The Influence of Culture-Specific Background Knowledge and Captions on Second Language Comprehension

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of caption availability on advanced university-level ESL students' comprehension of contrasting, religion-specific video material. Seventy-nine advanced ESL students participated in the study. Fifty-four of these students reported that they were religion-neutral, having very little or no knowledge of Buddhist or Muslim religious rites. Sixteen students self-reported being practicing Muslims, and nine of the students self-reported being practicing Buddhists. The videotaped episodes consisted of two excerpts from a series of public television broadcasts concerning world religions. The first episode (9 min., 25 sec.) presented information about the Muslim religion and the second episode (10 min., 11 sec.) displayed information about Buddhism. The students were enrolled in six different sections of an intensive English course and participated as intact groups. Each group viewed the Muslim episode once with or without captions, and the Buddhist episode once with or without captions. The primary dependent measure consisted of the number of idea units generated by each student in written summaries of the content of each of the two videos. The results revealed that both religious background knowledge and captions contribute substantially to the comprehension of university-level ESL students. Regarding the prior knowledge issue, the Muslim students and the Buddhist students performed at a higher level after viewing videotapes concerning their respective religions. However, the smaller sample of Buddhist students performed somewhat more erratically than the Muslim group. Conversely, the religion-neutral students performed at a higher level after being exposed to captioned versions of the videos concerning either religion.