Effects of Students Using Smartphones to Receive Different Amount of L1 Support for Listening Comprehension and Vocabulary Recall

Abstract

The study aims to explore whether different amount of the first language (Chinese) information will lead to different effectiveness on high school students’ listening comprehension and vocabulary recall. Furthermore, the study also discusses the relationship between different difficult degrees of videos with two kinds given amount of subtitles/ captions and students’ learning performance in English listening comprehension and vocabulary recall. One class was given the full first language subtitled movie with no foreign language captions while the other class was given the partial first language subtitled movie with full foreign language captions. The findings indicated that although the students received only the assistant of the partial first language subtitles, learners’ understanding of the listening comprehension will not be affected and their performance in the vocabulary recall test statistically better than those who use the full first language.