Subtitles help in learning a second language

If you've ever watched a movie or television show in a foreign language you're not confident in, you'll appreciate the value of subtitles. And if you've ever watched a dubbed movie or television show (with a voiceover in your language rather than the original language), then chances are you prefer subtitles (at least, I do!). But, have you ever thought about whether reading subtitles while listening to the foreign language helps your language skills?

That's the topic of this 2019 article by Augusto Rupérez Micola (Luxembourg School of Finance), Ainoa Aparicio Fenoll (Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy), Albert Banal-Estañol (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain), and Arturo Bris (IMD, Switzerland), published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (ungated earlier version here). Noting that, after World War II, most countries decided whether to dub or subtitle English-language films and television shows and have not changed their practice since, they compare the average English language proficiency of people from 'dubbing' countries with the average English language proficiency of people from 'subtitling' countries. English language proficiency is measured by the average score of people from each country who attempted the online TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exams. Controlling for education spending, 'proximity' of the language to English (linguistically), and a number of other variables, they find that:

...a change from dubbing to subtitling translation mode in a country improves test scores by 16.9%.

The TOEFL test breaks down English language ability into reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Looking at those four domains, they find that:

All coefficients are positive and significant. The highest effect is found for listening (25.2%), followed by reading (18.3%), writing (12.6%), and speaking (11.9%). The coefficient for listening is significantly higher than the one of the average effect (16.9%).

Their instrumental variables estimates make these results plausibly causal, rather than simply correlations. So, subtitles appear to help with language learning, especially in terms of listening skills, which is what you would expect theoretically. So, I guess that when I used to find my daughter watching anime instead of studying, and she argued that it was helping her practice her Japanese, I was right to let it go.

[HT: Marginal Revolution]