:: TRANS 29. ARTÍCULOS. Págs. 101-122 ::

Active Subtitling to Train Linguistic Mediation and Digital Competence in Portuguese as a Foreign Language *

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Iolanda Ogando González

Universidad de Extremadura

ORCID: 0000-0001-7895-454X

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Since the provisional release of CEFR-CV, inspiring proposals and analyses to train mediation in the foreign language classroom have been published. However, much remains to be explored, specifically in Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL).  Based on the theoretical framework, in which I delve into the relationship between active subtitling, mediation, and the development of digital competence, in this paper, I present two subtitling exercises framed within a set of tasks designed explicitly for the development of students’ mediation skills. As we shall see, taking advantage of the mediating nature of subtitling has enabled us to progress in developing text mediation and concept mediation skills, as well as working across the board on our students’ digital competence.

KEY WORDS: linguistic mediation, digital competence, subtitling, Portuguese as a foreign language, Amara Subtitling.

Subtitulación activa para la mediación lingüística y la competencia digital en portugués lengua extranjera

En el tiempo transcurrido desde la publicación provisional del MCER-CV han aparecido interesantes propuestas y análisis para el trabajo con la mediación en la clase de lenguas extranjeras, pero queda mucho por explorar, más específicamente en el terreno del portugués como lengua extranjera (PLE). A partir del marco teórico, en el que profundizamos en la relación de la subtitulación activa con la mediación y el desarrollo de la competencia digital, en este trabajo presentamos dos ejercicios de subtitulación enmarcados en un conjunto de tareas diseñadas específicamente para el desarrollo de las competencias de mediación del alumnado. Como veremos, aprovechar el carácter mediador de la subtitulación nos ha permitido avanzar en el desarrollo de competencias de mediación de textos y mediación de conceptos, además de trabajar transversalmente la competencia digital de nuestros alumnos.

PALABRAS CLAVE: mediación lingüística, competencia digital, subtitulado, portugués como lengua extranjera, Amara Subtitling.

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recibido en diciembre de 2022 - aceptado en febrero de 2024

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1. IntroducTION

This paper presents two subtitling activities specifically designed for a group of four students studying Portuguese as a Foreign Language (level B1.2). These activities were implemented during the second semester of the 2021-22 academic year.

The discussion begins by establishing a theoretical framework to explore new trends in mediation in learning a foreign language, the potential of subtitling in teaching foreign languages, especially in the mediation area, and the need to highlight digital competences in teaching. Each activity is described by emphasizing the specific mediation and digital competences they aim to develop. The paper then delves into two of those subtitling activities in depth, primarily from a theoretical perspective, but it also includes a brief analysis of the results, covering both linguistic aspects and the students’ perception and motivation.

By reflecting on the objectives, strategies, and results of both activities, the paper aims to contribute not only to the analysis of this type of practice in the PFL (Portuguese as a foreign language) area but also to offer practical models for foreign-language classrooms, showcasing innovative practices to teaching and learning.

2. Theoretical framework

2.1. Mediation in the PFL classroom

It is well known that the publication of the Companion Volume to CEFR (CEFR-CV), both in its provisional release in 2018 and its final version in 2020, has backed linguistic mediation as one of the main activities in the foreign language classroom, not only because of its integrating nature by accommodating production, reception, and interaction but also because

…[it] is a strategic process which requires agency at every stage, develops linguistic and cultural awareness, and highlights the developmental nature of linguistic repertoires. Mediation plays a crucial role in successful plurilingual/pluricultural encounters and in online, distance communication, to which we now turn (Piccardo & North, 2022, p. 34).

The publication of this referential document in language teaching was the culmination of a series of works and research projects which, since the CEFR publication in 2001, sought to fill the ‘void’ in which mediation had been left compared to other linguistic activities (North, 2022, pp. 39-41), despite being also noted in CEFR that mediation occupies a prominent place in how linguistics works in society.

In 2001, mediation was indeed identified as the activity that made it possible to solve communication problems between languages and between varieties or registers of the same language, therefore awarding mediation an enormous linguistic relevance and highlighting the role of the learner of a new language as a social agent. However, this centrality was not understood or applied for years precisely because of the inequality with which mediation was treated compared to other activities (Piccardo, 2012, p. 295). It should also be noted that in the pioneering occasions in which mediation was appraised in language teaching-learning processes, it did so through its translating character, fundamentally only highlighting and attending to its interlinguistic aspect (North & Docherty, 2016, p. 24).

However, in several of the studies developed around the concept and relevance of mediation in CEFR —which would later be at the basis of the development of the descriptors of CEFR-CV—, the role of mediation as a “reducer of distance” began to emerge (Coste & Cavalli 2015, p. 27), i.e., the process by which the mediating agent, whose relevance remains obscured for the sake of communication, strives to fill the gap hindering the (mutual) understanding between other people (Coste & Cavalli, 2015, p. 12; North & Docherty, 2016, p. 24).

While the concept of linguistic mediation strengthened as the activity enabling the establishment of linguistic, cultural and social communication channels between groups —whose diversity may lie in age, socio-educational level or other cultural factors (Piccardo, 2012, pp. 290-291)— its crucial role in the educational system was also increasingly recognised (Coste & Cavalli, 2015, p. 28; Beacco et al., 2016, p. 54).

Thus, linguistic mediation contributes to developing learners’ intercultural competence not only because there is a foreign language in one of the sources, as described by Byram, Porto & Yulita (2020, p. 48), but because, in any type of mediation, learners become “aware of the need to identify potential sources of ambiguity and misunderstanding with a view to anticipating or resolving them” (Beacco et al., 2016, p. 59).

Consequently, during the development of the CEFR-CV, the role of mediation as an interlinguistic transfer was reframed to consider it a tool enacting “communication in social interaction” (Leung, 2022, p. 79) and working in the “(co-)construction of meaning and knowledge” (North, 2022, p. 39). In other words, its role in the articulation of knowledge has been given precedence over its translatological aspect; in other words, languaging or plurilanguaging 1 is prioritised over translanguaging 2—:

The social agent mediates while languaging, because languaging is the manifestation of mediation. If we think of the three main categories in which mediation is presented in the CEFR-CV, in mediating concepts, social agents are quite obviously languaging as they think things through together, in mediating communication they are languaging in the process of self–other regulation, and in mediating a text they are languaging to find formulations that enable understanding of the text itself for themselves and for or with others. (Piccardo, forthcoming, as cited in North, 2022, p. 39)

In his study on the achievements of CEFR-CV, North (2022, p. 34) points out that the document has already inspired several projects and new activities. This catalytic effect has been undoubtedly proven not only by rather generic projects (such as those mentioned by North as linked to the European Centre for Modern Languages) but also by specific proposals focused on different educational levels and language areas, such as those showcased in the volume Enriching 21st-century language education. The CEFR Companion volume in practice (North et al., 2022). Countless experiences have been implemented with their focus on mediation, but as previously said, much remains to be explored in testing, measuring, and assessing, mainly in Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL).

2.2. Subtitling in the PFL classroom

Research about Audiovisual Translation in the Foreign Languages classroom has been carried out for decades to demonstrate the growing vitality of a subject gaining ground in translation or media studies while analysing its characteristics, typologies, or social and cultural importance. Over the last few years, more papers have studied this specific form of Audiovisual Translation in-depth, mainly to report on its unstoppable progression regarding social presence, relevance, and technological development.

Regarding subtitling as a tool for the teaching-learning of foreign languages, in the last years of the 20th century, some studies now considered seminal began to emerge, such as those by Vanderplank (1988) or Borrás & Lafayette (1994), among others, as noted by Incalcaterra McLoughlin et al. (2020, pp. 1-2). Subsequently, the expansion of media content, primarily online, along with significant changes in subtitle production and reception, explains the increasing importance of this pedagogical practice. As Talaván Zanón (2019b, p. 23) points out, excluding that practice from foreign language classes would not be reasonable. 

Indeed, over the last twenty years, there has been a veritable explosion of interest in subtitling, both in the institutional sphere (see, for example, the report published by the European Commission in 2011) and academia. In the latter area, it would be enough to recall the development of projects of teaching-learning and applied research such as Learning via Subtitling (Sokoli, 2006), ClipFlair (Baños & Sokoli, 2015) or, in a more ambitious proposal that investigates various modalities of audiovisual translation, the TRADILEX project (Talaván & Lertola, 2022). The experiences carried out using software not explicitly intended for teaching-learning, as referenced in works by Talaván (2010), García Benito (2018), and Ogando (2018), have also been taken into account.

On the other hand, the consolidation of this discipline in teaching foreign languages has led to a diversification of approaches. These investigations have paid attention to the potential of a translation practice (inter- or intralingual) to the outcome of exercises in which learners assume different roles (active subtitling vs. passive subtitling), to the differences in the students’ work depending on whether their exercises are aimed at foreign speakers or hard-of-hearing people (with implications on the transcription of sounds such as onomatopoeias or the translation of written messages, besides the evident inter-and intralingual aspects); or the improvement achieved according to the type of linguistic activities (reception, production, both) and according to the developed competences (linguistic, intercultural, transversal competences, and etcetera.), among other options 3.

Thanks to the ability to adopt diverse methodologies and approaches, subtitling has incorporated other perspectives central to teaching-learning processes, such as mediation, multilingualism, or linguistic awareness. Additionally, subtitling has facilitated the reintroduction of translation as a tool in its own right in teaching-learning. Papers advancing research along these lines include Muñoz-Basols’ work on multilingualism and linguistic awareness (2019) and works by Talaván Zanón (2019a) and Baños et al. (2021) on mediation. As noted in these studies, there remains considerable potential to explore subtitling for developing multilingual and multicultural competences and its capacity for working with mediation skills. The intrinsically mediating nature of subtitling is anticipated to lead to research on its potential for developing other competences, both linguistic and key competences, such as digital competence for citizens (Vuorikari et al., 2022) and educators (Redecker, 2018).

In the following pages, I will present the theoretical framework I used when approaching subtitling, where mediation and digital competence are intertwined.

2.3. Subtitling and mediation in the PFL classroom

It is unequivocally clear that, even before the publication of CEFR-CV, it was possible to glimpse the potentially mediating nature of subtitling, considered as part of what in the field of translation studies has been named as diamesic translation (Gottlieb, 2017, p. 51), i.e., a practice involving the transit between linguistic modalities (oral-written and interlinguistic). Thus, in 2016, Talaván et al. linked subtitling directly to mediation because of its translating essence. Similarly, although without mentioning mediation, Borghetti and Lertola (2014, p. 24) presented subtitling as a tool for intercultural learning and, insofar as it involves translation, a means of mediation between cultures.

In this sense, there is no doubt that the subtitler can be considered as the “social agent who creates bridges and helps to construct or convey meaning, sometimes within the same language, sometimes across modalities (...) and sometimes from one language to another (cross-linguistic mediation)” (CV-CEFR, 2020, p. 90). Several works have already pointed in this direction, such as Talaván and Lertola (2022, p. 25), who underline the mediating essence of subtitling as making a text comprehensible, accessible, or both; or Bolaños-García-Escribano and Díaz-Cintas, who attribute to subtitling the capacity to build communication bridges (2020, p. 207).

On the other hand, Ragni (2020, p. 10) outlines a range of activities and micro-activities encouraged by active subtitling in the foreign language classroom, one of which includes taking notes, prioritise one piece of information over another, find synonyms, condense a message, or synthesise parts of the original text. As is evident, all these tasks correspond to the mediating competences listed in the “Mediating a text” category, such as “note-taking” and “relaying specific information” or to the strategy of “streamlining a text” (CEFR, 2020).  

This condensation strategy has been used frequently as evidence of the mediating potential of subtitling, especially in interlingual experiences. In this sense and following the rules of most traditional subtitling (Gottlieb, 2004 [in Nikolič, 2018, p. 181]; Orrego-Carmona 2013, p. 302), many of these works consider that subtitling always involves reduction and synthesis (Talaván Zanón, 2012, p. 27; Lertola, 2019, p. 3). They also emphasise the advantages for foreign language learners, who are compelled to listen and rephrase the information before communicating it, thus engaging in a comprehensive mediating exercise (Talaván Zanón, 2019a, p. 87). 

Without questioning the validity of these considerations, I choose in my proposal a verbatim approach to subtitling (that is, one that reproduces each word from the oral text, from an intralingual point of view, or that reproduces as much of the original text as possible, from an interlingual perspective). I base my choice on the belief that, firstly, the shift from oral to written mode, including the work needed to compose the final deliverable, develops the aforementioned mediating competences; secondly, this method goes hand in hand with increasingly widespread practices of verbatim transcription, especially in the intralingual domain, i.e., subtitling for the hard-of-hearing (Vanderplank, 2016, pp. 9-10; BBC, 2019). Likewise, as Orrego-Carmona (2013, p. 314) pointed out a decade ago, the advance of ICT should lead to a re-evaluation of the rules conceived before the expansion of subtitles, as shown by platforms where passive subtitling is essential (Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo, and etcetera.) or those where active subtitling is used (among which Amara Subtitling stands out).

In the many years I have worked with subtitling, the choice of literal subtitling has not been a barrier. On the contrary, it has enabled me to enhance linguistic awareness in a comprehensive way (Vanderplank, 2016, pp. 8; 12-13). Along these lines, I have followed Ragni’s theoretical proposal (2020) 4, according to whom, in some phases of the subtitling activity, it is worth focusing on the explicit study of language (FonFs, or Focus on Forms). In my case, I did it when working with vocabulary, which became the focus for the central part of the first work session. Additionally, I aligned our approach with Caimi’s (2006, pp. 22-23) perspective: Caimi views subtitling as an effective tool for enhancing phonological awareness.

Consequently, most of the students’ assignments focused on analysing oral texts in their written form. This analysis aimed to understand how stressed vowels work within the phonological system of European Portuguese and should be presented to their classmates by each student afterwards, with a selection of examples. By adopting this approach, I could move beyond just text-mediation in subtitling and embrace a broader role of concept-mediation. This shift mainly focused on developing competences like “Collaborating to construct meaning” and “Encouraging conceptual talk” (CEFR, 2020).

Thus, subtitling demonstrates versatility in creating diversified proposals that adapt to multiple guiding principles while including the core elements for improving language teaching-learning processes in the development of innovative practices.

2.4. Subtitling and digital competence in the PFL classroom

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the classroom and the need for training in digital competence, considered one of the key competences since the publication of the first edition of the Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council on key competences for lifelong learning in 2006, and ratified in the update of 2018 (Council of Europe, 2018), is no longer a novelty.

While the prevalence of this competence was undeniable, after the turning point caused by the 2020 pandemic and the forced migration of teaching and learning to virtual environments, the need for digital competence became urgent. Indeed, this watershed event, as pointed out in the subsequent report of the European Commission following its Open Public Consultation of the Digital Education Action Plan, marked “a turning point for how digital technology is used in education and training” (2020, p. 2), joined forces to the context of a widespread perception of the need for more and better digital training. Consequently, the EC has designed a Digital Education Action Plan for 2021-2027 with two strategic priorities: fostering “a high-performing digital education ecosystem” and enhancing “digital skills and competences for the digital age”. If in the first of the lines, we teachers are advised to develop our classes as “digitally-competent and -confident educators” and to work with “high-quality content, user-friendly tools and secure platforms”, in the second one, we are urged to be prepared to work with “digital literacy” and “boost advanced digital skills” (European Commission, 2020, p. 1). 

In this sense, I believe that the systematic introduction of the digital competence guidance documents, both The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp 2.2., Vuorikari et al., 2022) and the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators. DigCompEdu (Redecker, 2018), is now urgent in programming subjects and activities. This absence has been one of the significant gaps in the processes of subject planning, which still do not provide transparent and measurable mechanisms on the levels and areas of digital competence as is worked in the classroom. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that this planning should not only be systematic but flexible and constantly renewed as digital literacy continues to be defined and revised in a complex and highly variable technological world, as evidenced by the recent publication of DigComp 2.2 (Vuorikari et al., 2022) —the fourth edition of the guidelines since its publication a decade ago—; or the recent update of the Spanish Marco de la Competencia Digital Docente in March 2022. 

In other words, it is not just necessary but essential to rethink curricular practices in most subjects to improve the digital training of our students, including in higher education, so that they can face the multiple demands of their future jobs, social life, or cultural life. 

Aware of this need, the choice of subtitling seemed to be highly opportune as 

…[it] perfectly adapts to both face-to-face (F2F) and distance education/online learning environments while catering for diverse students’ needs (it may equally attract visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners), and one that allows for the creation of a realistic and familiar learning context and provides students with the opportunity to develop their ICT skills by playing to imitate a professional task (Talaván Zanón, 2019b, p. 22).

As we will see in the following section, it is possible reinforce many specific competences with this type of classroom activity, mainly in the areas of “Information and data literacy”, “Communication and collaboration”, and “Digital content creation”.

3. Activities Presentation

Within the framework of the course Portuguese Language IV, designed for the acquisition of level B1.2 in Portuguese and taught during the second semester of 2021-22, I implemented a set of activities whose unifying focus was work on mediation (as the primary linguistic objective) and the development of digital competence in all its areas. In the table below, I present the catalogue of activities (organised in the chronological order in which they were proposed to the students) and the specific textual source where linguistic mediation and digital competence were trained.

In the following sections, I will present how the activities relate to the specific work of mediation and digital literacy. Subsequently, I will describe the process of working with the specific activities of active subtitling and, in a final subsection, analyse the results. This analysis includes the four resulting subtitling tasks and the students’ perceptions about the advantages and disadvantages of an active subtitling task.

3.1. Activities for learning mediation competences

All the activities were proposed as the final activity of a topic, except for the first one, which served as an introductory and, at the same time, a recapitulative activity. Furthermore, they encompassed several of the issues worked on throughout the unit. In Table 2 and Table 3, I outline the linguistic mediation competences and the digital competences that I aimed to develop and reinforce.

The activities I propose are framed within the notion that the processes applied to the texts, from comprehension to production, compel students to become those social agents who contribute to constructing and transmitting meaning. As Piccardo points out, “they are languaging to find formulations that enable understanding of the text itself for themselves and for or with others” (in North, 2022, p. 39). In such activities, the mediation process takes place between different languages and, above all, inside the same language, in a process which trains them through different phases (North, 2022, p. 40) not only to carry out monolingual but also plurilingual acts of linguistic mediation, insofar languages are not learned or used in isolated containers.

On the other hand, in agreement with the consideration that “mediation as a pedagogical activity makes it possible to move beyond a simple juxtaposition of knowledge in the different languages and to arrive at a coherent, structured whole that can act as an effective filter for understanding our societies and the world” (Beacco et al., 2016, p. 59), these activities allow us to work on multicultural competence.

Finally, I would like to emphasise that the work with mediation was planned as a continuous learning process across the semester. In this way, it is possible to accommodate recurrent mediation competences and strategies (“Relaying specific information” or “Linking to previous knowledge”, for example) alongside others that were exercised on an ad hoc basis (“Facilitating pluricultural space”, “Acting as an intermediary” or “Explaining data, among others”) (CEFR, 2020).

3.2. Activities to train digital competence

As seen in the following table, all the activity guidelines specify the areas of competence and the determined competences that each activity is intended to develop or reinforce. As I have already said, of the five areas of competence considered in digital citizenship competence (and which constitute the axes on which the teacher must plan for “Facilitating Learners’ Digital Competence”), the first three, “Information and literacy”, “Communication and collaboration”, and “Digital content creation”, are the ones that were exercised most frequently.

In this sense, the choice of Amara was fully conscious, as it is a platform offering the advantage of being free and accessible. It is an online software (web-based) that does not require installation and is compatible with any operating system or browser. Also, thanks to its philosophy around the ‘commons’ culture and cooperative operation, Amara Subtitling allowed us to work with other key competences, such as social and civic competence and learning-to-learn competence.

Amara’s social and collaborative nature, designed to favour the accessibility of media content on the Internet, allowed us to reinforce particularly those competences for “Interacting, Sharing, Engaging citizenship”, and “Collaborating through technologies”, in the area of “Communication”, but also “Copyright and licences”, as the whole process, from selecting the clips to subtitling them, facilitated the discussion on channels and publishing rights on the net.

3.3. Activities description

The aim of the first of the proposed subtitling activities (Legendar Portugal... é tempo) was to work on mediation skills (B1.2), phonological awareness (B1.2), and digital competence (at the Foundation level for competences such as “Evaluating data” or those related to “Digital content creation”, in which students usually have less capability; and at the Intermediate level for the rest of the digital competences, which they are usually more familiar with). The activity consisted of intralingual subtitling (in Portuguese) and interlingual subtitling (translating the subtitles into Spanish and another foreign language, depending on their second foreign lan- guage), adding the subtitles to several videos of the advertising campaign É tempo de ser (Time to be), launched in June 2021 by Portugal’s governmental tourism agency, Turismo de Portugal.

The activity was conducted with four students over three face-to-face sessions, totalling four hours, including individual and paired work (three hours total). During the first session, besides an introduction to the government agency, the Visit Portugal website, and the campaign, extensive linguistic preparation was conducted, including thoroughly scrutinising Portuguese vocabulary, which would help the students understand the videos and focus on their phonological features. After watching the videos, the students chose one video to subtitle intra- and interlingually (oral to written and then from Portuguese into Spanish). Then, they did a second interlingual exercise, subtitling a clip, previously subtitled in Portuguese by a classmate, into a second foreign language. Part of the session was also devoted to getting to know and familiarising ourselves with Amara Subtitling. This task was more straightforward than expected, as the students quickly grasped how the software works, saving allocated time.

The second session was devoted to clarifying doubts and, mainly, to working with the language: a review of the Portuguese phonological system, learnt by the students during their first semester, and a general explanation of the phonological characteristics of the standard European Portuguese vowel system in stressed position, as a first contact with the contents that would be examined in greater depth during the second semester.

In the time allocated to their independent work, the students carried out the subtitling tasks described above and prepared an oral presentation about it to be delivered in class. 

In the third session in the classroom, students individually presented their subtitling work in Portuguese and Spanish. Additionally, they discussed three chosen examples to highlight the stressed vowels in Portuguese. Finally, they briefly reflected on their work process, focusing on their learning and the difficulties, as illustrated in figures 3 to 7 in the appendix.

3.4. Outcomes of the activities

As can be seen with the subtitled videos —É tempo de alcançar, É tempo de inspirar, É tempo de sabo- rear, and É tempo de surfar 5— one of the main advantages of using Amara lies in the ability to create subtitles easily and intuitively, allowing students to focus on the linguistic aspect of the activity. In this case, as these were short videos that had been previously analysed in the classroom, the students started from a suitable situation to focus their efforts on establishing the relationship between the spoken text and the written text in the subtitle, in addition to looking for examples of stressed vowels that they wanted to highlight.

Even though it was their first time reflecting on the occurrence of stressed vowels in which the differences between semi-open vowels /a/, /ɛ/, and /ɔ/ and semi-closed /ɐ/, /e/, and /o/ were considered —based on listening to an oral text and analysing the context of appearance of the stressed vowel phonemes—, all of them managed to select the appropriate examples to demonstrate the basic functioning of the European Portuguese vowel system.

In terms of the development of their competence in co-constructing meaning and collaborating with the group, which are core competencies in the realm of the CEFR’s concept mediation, I could observe that this exercise proved to be a very suitable training for the implementation of other activities in which they had to present work not only to demonstrate the acquisition of linguistic or plurilingual competencies but also to help their peers learn with them. The activities on politics or interesting facts about Lisbon and the Algarve (see Table 1) showed this, as in all cases, the students demonstrated their ability to mediate knowledge based on the subject matter assigned to them.

Another advantage of using Amara is that all the work is published immediately, opening the possibility of collaboration with others, either by correcting existing subtitles or by adding their translations into other languages. As I have already explained, students had to perform an intralingual subtitling of a video in this activity. However, at the same time, they had to carry out two interlinguistic subtitling exercises of videos subtitled by their peers, one translated into Spanish and another into the foreign language they study in their degree, in addition to Portuguese. In this way, in addition to having to understand the Portuguese oral text of two other videos, the subtitling work allowed for more detailed work with the vocabulary and syntactic structures of the videos. As can be seen in the comments about the execution of the exercise, the reverse subtitling exercise into another foreign language was one of the significant difficulties perceived by the students.

I can highlight that none of them pointed out the use of the tool as a difficulty; however, when they were asked during the presentation about this specific issue, all of them noted that not only had it been easy, but it had also been very interesting to approach the study of Portuguese through subtitling. They were particularly interested in the possibilities of correction and self-correction that a digital tool like Amara allows. The basic structure of this task was repeated weeks later when approaching the second activity. Then, as a culmination of the semester’s work, they were asked to translate together, as a team, two video clips in reverse (from Spanish into Portuguese), focusing on tourism in the Azores, a cultural and geographic topic discussed in previous days. Thus, putting into practice knowledge acquired across the course, the activity required a cross-linguistic translation of two short (and related) clips from Spanish into Portuguese and into a second language, plus the showcasing of several examples of stressed vowels in which the differences between semi-open and semi-closed vowels should be perceived.

In addition to the acquisition of mediation skills and digital skills described in points 3.1 and 3. 2, thanks to the delivery of the subtitled videos and the presentations made in the classroom, I would like to underscore the high level of motivation of the students: regardless of their characteristics as learners, their linguistic skills or their computer literacy, they were all actively involved in the process of co-construction of knowledge about Portuguese phonology and, as they pointed out in their reflections, they felt part of a community that contributed to making the Internet more accessible.

4. Conclusion

There is no doubt about the innovative nature of foreign language teaching and learning processes, where competence-based teaching, ICT, and, in general, active methodologies have consistently placed the learner at the centre of the process. In this sense, as I have mentioned before, the effort of European institutions in establishing the mediation descriptors in the CEFR companion volume demonstrates their interest in continuously updating the guidelines for their 2001 document and, above all, the framework’s capacity to explore a variety of tools to improve the educational environment. The challenge now lies in the ability of teachers and agents responsible for these processes to implement, experiment, evaluate and make mediation —textual, conceptual, or multilingual— effective in the classroom.

By presenting these six activities and analysing the practices of mediation through active subtitling, I have reflected on how this type of task is a valid option to work effectively, meaningfully, and in a motivating way in the PFL classroom, both in the field of text edition and in the mediation of concepts. In addition, it is also possible to work on students’ digital competence and to create a multilingual workspace, as it leads to informal translation and comparison between languages but also explicit linguistic reflection, and this favours the development of the pupils’ autonomy in learning, as well as their ability to adapt to diverse social and professional environments.

Finally, I would like to emphasise that, even if this activity is easily replicable in other foreign-language classes, it serves as a further example of the development of mediation and digital competence in the learning of Portuguese as a foreign language, thus contributing to a multilingual dialogue on the practices and results of teaching the various European languages.

References

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Bolaños-García-Escribano, A., & Díaz-Cintas, J. (2020). Audiovisual translation. Subtitling and revoicing. In S. Laviosa & M. González-Davies (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education (pp. 207-225). Routledge.

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