The use of active subtitling activities for students of Tourism in order to improve their English writing production

Abstract

Most current university students are permanently surrounded by multimedia content, especially in their leisure time, and this is affecting their attention span and the way in which they communicate and learn. As teachers/researchers it is both challenging and rewarding for us to create activities that keep them motivated and focused, therefore we must adapt our courses in order to achieve the expected results, trying to take advantage of what interests students whilst ensuring that their skills are clearly developed. Audiovisual translation can be useful in this scenario when it is integrated in the learning process as a tool, with a pedagogical objective: that is, as a means to an end. This is the goal that a group of researchers from UCM, UNED and UAM aimed for when designing this project: to take advantage of the interest of a group of university students in multimedia content and ICT. All the activities were developed with a definite purpose –that of the improvement of writing skills in English and the use of specific vocabulary related to their degree in Tourism–. The students undertook reverse subtitling activities before handing in written compositions at several stages of the project. The researchers gathered data about the effect that these reverse subtitling activities had on the improvement experienced by the students in their writing skills and compared them to the performance of a control group