It was hard enough to get into a university in the first place, and now you have to study in a language that’s your second, third, or sometimes, if you’ve grown up in a multicultural-background family, even fourth. In any case, admissions scores and live speech comprehension (spiced with technical terms) are not the same thing.

Technology can remove some of that challenge, considering there are professors who prefer keeping videos of their lectures. So, if a university provides lecture recordings, or recording is otherwise permitted, Clideo’s subtitles generator automatically transcribes speech into timed text, lets the student correct the wording and timing, and allows the result to be downloaded as SRT or TXT. Plus, the Clideo browser extension has a solid free version, which means you don’t have to tighten the purse strings any further. You can replay, read, and better understand some challenging parts of a lecture.

This is not a niche problem, either. UNESCO says 7.3 million students worldwide now study abroad, compared with about 2 million in 2000. For many, university means learning difficult new material and processing it through a second or third language at the same time.

Following a lecture is its own language skill

Academic listening is not just talking but with longer words. Lectures will use discipline-specific terminology, shortened explanations, and remind references to previous material and extended sections where one missing transition can make the next five minutes difficult to comprehend.

In the study of 258 students who were learning English in Taiwan in 2024, listening ability in the academic context had a strong influence on lecture comprehension, whereas the pre-lecture reading had only a small effect. A 2024 study of international learners in the UK found that, for the small sample of 33 learners surveyed, native-accented speech was the main listening challenge (42%) and fast speech was the second most popular difficulty (36%).

All this does not imply that international students are academically weaker. It entails that, when listening in another language, there is an extra obstacle between the explanation of the lecturer and the understanding of the subject by the listener.

The problem is also hard to solve by frantic note taking. If you are trying to decode an unfamiliar phrase, decide whether “variance” or “variants” was said, write it down and keep listening simultaneously, something has to give.

Use subtitles to find the problem

Subtitles are a handy tool. But treat them as a study aid rather than a substitute for listening.

• Start with the lecture itself.
• Take normal notes while listening normally.
• When something becomes unclear, mark the approximate time instead of repeatedly stopping the recording.
• During the second pass, check only the sections with captions.
• Clideo is making this convenient, since it operates in a browser, requiring no traditional desktop software, and because the automatically-generated subtitles can be edited.
• The platform overview allows a student to edit a misheard word, change timing and export the output to TXT or SRT.
• Subtitle tracks can also be created, edited and translated in Clideo’s primary Video Editor.

This establishes some helpful study strategies.

• Look up words that you didn’t recognize from the context.
• Repeat the sentence aloud, reading it.
• Match the words spoken by the lecturer, and the text in the textbook.
• Add a new word to vocabulary notes.
• Return to the exact explanation before an exam instead of scrubbing through a 90-minute recording hoping to recognize it.

There is evidence behind the general idea.In a 2024 study, 250 Catalan- and Spanish-speaking university students with English levels from A1 to C2 watched television episodes with and without English captions. When evaluating comprehension overall, the results of captioned viewing were significantly greater than the results of the other conditions, but this difference was not significant at C2. The lesson is not that everyone should permanently watch everything with text attached; support is most useful when there is actually a gap to bridge.

But captions can also get in the way

The evidence becomes especially interesting when researchers move from television to university-style lectures.

A 2024 pilot study of English-medium university lectures in Flanders found that students performed significantly better, on average, on comprehension measures when intralingual live subtitles were available. But a 2026 study involving international university students produced the opposite result: in two simulated one-hour Research Methodology lectures, the subtitled condition negatively affected performance, while higher English proficiency predicted better performance.

Such results do not necessarily conflict with each other. There’s a lot of material to be attended to when reading out loud, looking at slides, listening to a lecture, and discerning what to write down. The subtitles convey information, and they provide another place to look.

If that is the case, then for an international student who sees a recorded lecture, then it argues for selective use. Don’t have to look at captions for 90 minutes. If they get hard to understand, the vocabulary begins to get too complicated or if you have to confirm a specific statement, use them. Then go back to the lecture.

Do not let automatic transcription become the professor

Automatic subtitles also make mistakes.

A 2025 survey of 28 students from Chemical and Process Engineering who are learning ESP, conducted an investigation into errors in automatic subtitle generation and captions. Their answers referred to accents, language complexity, similar sounding words and automatic speech recognition picking up the wrong word. In an academic context, a wrong technical term can change the meaning of an explanation.

• Clideo’s own recommendation for automated transcription is to ensure that the audio quality is good, there is limited background noise, no multiple speakers, and to ensure that the language or accent is correct.
• By automatically generating transcripts, Clideo’s automatic-subtitle instructions can be edited before a student accesses them or exports the transcript.
• Don’t treat automatic text as an authority, but as a locator.
• If you have never seen a term coming up in Clideo, look it up before adding it to your revision notes in lecture or in assigned reading or another trusted academic source.
• Subtitles are most useful when they remove a bottleneck.
• Clideo or any other transcription tool cannot learn the material for you, and it should not try.
• It can make spoken academic language slower, visible, and retrievable long enough for you to do the learning yourself.
• Eventually, you may need that help less often. That is probably the best possible outcome.