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.
Article outline
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1.Introduction
- 2.A conceptual framework to address multimodal language learning
- 3.Educational specifications of the web platform
- 4.Areas of the ClipFlair platform
- 5.Activity examples and ideas
- 6.Learner survey
- 7.Concluding remarks
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Notes
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References
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Appendix