International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 5(6) Nov-Dec 2020 | Available online: https://ijels.com/ ISSN: 2456-7620 https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.56.54 2196 The Efficacy of Bimodal Subtitling in Improving the Listening Comprehension of English as a Second Language (ESL) Learners Kenneth Christopher S. Dumlao 1 , Ruth C. Alfonso 2 , Elgin S. Paguirigan 3 , Gener S. Subia *4 Master of Arts in Education major in English, Wesleyan University Philippines 1 Teacher I, San Jose City National High School 1 Faculty, Wesleyan University Philippines Graduate School 2,3,*4 Corresponding author: subiagener@yahoo.com *4 Received: 18 Nov 2020; Received in revised form: 09 Dec 2020; Accepted: 15 Dec 2020; Available online: 21 Dec 2020 ©2020 The Author(s). Published by Infogain Publication. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Abstract— This study aimed to determine the efficacy of bimodal subtitling (English) in improving the listening comprehension of English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Fifty Grade 10 students from San Jose City National High School were selected as participants in the experiment. A listening comprehension test was first administered to determine the current listening level of the respondents and the result served as the baseline data in assigning them to the control and experimental groups through match-pairing. Six video lessons about selected literature of the world were used as materials in the study. The control group watched the videos without subtitles while the experimental group received the bimodal subtitling treatment. After the viewing sessions, the respondents answered a sixty-item comprehension test about the materials viewed, and the data gathered were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of listening comprehension and the difference in their post-test scores was significant. Thus, the efficacy of bimodal subtitling in improving the listening comprehension of ESL learners was proven. Keywords— Bimodal subtitling, efficacy, English as a Second Language (ESL), experimental study, listening comprehension. I. INTRODUCTION Listening comprehension plays a critical role in both communication and language acquisition. However, despite these crucial roles, in the area of Second Language Teaching, it has always been the most forgotten and least researched of the four macro-skills (Gomez Martinez, 2010; Yildiz, Parjanadze, & Albay, 2015).In line with this, listening comprehension is often a source of frustration for second and foreign language learners (Graham, as cited in Rokni & Ataee, 2014). Aside from language teaching, English teachers also have to make their students appreciate not just local literary pieces but the literature of the world as well. According to Westin (2016), multimodal aids such as film adaptations of canonical literature can be used to help students gain a literary appreciation and better understand literature. In the advent of technology, the use of movies in the classroom has been widely employed and has greatly benefited the learners. However, the English accents and pronunciations used in films serve as barriers to the comprehension of the learners, particularly Filipinos who study English as a Second Language (ESL).