Bimodal and unimodal comprehension and reception of discipline-specific audiovisual texts among students in a Faculty of Health Sciences

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, the educational applications of subtitling, such as incidental language learning, improved literacy, and comprehension and retention of visual content, have been well documented. Seminal studies confirming the educational benefits of subtitled texts were done in Europe. Several studies also confirmed the educational benefits of subtitling in Africa, some specifically in South Africa. This study aimed at measuring the difference in the comprehension of a technical, subject-specific audiovisual text for healthcare students between a control group who viewed the video unimodally and an experimental group who viewed it bimodally. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 182 students from the Faculty of Health Sciences. A quasi-experimental design was used to randomly assign participants to experimental and control groups, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze pre- and post-test quantitative results. Qualitative data were collected using an open-ended questionnaire, and the data were sorted and analyzed for emergent themes. Analyses of both data sets confirmed findings from numerous international studies that the use of subtitling improves comprehension. Qualitative data, in particular, showed that respondents perceived subtitles as assisting with the retrieval and retention of information. Contrary to these positives, the data also revealed that subtitling could, in some cases, be perceived as a form of distraction and a barrier to comprehension.