Alright, so our next speaker is with an assembly.
I'm going to introduce her
and then we are going to check if her presentation is already there.
Teaches English for specific purposes
at the Department of Crisis Management and Optometry of the University
of Applied Sciences Building Calgary in Croatia.
She's also a Ph.D.
student at the University of Saada with a thesis
in subtitle Revision Processes and Procedures.
Her fields of interest include Subtitling France having subtitle
revision and cognitive processing of audio visual translation,
as well as language
for specific purposes, and the acquisition of technical terminology.
So let us check if
highly that don't know.
Hello? Can you hear me?
Yeah. Loud and clear.
Okay, great. Screen.
The floor is yours.
Okay. Okay, Just a second.
Um, so is the presentation visible?
Yes. Perfect. Perfect. Right.
Okay, So probably the most important aspects of my professional resume
for this would be the fact that I used to work as a subtitle advisor,
and now I work as a lecturer of English for specific purposes.
So this is a sort of pilot study that combines
both of my fields of interest,
and I incorporated
subtitle revision into my English for specific purposes.
Classes because my students are a sort of mixture, so they can sometimes be
ranging from a one and they can also sometimes range
through all of the other c, e, F levels.
So I'm going to talk about our experience as it worked
well in the classroom.
Okay. So just the second
now. Okay.
So when we talk about foreign language acquisition, subtitling
has been used for quite a long time in classrooms, and most of the studies
to date actually talk about the use of subtitles to learn vocabulary.
This is a similar study as I've said, most of my students are lower
level of language knowledge.
So a one to, let's say B two, they're sometimes they can be
higher levels, but most of the time they're not.
So this is also a study that didn't really look at
the acquisition of grammar,
although this is something that I plan to do in my next step.
So I will mention that at the end of this presentation.
So well, all of the studies that I have read
pretty much talk about the retention of vocabulary, about improvement
of writing skills and the beneficial effects
of the use of subtitles as a sort of interplay of both visual
and aural and textual elements, meaning that if people are watching
films that are subtitled, it helps them in there.
Sorry, I forgot to move the
presentation, so it helps them retain their vocabulary.
They have learned and this is something that could be quite useful.
Or at least I thought so.
In LSP because LSP is something that relies
heavily on technical vocabulary, because this is English
for specific purposes.
And since I teach at the Department of Optometry,
this is a vocabulary that is related to different types of optical
instrument, different parts of the eye and similar.
And since I also teach the Department of Crisis Management,
their vocabulary is something that covers
natural disasters and
relief in natural disasters or
anthropogenic threats, terrorism and similar.
So it covers quite a lot of different vocabulary
and it is quite heterogenous.
So I sense the students have to watch the film with subtitles
and they need to, at the same time be able to process and apply
to the production of new vocabulary and new texts.
The type of subtitle I chose to use was intro lingual,
so I use the English subtitles with the English audio.
I did not use Croatian subtitles and this is quite important to mention.
So these subtitles
in language for specific purposes
can I believe have beneficial effects on grammar as well.
But as I said, this is something that I intend to have a look at
the following step, which I intend to do with a colleague
from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering.
Okay, So as I've said, the previous research has shown
that subtitling is quite good for vocabulary acquisition.
So I thought that revising subtitles should be something
that would be quite good to try in an LSP context, especially
since we are talking about students who have a lower level of knowledge.
So this would eliminate the need to create their own subtitles,
because I'm not entirely certain that students with lower level
of previous knowledge would be able
to create subtitles from scratch.
This is something that well, at the Faculty of
Humanities in
Zagreb, there is a course in subtitling the study of English,
but this is something done by students of translation.
This is not something done by students of other groups.
This is not something that again, done from scratch.
So I wanted to have a look
at what is called the other revision, meaning that the students
would not be revising subtitles they made themselves.
They would revise subtitles that were made by someone else.
And this is some friends can be tricky,
even when it is done by professional translators.
As I had the opportunity to see in my career as a subject advisor.
Because even experienced professional or revise authors may sometimes
introduce errors in subtitles if they are not sufficiently familiar
with the technical terminology of the text they are working on. So
when we talk about students of
crisis management or students of optometry,
they should learn the vocabulary that is related to their profession
and they should be familiar
with the vocabulary that is related to their profession.
So I assumed that the amount of potential mistakes
that could be introduced by the students would be lower
than with somebody who might be better in English,
but not as familiar with the terminology.
Okay, so this is an experimental pilot study.
It was a small scale study.
It included 12 students as a sort of beginning
for something that I tend to do on a larger scale.
The students all belong to either
levels between a1a to B one or B two.
There were seven male students, five students.
One of them was a Dutch student on the Erasmus
exchange and 11 students were Croatians.
So this pilot study was done in three phases.
The first one was the free task.
Then the students had to complete the subtitle, a revision task,
and after that they had the post
task questionnaire, which mostly focused on their perception
of the subtitle revision task and the use of subtitle videos
and revision exercises in their classes.
The videos that were chosen were clips that were really short,
and they corresponded to their regular course materials.
So the second year students had the video calls.
The How Big the Great Pacific Garbage Patch really is
because they had a lesson on marine pollution, the plastics.
And the first year students had the COVID 19 and the rise
of zoonotic infectious diseases because they also had a lesson
on epidemics and pandemics, which we do in our first semester.
When it comes to documentaries, the LSP courses
would be a perfect thing to incorporate document stories
that are subtitled,
even those that would subtitled in Croatian or those
which are intro lingual and which have original English subtitles.
Because documentary
is as every subtitle, all of the notes usually have slower narration,
and they don't have as much idiomatic language, but they usually have more
technical vocabulary that is related to the topic at hand.
And this is something that is really good
for vocabulary acquisition.
And this is something that I also have experienced with students.
They really like having such materials.
Okay, So as I said, we have English audio, we also have English subtitles.
And the whole point was to see whether this would impact
technical terminology acquisition
and whether the students would react positively on having such
tasks in their courses.
I personally introduced errors into the subtitles,
meaning that I chose several subtitles then to be specific and introduce
vocabulary or terminology errors or mistranslations.
And then the students had to realize
that there are certain mistakes and they had to correct them.
I did not introduce grammatical or any stylistic errors
because I didn't really believe that beginner level students
would be able to see nuances in style.
This is something that I plan to do with C one and C
two level students during the next steps.
Okay, so this is an example of a video
they had to do or zoonotic
infectious diseases video.
You can also see that a subtitles were not properly segmented,
and some of the students even commented on this in their post
task questionnaires.
But this is something that is that some studies that are done on
somebody show that it has no necessarily no
bearing on the enjoyment of the video.
However, this is, again, something that could be interesting
for other similar studies.
So as I said, the first thing we did were the previewing activities
and we had our regular lesson, as we usually do.
We completed a short text on the relevant topic,
either the plastics in the oceans or zoonotic diseases.
We also completed this doesn't do reading comprehension task.
We had a short discussion on the topic and then the students
were asked to revise the subtitles for the video.
The video was viewed twice the first time the students
were asked to simply watch the video with the subtitles.
The second time they were asked to revise those subtitles.
And then they viewed the video once again with revised subtitles.
And they also have additional vocabulary and comprehension
tasks to complete that were related to the text from the video
specifically rather than the entire lesson.
And afterwards they were asked to complete
the post task questionnaire, which guides their perceptions
and beliefs or motivations and so on.
Okay.
So when we talk about the task
completion, all of the students who were included in this pilot
study completed their revision task successfully.
They also didn't really have any problems with the comprehension.
Some of the text from the video or the text from the general lesson.
One of the students, and it may be interesting to say,
but it was one of the mid-level
students, so not the beginner level, but one of the B one level
students had issues with some production, meaning
that they had a lot of typos in their subtitles
and most of other students
didn't really show this type of issue. So
in revised subtitles, most of the other students
completed their task successfully and they corrected all of the errors
that were introduced.
When we talk about perception,
the response was overwhelmingly positive.
And this is something that can also be seen in previous
research on the topic, because the interactive materials
usually increase the student's motivation and interest
because this is something that is, well, visually active.
It is something that
makes them focus more intently on the task at hand.
And this is something that was also visible in the students responses
because most of the respondents emphasized the beneficial effects
of having an image to accompany the words
or the text, because let's be honest, language for specific purposes
can sometimes be, well, if not necessarily monochrome.
It is not something that is usually general language.
Everybody likes doing the clips that were taken from TV
series or, I don't know, The Simpsons or something similar.
There's just something that is interesting.
This is something that people like watching.
This is something that always keeps people glued to the screens.
But when we talk about documentaries, about about infectious diseases,
this is not necessarily
something that everybody would be delighted to watch, even though
this is something that belongs to their course materials.
And if they cry this managers
need to be able to deal with situations such as this.
As the pandemic has shown us.
So, okay, just seconds. So
there were
several different themes
that kept being repeated and the students stressed,
and they mostly characterized those subtitles
revision tasks as helpful.
They said that it was easier to learn if they used interactive materials.
Some of them were quite happy that the topic was content
specific because they also have similar type of content
in other courses they have on their study program.
So this English specific focus is of course ties in
with the rest of their learning material, and many of them
mentioned the exercise as being either fun or interesting.
And this was something that students really liked.
So here I have some of the direct quotes
that I took from the questionnaires.
So some of those students were quite happy
because they were able to at the same time
hear how the words were spoken and see how they were written.
Some of them mentioned
that it is easier for them to remember the course materials
or specific words and concepts if they see them visually on screen.
And many also mentioned that those were something
that they didn't really focus on before this semester because, again,
while not many people really like
watching documentaries about plastics or infectious diseases
and this is something that is very content specific.
So some of the students also mentioned that it is fun
because this is something new,
this is something they haven't done before. And
those
materials also make them more mentally present
or more focused on the course contents.
However, there was one student
who wasn't really happy with this exercise,
and it wasn't the same student who struggled with rhythm production.
This is important to mention.
So one of the students
mentioned that he didn't find it
really that difficult, but he thought that
it was more difficult to follow the video and correct subtitles.
At the same time,
he said that he usually prefers having videos
with subtitles just to watch rather than having actually
do something with those subtitles, because he thought that this detracts
from the overall experience and
he said that he wouldn't really like to have more tasks like this one.
This was the only such opinion, but it is also worth noting.
So when I say limitations, obviously this is a pilot study.
It had really low number of respondents, so no statistical
analysis would be appropriate to use with only 12 respondents
for further study.
It may be
also better to divide respondents into groups according to their sea
levels or common European frameworks reference framework levels.
And we could also include also plenty
of other language learning components such as grammar or style.
So I plan to repeat this experiment on a larger scale.
I plan to include also my students of optometry and my colleague
from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering would like to join.
So we are going to do several similar studies
with students from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering.
It would also be interesting to see
how the students would react to having to revise grammatical errors
or subtitles, segmentation or things that could be subtype and specific.
All that has to be mentioned.
And since these are not language students as such, meaning
they are not involved in the neo philological course, they are studying
things that are quite different, that belong to STEM.
Maybe
the subtitle segmentation and things that are
subtitling specific may not be appropriate for them.
Okay.
So to conclude,
the overall results of the experiment support previous research
in the field and the respondents didn't really have many difficulties
in following the content of the videos completing their revision tasks.
Most of the respondents had a really positive experience.
They really liked doing an exercise such as this, and they believed
it was something interesting, something fun,
and something that increased their motivation for English language
learning in addition to other courses they had to complete
during their studies.
Although despite this
broad majority of students having a positive and motivating experience,
some of the students may not prefer a similar classroom activities
and similar classroom activities which have to be included
in the course curriculum
depending on the student's previous level of knowledge. On
a specific role,
which might be more responding
to using such tasks and that devoted.
Thank you for watching.
Thank you very much for joining us for your presentation.
I think we might have time for two or three questions
in case one.
Okay.
Yeah.
So thank you with Rana for this very interesting presentation.
I would like to know if you have detected any differences
in the treatment of terminology in the subtitle
as compared to, you know, in written texts or in other contexts,
because, you know, in subtitles, you have to make the text shorter.
So maybe is anything happening to the technical terms
or do they say the same as in other contexts?
Have you observed this?
Okay, so the technical term stayed the same in subtitles
because I chose this might be something that is related
obviously to the choices I made in introducing specific errors.
So I chose specific words They need to learn in this lesson
depending whether it's plastics or infectious diseases and pandemics.
So I chose words that were lessons specific and the students had to
select specific errors and then replace them
with the correct solution.
So they didn't really create their own subtitles.
So there was no tense contention and they didn't really struggle
with those errors because those were words they or over
they learned and they that those words
were introduced in the previewing task.
When we did our first part of the lesson.
So, no, nothing specifically changed with the subtitles
as opposed to the written text
they had at the beginning of the lesson.
The questions from the audience,
anybody, any question.
Jennifer
you probably have one or two
anybody I can ask any question regarding research
design, theoretical tools, anything at all?
No questions.
Sure. Yeah.
You are not obliged to. Okay.
I was just joking.
Thank you.
I have a hybrid conference.
Actually, I thought I just wanted to say that
I thought your idea was extremely clever,
actually, to have single specialists
who now about certain area
to actually work on a text. And,
you know, because what happens typically, right?
You've got all those translators
who have to translate all sorts of texts, texts and they don't
necessarily specialize in in this and that.
And what you did was I said, yes,
as I said, a very, very clever and maybe, you know,
it should be it should be used there.
I don't know if there were any trends
or any specific
things that were going on in how they were doing.
The revision, anything going on in the post editing.
Everybody just corrected everything correctly or.
Most of the times.
Yes, because as I've said, this was a controlled study.
This was a pilot study to see how they were respond
and whether this is something that would even be a workable solution
for some of our lessons, because some of our lessons,
especially waste management lessons, can be really well,
I'm trying not to use the word boring, but yes, they are kind of boring.
And this is something that the students usually
are not exactly happy doing.
So I would like to introduce a bit more of,
let's say, something interactive, perhaps subtitles, perhaps
called games or I don't know any type of word game
that would make heads a bit more bearable for them.
So since they had to learn specific expressions
and I introduced errors that were related
to those specific expressions, nobody really had any issues with that.
And some of the students even commented that it helped them
because both
the audio was in English and the subtitles were also in English.
I suppose that if I use Croatian subtitles,
the results would be very different because, as I've said,
many of the students were a lower level of knowledge.
So this is something that is also unfamiliar vocabulary,
something like an unfamiliar activity, because they are not language
students and soft pedaling is not really something they often do
know.
No subtitling is something they never really do,
and that's about it.
So English audio, English mistakes and English subtitles.
It was interesting to see that even though some of the students
for a one or total begin their level, they were able to follow the audio
and realize that something is really wrong with a subtitle and
write down the correct version and then introduce
the correct version into the subtitles.
Again, it would be interesting to see different language combinations.
So if I do the next step with English
audio and Croatian subtitles, or vice versa, perhaps we could do
the Croatian audio and English subtitles.
That could be a fine idea to try.
I suppose the results would be quite different.
Thank you very, very much for that.
All right.
If there are no further questions. Thank you.
See you there, Joanna.
And we continue with our next speaker.