The Effect of English and Persian Subtitle on Listening Comprehension of the Learners

Background and Aim: Listening is one of the most complex skills in English language learning. Students have major difficulties in understanding the story. Students have some problems when they face a lot of listening, because universities and schools pay more attention to writing, reading and vocabulary. Subtitled movies can modify the viewer's audio and visual integration processes as a result of competition between these two types of information. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand how subtitle can affect learners in order to make an optimum use of subtitle for process-oriented listening comprehension. A review of the literature on the use of movies as multimedia material in English language teaching revealed that movies are very useful resources in EFL classes. Some studies showed that highly skilled learners learned more words than low-skilled learners from subtitles. Wink, Gus, and Sidorenko (۲۰۱۰) examined the effect of subtitle on EFL students' proficiency and listening comprehension. Previous studies have shown that authentic subtitle films can help learners improve listening comprehension and vocabulary. Other studies have shown that progress organizers may also facilitate students' foreign language learning. Methods: The main concern of the present research was to compare the effect of Persian and English subtitle of English educational movie on learners' listening comprehension, to diagnose whether there was a significant difference between Persian and English subtitle. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine whether the differences between mean scores of ESG and PSG were statistically significant. Results: The purpose of this study is to compare the effect of Persian and English subtitle of English educational movie on learners' listening comprehension. In the present study, the impact of the role of Persian subtitles on learners' comprehension was examined first, and in parallel, the influence and role of English subtitles on learners' comprehension was examined. Conclusion: Result showed that learners who watched educational movies with English subtitle have giant better grade in listening comprehension test.

Keywords:

Listening comprehension , EFL , Listening strategies , Captions and Subtitles