Audio description and pronominal verb production in students of Spanish: An analysis of unexpected linguistic outputs
Adriana Bausells-Espín
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HTML version of the abstract and keywords [English]:
Title
Audio description and pronominal verb production in students of Spanish: An analysis of unexpected linguistic outputs
Abstract
In audio description (AD), images are turned into words to facilitate access to audiovisual products for blind and partially sighted people. Over the last two decades, AD has been incorporated into foreign language education to promote active learning. This article presents an experiment on the potential of AD to promote pronominal verb (PNV) production in English-speaking students of Spanish (B2 level), focusing on participants’ PNV uses beyond the expected ones. Experimental groups completed two translation tasks: an AD (images into words), and an interlingual translation (English into Spanish), in reverse order. Production differences were explored quantitatively and qualitatively by task type, task order, and PNV type. Results suggest that interlingual translation is more effective for PNV production. However, certain trends reveal that completing the AD first may enhance PNV frequency and correctness in a later task. More importantly, the presence of ‘unexpected’ PNVs—many of types considered difficult—challenges previous findings regarding students’ tendency towards pronominal omission or overgeneralisation, raising questions about what generates students’ awareness of pronominality requirements, and about whether establishing a visual-linguistic connection promotes such awareness.
Keywords
Audio description, Spanish pronominal verbs, didactic audiovisual translation, Spanish as a foreign language, integrated form-focus approach
36(1) - 2024