Active subtitling in the classroom: a case study of an educational intervention

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show the potential of the application of audiovisual translation, in particular of the modality of subtitling, for the development of oral comprehension, as well as its possible use as the backbone for the design of didactic units for the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). While it is true that a lot of progress has been made thanks to extensive research and the fact that numerous hypotheses have been confirmed regarding the benefits of the use of audiovisual translation in language teaching at a general level, research on the possibilities that audiovisual translation in language teaching for specific purposes can offer is still scarce. This is why this article also aims to contribute to this line of research by adding to previous studies carried out on the specialities of business English by Talaván (2006) and Ávila-Cabrera (2021) or military English by Fuentes-Luque and Campbell (2020). After providing a theoretical framework and critical review of the current literature, the study of an experimental case based on a didactic unit is presented. The didactic unit created as part of a national research project where the benefits of the use of the different modalities of audiovisual translation in language teaching has been put into practice within a technical English subject for this study. There is a comparative analysis between the results obtained in an experimental group and a control group after the implementation of a didactic unit that sought to work on the socializing function of language. The didactic unit designed is conceived for use in both face-to-face and virtual teaching environments and, in this particular case, and due to health restrictions, it has been developed in the online class format. The study will also raise the viability of implementing teaching units based on audiovisual translation as an alternative to those designed with a communicative approach but that still do not incorporate resources that are far from the conventional ones.