La aplicación de la traducción audiovisual como herramienta para la docencia de la lengua inglesa

The use of audiovisual resources is common in language teaching, as they allow access to linguistic and cultural elements in context. In order to offer new interdisciplinary and methodological perspectives, second language didactics has become interested in audiovisual translation (AVT), in particular, in the practical use and exploitation of activities in which students can, for example, dub or subtitle a scene from a movie, a documentary, a cartoon, etc. The use of AVT in language teaching, although at an early stage, has already shown signs of its endless possibilities. In this proposal we present a pioneering, interdisciplinary educational innovation project carried out at the Department of English and German Studies at Universitat de València. The project is structured around the collaborative creation by the AVT students in our Degree in Translation and Interlinguistic Mediation of activities to practice dubbing and subtitling, designed for other students so as to help them in their acquisition of the English language. To do so, Translation students were invited to practice AVT and, at the same time, to explore the professional profile of the language teacher, moreover practically unexplored in their degree. After the necessary training in AVT and a specific workshop on the implementation of AVT in language teaching, students created their own activities in teams and uploaded them onto a virtual platform which also included the necessary software and the proposed translation for their self-evaluation. These activities were first tested by the rest of the teams, so that all the students, in addition to practicing AVT, would peer review their fellow students’ work and would increase their critical analysis skills. Starting from the academic year 2016-2017, these activities will be made available to the university to practise English as a second language in different degrees. The collection of data was performed through direct observation, a final satisfaction and opinion survey from participants and focus groups. The analysis of the collected data allowed to determine the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The results are positive for translation students, as this methodology stimulates their active learning and motivation and helps students develop translation, linguistic, technological, professional, interpersonal, problem-solving and critical thinking skills, etc.