International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

When using videos for foreign language learning, it has been suggested that learners should use not only their vocabulary capability but also their listening skills to comprehend the videos. Other than that, interactive features added to video learning activities are confirmed to improve the efficiency for foreign language learning and teaching. Subtitles, in the long term, however, are suspected to become an obstacle to learning foreign languages because they lead learners to pay much more attention to the text. The purpose of this preliminary study is to understand the efficacy of controllable partial subtitle in videos on learning foreign languages. The partial subtitle that makes easy sentences from the original subtitles hidden, and let the learners focus on the difficult ones. An interactive player is designed to play videos with partial and full subtitles, and can be controlled to show hidden sentences of the subtitles by the learners. Experiments were conducted to examine the effectiveness of the study. As the data collected on vocabulary capability and reading comprehension shows that learners in the experimental group, who watch videos with controllable partial subtitles, can perform better or no worse than those in the control group, who watch videos with full subtitles. System logs show that learners in the experiment group have higher interaction rates than learners in the control group on retrieving appeared subtitles; they try harder to understand the speeches that are more difficult.