The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of order of reading text or viewing a film and L1 / L2 captions on participants' comprehension. The participants were college freshmen (N = 236) enrolled in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses. In the experiment, there were four conditions: the text was read first, and then the film version viewed with either Chinese or English subtitles, or the film version was viewed first with Chinese or English subtitles. Pre-test and post-test scores on the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) indicated that the read-first group viewing the film with Chinese subtitles outperformed the read-first and view-first groups viewing the film version with English subtitles.
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