Exploring the possibilities of interactive audiovisual activities for language learning

Language teachers often resort to video to familiarise their students with contextualised linguistic and cultural aspects of communication. Since they tend to consider learning-by-doing more effective than learning-by-viewing, they try to further exploit this valuable asset through active tasks, such as taking notes or answering comprehension questions, silent viewing and predicting, ordering sentences, role-playing, analysing, summarising and describing (Zabalbeascoa et al. 2015). Advances in ICT have enabled more interactive options, with a view to expanding the range of available activities to include audiovisual translation (AVT) activities, such as subtitling and dubbing. This is the focus of ClipFlair, a project which developed a platform for creating and hosting such activities and a pedagogical proposal based on the idea that language learning can be enhanced with the use of activities asking learners to work from a video by inserting their own writing (captioning) or speech (revoicing). Based on this framework, a whole range of possible activities are open to teachers, beyond standard subtitling and dubbing.

This paper starts out by briefly describing previous work done in the area and goes on to illustrate the ClipFlair conceptual framework including the educational specifications for the web platform, after the description of which concrete examples are provided in order to expand on the possible audiovisual activities that can be used in a language classroom and beyond. Finally, the paper gives an account of the learner survey carried out during the pilot phase of the project, which included feedback provided by more than a thousand learners and teachers.