a comparative study of subtitled vs auditory documentaries comprehension among persian speakers of english

abstract this study set out to compare the effect of modality of presentation (subtitled vs. auditory) in the comprehension of verbal content of documentary films among iranian efl students. to this end, (30 male 30 female) students were chosen from two schools. after their homogeneity was established, the students attended the listening sessions to watch five documentary films over two weeks. each session lasted nearly one hour. the students of each school were voluntarily assigned to one of the two experimental conditions: english soundtrack with no subtitles (esonsu), no soundtrack with english subtitles (nsoesu). they observed five five-minute documentary clips, where the presentation format was varied in terms of verbal information in the soundtrack and subtitles. a group was presented with a combination of two visual inputs (muted film while reading subtitles) while the other group observed the documentary clips and listened to the sound tracks. the comparison of the groups on mann-whitney u test illustrated that there is not any significant difference between the comprehension of subtitled and audible documentaries. however, a significant difference was observed between the comprehension of females (median = 20) and males (median = 13) on the comprehension of subtitled documentaries. comprehension of females and males on audible documentaries showed that female efl iranian students performed better on audible movies. key words: subtitled movies, documentary films, advanced efl students, learning english through films