Non-Native and Mobile Readers of a Teaching Article: Evidence on English-Medium Instruction, Subtitles, Bilingual Subtitles, Machine Translation, and Screen Reading
In university courses taught in English, subject-matter results showed no detected difference from teaching in the first language (d = 0.13). With same-language subtitles on foreign-language video, three experiments all failed to detect better comprehension; first-language subtitles came out ahead in one experiment and showed no difference in two. When scrolling was needed, comprehension on paper beat computers and tablets; there are only 3 direct comparisons of phones with paper. No study has measured how much non-native readers learn from web teaching articles read on a phone.