Captioning Methods of Lecture Videos for Learning in English

Abstract

"This paper describes a study on the effect of using captions in lecture videos taught in English to assist non-native English speakers in learning. Lecture videos used in this paper were taken from MIT OpenCourseWare. We divided captions into 5 different types: (1) full text captions, (2) important sentence captions, (3) important phrase captions, (4) important keyword captions, and (5) no captions. Each caption was created manually and embedded in the videos. We prepared captions in two languages; English captions for foreign students and Japanese students, and Japanese captions for Japanese students. Participants for the experiment were chosen randomly from non-English native speaking countries and each participant must follow a set of tests. Experiment results showed that captions (2) or (3) helped participant the most in understanding the content of lectures."