An action-oriented approach to didactic audio description in foreign language education

This paper introduces the action-oriented foundations of TRADILEX (Audiovisual Translation as a Didactic Resource in Foreign Language Education), a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation which involves researchers from twelve universities across Europe and the UK. TRADILEX sets out to gather data on the improvement in the linguistic skills perceived through the use of captioning (i.e., interlingual and intralingual subtitling) and revoicing (i.e., dubbing, voice-over and audio description) through an action-oriented approach (AoA). In order to enhance learners’ communicative competence, as well as reception, production and mediation skills in an integrated manner, a methodological proposal for a didactic sequence of audiovisual translation (AVT) tasks has been developed. This methodological proposal is currently being piloted with B1 and B2 adult learners of English as a foreign language utilising – and adapting – the recent illustrative descriptors (Council of Europe 2018) for AVT instruction. This research effort sets out to better understand and evaluate the potential benefits of action-oriented AVT tasks in foreign language education (FLE). This project advocates for a wider integration of AVT in the FLE curriculum, thus fostering visual literacy and mediation skills, whilst promoting an active use of AVT practices and technologies in the classroom.