This study aims to investigate the effects of subtitles and captions on the English listening comprehension of EFL learners at the beginning level. The participants were 84 students of grade 9 from 3 intact classes at a public junior high school in Taiwan. Each class watched 9 video materials with a pre-designated caption mode over 3 weeks. To explore the variable of the learners’ proficiency level in defining the effectiveness of the two caption modes, the participants in each group were implicitly divided into 2 sub-groups according to their language proficiency level. All participants took a listening comprehension test and a cloze test after each viewing. After the last test was conducted, a questionnaire was conducted to all participants followed by a post-study interview administered by the researcher. The results of the study reveal that the use of captioning is more effective than the use of subtitling in promoting the English listening comprehension of EFL learners. Another finding of the study also suggests that there is selective effect of the captions on the learners of different linguistic profiles. The use of captioning poses more positive effect on the English listening comprehension of the more proficient learners than on that of the less proficient learners. Based on these findings, some pedagogical implications for employing authentic video materials to enhance the English listening comprehension of EFL middle school students are discussed.

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