Effects of Bimodal Subtitling of English Movies on Content Comprehension and Vocabulary Recognition

Abstract

This thesis is an attempt to study the impact of bimodal subtitling on content comprehension of English movies and vocabulary recognition. Forty four senior undergraduate students studying at Shiraz Islamic Azad University were selected from two intact classes of Tapes and Films Translation course. Two BBC documentary movies (Dangerous knowledge and Where’s my robot?), one with English subtitles and the other without subtitles were selected based on the content and level of difficulty of the language. First, both classes watched the same movies, but class 1 first watched ‘Dangerous knowledge’ with English subtitling and then ‘Where’s my robot?’ without subtitling. To counteract the order effect class 2 first watched ‘where’s my robot?’ and then ‘Dangerous knowledge’. After viewing the movies, the participants answered the relevant multiple choice vocabulary and content comprehension questions. The data gathered were subjected to the statistical procedure of paired samples t-test. The results clearly indicated that bimodal subtitling had a positive impact on content comprehension of English movies. It can be said that the participants comprehend the subtitled movie better than the one without subtitle. However, for some reasons bimodal subtitling did not have an effect on participants’ vocabulary recognition.

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