THE EFFECT OF WATCHING MOVIES WITH AND WITHOUT SUBTITLES ON IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS' LISTENING COMPREHENSION

This study was an attempt to investigate whether watching movies with and without subtitles has any effect on Iranian EFL learners' listening comprehension, and also to investigate whether there was any difference between watching movies with and without subtitles. In order to carry out the research, out of a total of 60 advanced students at the ILI (Iran Language Institute), 40 were selected based on a proficiency test. So the participants were homogeneous in terms of their language proficiency based on the scores obtained from the proficiency test. After selection of the participants and assuring the homogeneity of the students, the researchers assigned 20 students to experimental group and 20 students to control group randomly. Later, to determine the listening abilities of the learners, the researchers administered a pre-test including 50 multiple-choice items to the participants in both experimental and control groups. The researchers presented an English movie entitled "Fraiser" to the participants: the experimental group watched a segment of the movie with English subtitles, but the control group watched the same segment of the movie without any subtitles. At the end of the experiment, to check the learners' listening comprehension, the researchers administered a researcher-made post-test, comprising 25 multiple-choice items to the participants. Comparison of the mean scores of the pre-test and post-tests revealed that Experimental group who watched the movie with English subtitles outperformed the control group who watched the movie without subtitles.