The Influence of Culture-Specific Background Knowledge and Captions on Second Language Comprehension

Paul L. Markham

45 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Educational Technology Systems

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Subtitles and Audiovisual Media Second Language Acquisition and Learning English Language Learning and Teaching

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of caption availability on advanced university-level ESL students' comprehension of contrasting, religion-specific video material. Seventy-nine advanced ESL students participated in the study. Fifty-four of these students reported that they were religion-neutral, having very little or no knowledge of Buddhist or Muslim religious rites. Sixteen students self-reported being practicing Muslims, and nine of the students self-reported being practicing Buddhists. The videotaped episodes consisted of two excerpts from a series of public television broadcasts concerning world religions. The first episode (9 min., 25 sec.) presented information about the Muslim religion and the second episode (10 min., 11 sec.) displayed information about Buddhism. The students were enrolled in six different sections of an intensive English course and participated as intact groups. Each group viewed the Muslim episode once with or without captions, and the Buddhist episode once with or without captions. The primary dependent measure consisted of the number of idea units generated by each student in written summaries of the content of each of the two videos. The results revealed that both religious background knowledge and captions contribute substantially to the comprehension of university-level ESL students. Regarding the prior knowledge issue, the Muslim students and the Buddhist students performed at a higher level after viewing videotapes concerning their respective religions. However, the smaller sample of Buddhist students performed somewhat more erratically than the Muslim group. Conversely, the religion-neutral students performed at a higher level after being exposed to captioned versions of the videos concerning either religion.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.

References

1979A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Reading Comprehension 1987Content and Formal Schemata in ESL Reading 1992Captioned Television as Comprehensible Input: Effects of Incidental Word Learning from Context for Language Minority Students 1982Effects on Reading Comprehension of Building Background Knowledge 1999Children's vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language through watching subtitled television programs at home 1982THE EFFECTS OF INDUCED SCHEMATA ON THE “SHORT CIRCUIT” IN L2 READING: NON‐DECODING FACTORS IN L2 READING PERFORMANCE1 1991Evaluating the Use of Captioned Video Materials in Advanced Foreign Language Learning 1984Understanding Reading Compre hension

Cited by

2011Developing and evaluating SynctoLearn, a fully automatic video and transcript synchronization tool for EFL learners 2022An Exploration of Captioning Practices and Challenges of Individual Content Creators on YouTube for People with Hearing Impairments 2013The Effects of Captioning on EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.