Active audio description as a didactic resource to improve oral skills in foreign language teaching

Resumen

Audio description (AD) as a didactic tool in foreign language learning (FLL) is an innovative area that has a significant potential for students. This mode of audiovisual translation (AVT) is used for making video content accessible to blind and visually impaired viewers. An additional narration is inserted to describe information transmitted visually, converting images into words. Over the last decade, research on this AVT mode is getting more attention, yet not as much as it deserves. A handful of small-scale that studies have looked at the general benefits or at specific skills that can be enhanced with this practice such as lexical acquisition or learners’ oral production. In order to fill in the gap in knowledge, this study provides an in-depth exploration of the impact of active AD practice on learners’ oral production skills in spontaneous speech by assessing its impact on the enhancement of fluency, pronunciation and intonation features of FLL learners. A secondary objective of this thesis has been to outline a series of guidelines for AD use in the language classroom, based on reflective considerations extracted from the lessons learnt over the course of this study. These recommendations aim at encouraging the community of language practitioners to benefit from an effective usage of this practice. A final objective has come out from the need to integrate accessibility related barriers into the CEFR/CV’s initial taxonomy for AD or subtitling for SDH practice. Hence, this study has worked towards the incorporation of a new category for its descriptive scheme: ‘Relaying specific information of AV images in written discourse and in non-spontaneous speech’. And also, it has designed its corresponding illustrative descriptors for the AD mode. This thesis’ methodological framework includes the mixed-methods strategies used for data collection to allow triangulation of results. This is a large-scale project followed a cyclical procedure in harmony with action research principles. Hence, lessons learnt from each cycle were applied to improve the reliability of the data collected in each subsequent stage. Although its focus evolved with objectives and research questions, it culminated with the main experiment, which successfully responded to the final questions. Analysis of data and discussion of the most relevant results obtained were presented, as well as suggestions for future lines of investigation. With regard to the qualitative results obtained over three cycles, participants reflections towards AD practice were positive and encouraging. They valued how oral productive skills, as well as grammar and vocabulary, were enhanced. They also found their course tasks enjoyable and fun, and they appreciated the way the course was taught. However, on the negative side, some learners were not able to see the link between the course and certain areas of assessment, especially at the final stages of the study. It was in this final cycle when the quantitative analysis of results demonstrated that active AD practice enhances oral production skills as enough data was collected from 46 participants to confirm this. Results not only matched previous observations from participants, but also, AD practice was particularly beneficial in the areas in which learners appeared to be less confident. Each relevant feature before and after intervention was measured by four evaluators who assessed the sample recordings obtained from the participants allowing an additional triangulation of results. The data was analysed after calculating the increase in rating of the scores provided by the evaluators and the level of statistical significance of every paired attribute before and after intervention. The higher the level of increase in rating meant a greater impact of the intervention on each particular attribute. Also, it was noted that there was a tendency for the greater the impact shown, the higher the level of statistical significance was revealed. Intonation was the most enhanced feature followed by speed, stress, hesitations and vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and intelligibility. On the other end of the scale, pauses appeared to be the feature obtaining the lowest level of increase in rating, so it meant that the impact of AD tasks was lower than in the rest of the attributes examined. However, it was not possible to prove an improvement in the pronunciation of certain sounds, despite the teacher-researcher’s belief on AD’s positive impact on this particular area of oral production. It is noteworthy to explain that the promotion of didactic AD as a type of mediation task is not based on being the most effective way for oral performance, but on viewing it as a motivating procedure that brings about powerful results, encouraging best practice in language learning and teaching.