Co-Evaluation as a Tool for Reinforcing Learning in Didactic English Audio Description Practices

Abstract

Didactic Audiovisual Translation (DAT) is a discipline which aims at exploring the effects of the implementation of active Audiovisual Translation tasks on language learning. It implies that, under the DAT methodological approach, students do not consume subtitles but create their own ones. They do not listen to dubbings, but rather translate and perform them themselves. Translators are professionals who work with language and in the 21st century a considerable amount of text we consume has an audiovisual nature, so they need to be equipped with language and translation skills that help them face this type of translations. This innovation experience consisted in including a co- evaluation task in a Didactic Audio Description (DAD) course, delivered in the context of the Tradilex Project and within the framework of the ARENA group agenda, to foster translation and language skills by making participants think of their classmates’ translation solutions and their own ones. To do so, students were provided with the same rubric that teachers used to assess them. The instruments were thus the rubric to measure the performance of participants in two DAD- based lesson plans, and a questionnaire to measure their perceptions. The results show that the impact on translation skills was higher than on language skills. Besides, it is worth mentioning that students were stricter marking other students than teachers were when it came to grading students’ work. The fact that the process was anonymous might be a key factor. In this regard, participants also had a positive perception on the impact of co- evaluation on motivation, time management, development of translation and language skills, and showed a clear willingness to use co- evaluation in the future.