Modalities of Input: Captioning as a Means of Fostering Language Acquisition

Abstract

With the ever-increasing accessibility of multimedia materials in the EFL classroom, providing authentic and comprehensible input is not a challenge anymore for teachers. Promoting increased depth of processing, one dynamic source of communicative language use is the application of captions, with the help of which students’ content comprehension, mental lexicon and language proficiency can be significantly developed. Captions should be used along the principles of relevant pedagogical implications, and it is the responsibility of the language teachers to provide meaningful practice tasks supported by contextual grammatical and conceptual clues. A sample lesson plan on certain segments from the movie Divergent (2014) introduces an example of the exploitability of captions in the classroom.