The Effects of Captioned Videos on Listening Comprehension and their Consequences for the EFL Classroom

Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, University of Duisburg-Essen (Anglophone Studies), course: Teaching and Assessing Learners - EFL, language: English, abstract: Firstly, this work will elaborate on the importance of listening comprehension and refer to further paralinguistic features that are required to understand video material. Furthermore, it will give reasons to incorporate videos in the EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom. In the analytic part of this paper, it will deal with the contradictory findings of some selected studies on captioned videos. It will additionally elaborate different approaches and suggestions for foreign language teachers and their teaching. In recent years, the media have developed rapidly and in many ways. In the same way, there have been many changes in foreign language teaching. From voice recordings, radios to videos, the way teaching is organized has changed and is changing constantly. Ever since excerpts from a radio recording and voice recordings were introduced into foreign language teaching, they have been carefully selected by teachers and embedded, for example, in a task or exercise; learners listened attentively to the audio and tried to solve the task set. But how do you proceed with a video, which offers a visual and an auditive form of representation? Despite much research and knowledge, some questions about the relatively new medium of video remain unanswered. One of these questions is the usefulness of captioned videos.