The Riches of Hands-on Subtitling in the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

Using subtitles and subtitling as a means of diversifying foreign language teaching and learning has become increasingly popular in recent decades, particularly across Europe, where the European Commission has promoted, among others, the development of projects like ClipFlair, a web-based subtitling platform for foreign language learning (FLL). As part of this boost of research on FLL through subtitling, this empirical study was conducted in mainland China, where the role of subtitling in foreign language classroom has not been widely recognised by scholars. Carried out on seventeen higher education level Chinese L1 students, the experiment studied the effects of performing subtitling activities on English L2 vocabulary acquisition and discovered that doing subtitling tasks from L2 to L1 can result in a significantly better performance in vocabulary acquisition than doing intralingual subtitling activities (L2 to L2) or doing non-subtitling activities.

Keywords

• subtitling
• translation
• foreign language learning
• vocabulary acquisition
• second language acquisition