How Do Different Keyword Captioning Strategies Impact Students’ Performance in Oral and Written Production Tasks? A Pilot Study

As an increasingly popular format of input, the affordances of audio-visual materials have been widely studied. Past research has provided evidence that audio-visual input combined with different captioning strategies could benefit learners in terms of vocabulary learning, listening comprehension, and the development of grammatical knowledge. However, there is a lack of research on how manipulating captioning conditions could help learners use their own linguistic resources to produce L2. This study compares the effects of three captioning techniques, L1 glossed keyword captioning, keyword captioning, and no captioning on English learners’ oral and written recall of a short video. The results show that L1 glossed keyword captioning worked better in facilitating students’ oral and written production of the keywords than keyword captioning and no captioning. L1 glossed keyword captioning was also found to be more useful than keyword captioning and no captioning in helping students comprehend and reproduce the content of the video. Suggestions for further research on this topic are presented in the final part of this paper.