Introduction

Abstract

Welcome to the world of watching television programmes and films with subtitles in the same language, or captions, as I shall call them in this book. If a reader who has never watched a programme or film with captions thought that captioned viewing was a simple matter, rather like watching a foreign film with translation subtitles, he or she needs to think again and try and watch a few programmes with captions. The many over-simplistic experimental studies on foreign language learning with clips from captioned programmes that are published in journals may conceal the richness and variety of the world of captioned viewing, a world in which both language and culture are made accessible to those who have normal hearing but who are “hard of listening” in the foreign language.