THE EFFECTS OF CAPTIONING VIDEOS ON LEARNING ENGLISH FOR SPECIAL PURPOSES

The primary goal of teaching English is to improve foreign language skills – reading, writing, listening and speaking. In order to understand messages, to receive comprehensible input, and to lower affective filter, the variety of audiovisual materials is used in English lessons for medical students and health care professionals. This study presents an investigation into the effects of intra-lingual subtitling and captioning during video-based activities in advanced learners of English at Jessenius Medical Faculty, Comenius University in Bratislava. Two groups of first-year students watched five specific medical videos with and without captioning. The sample consisted of twenty-eight students. After the second viewing of the video, students took vocabulary acquisition and content comprehension test based on the video. Results from t-test partially support the findings presented in the scientific literature. A few discrepancies emerged, probably because of a specific medical content of the videos. The questionnaire delivered useful data which revealed that the students consider captions as contributing to their confidence in understanding spoken English.