Abstract:

The dubbing of muted video clips offers an excellent opportunity to develop the skills of foreign language learners at all linguistic levels. In addition to its motivational value, soundtrack dubbing provides a rich source of activities in all language skill areas: listening, reading, writing, speaking. With advanced students, it also lends itself to creative collaborative scenario production. Video dubbing thus offers essentially the same pedagogical benefits of full video production, but without completely taking over the curriculum or bogging students down in the technical logistics of movie making. The production of dubbed videos raises numerous practical issues--pedagogical as well as technical. Pedagogically, successful projects require considerable in-class as well as out-of-class preparation. Technologically, they require both instructors and students to learn basic video editing skills. The management of a video dubbing project involves several stages: video selection, scene cropping and muting, initial class presentation of the target video, group listening comprehension (or scenario creation) activities, individual practice, group rehearsal and, finally, soundtrack dubbing.

Author: Jack Burston