On the Effects of Help Options in MCALL Programs on the Listening Comprehension of EFL Learners

Abstract This research compared the effects of two types of help options (subtitles and transcripts) in a multimedia listening unit on EFL learners’ comprehension of an academic lecture. To this end, the two experimental groups under study listened to an academic lecture on “e-waste” under two multimedia conditions. The first group used the multimedia program comprising the video of the lecture coupled with subtitles and the second group used the multimedia program comprising the same video clip coupled with transcripts. The help options would be offered to learners in case of communication breakdown. The experiment revealed that those students who used video and transcripts obtained a higher mean score on the comprehension test than did those who used video and subtitles.