A Study of the POS Keyword Caption Effect on Listening Comprehension

Abstract

Listening comprehension is the most important part of English communication. Watching English films helps getting both audio and visual messages which can improve the learners’ listening comprehension. In this study, we examined the full text captions films and the keyword captions with nouns and verbs to help understand the different effects of listening comprehension. One hundred English majored high school students participated in this experiment. This research indicated that with only nouns in the keyword captions the participants’ listening comprehension was greatly assisted and reduced both the audio and visual senses from information overloading. On the other hand, with only verbs in the keyword captions, the participants’ listening comprehension was excessively low. Moreover, the effects of listening comprehension for different types of films which include natural science and cultural history films were discussed. Natural science films provided more information without a necessary of a great deal of background knowledge; therefore it was easier for the participants to understand. However, it was difficult to comprehend cultural history films without having a certain level of knowledge of the background information. From the results, due to the participants’ positive attitude towards the system satisfaction and learning approach, the participants had more self-confidence and higher motivation to operate the system and interface afterwards.