Audio Description Practice in the Catalan L1 Classroom: Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities in a Minoritised Language Setting

Abstract

Audiovisual Translation and Audio description (AD) have been successfully used in educational settings, especially in foreign language learning and with advanced foreign language learners, in the context of higher education. The use of AD in school settings, and in connection with L1, is a promising but arguably under researched area, which our study explores through an AD workshop conducted in a Catalan secondary school. The article outlines the pedagogical design of the intervention based in action-research, its results, limitations, and ways forward. Our results indicate that the practice of AD helped students to develop linguistic skills, especially lexical and syntactic skills, as well as critical thinking and transversal competences such as digital skills. The activity also raised awareness about blindness and functional diversity. One of the challenges was to evaluate students’ productions and another was to deal with a complex sociolinguistic context and translanguaging in the classroom, two key aspects that are also discussed in the article. An important outcome is that the AD workshop presented in this article is now part of a catalogue of activities to encourage the use of Catalan among students, published by the Catalan Government, and addressed to Catalan schools.