Teaching Languages for Social and Cooperation Purposes: Using Didactic Media Accessibility in Foreign Language Education

Abstract

In the heart of the 21st century, with audiovisual language surrounding people’s lives, it is necessary to make media content accessible for all, especially considering how such content can have a potential value to raise awareness on relevant social issues, such as gender-based violence. This paper focuses on didactic media accessibility understood as the use of subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) or audio description (AD) as pedagogical resources in foreign language education (Talaván et al., 2022); it is a field of study and teaching practice that has been receiving increasing attention during the past decade (Lertola, 2019). Within this context, the objective of the study presented herein is to assess the impact of transferable contents through didactic media accessibility, together with the enhancement of communicative L2 skills, and as boosters of sensibility towards gender violence. To that end, a lesson plan based on the short film The Mirror has been designed following the model proposed by Talaván (2013). This didactic proposal asks students to create SDH for the selected short film and to complete related tasks in pre-viewing, viewing and post-viewing phases. In such a context, students are expected learn to watch audiovisual products with 'gender on the agenda' (Goodman, 1996), which implies exploring the inequalities and the types of violence (Barry, 2017) within the pedagogical context. An important number of students have completed this lesson plan within the TRADILEX Project (sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation ref. PID2019-107362GA-I00). A representative sample of learners’ SDH productions of The Mirror have been randomly selected to analyse the effects of such a didactic proposal from a qualitative perspective, based on observation and students’ comments derived from interviews from the long-term study undertaken within TRADILEX, where this lesson plan had been included. The preliminary feedback in terms of raising awareness, not only on gender-based violence, but also on media accessibility, has been surprisingly positive, and the student’s productions reflect their understanding and empathy towards both issues. All in all, we offer a proposal for interdisciplinarity, where gender studies, audiovisual translation in the form of media accessibility, and language learning come together within an ICT setting with the aim of raising learners’ awareness on gender-based violence and accessibility while they enhance their L2 communicative skills.