Abstract:

Linguistic knowledge is essential in order to achieve a full communicative competence in a foreign language. Consequently, the linguistic aspects of a language, such as the grammar, cannot be ignored when teaching a foreign language. Teaching grammar may pose a great challenge for teachers as it is not normally appealing for students and it is difficult to engage them in grammar lessons, specially if they are kids and teenagers as, generally, they are not willing to memorize grammar rules.

Traditionally, translation have been rejected as a pedagogical resource for foreign language grammar teaching. Translating into a second language may lead to negative language transfers, that is to say, the mother tongue (L1), when literally transferred into the second language, (L2) can be a source of errors as items and structures normally differ in both languages. However, during the last years, several studies have proved that translation may be beneficial for second language acquisition and methodologies have been proposed to implement pedagogical translation in the classroom. Therefore, having in mind that translation should not be the central focus of the teaching process, pedagogical translation can be integrated along with other resources and activities for foreign language teaching.

The aim of this study is to analyze linguistic competence in the English as a Foreign Language Secondary classroom by means of audiovisual translation. Specifically, the objective is to assess the impact of audiovisual translation on the grammatical competence concerning past modal verbs. To this end, an intervention proposal based on Game of Throne series was designed and implemented in two groups of 4th Year of Secondary School, formed by 43 students aged between 15 and 16 years old. First, students were given a theoretical explanation about past modal verbs and they were asked to do some activities to practice their use. Then, students did a test to assess their knowledge about past modal verbs. After that, students watched a chapter of Game of Thrones series and were asked to translate selected fragments containing past modal verbs. Once this task was completed, the test was conducted again to analyze if students' knowledge about modal verbs had improved.

Results proved that audiovisual translation was potentially useful to foster linguistic competence at the grammatical level, specifically concerning the use of past modal verbs. The average of students that failed the test−around 24%−decreased around the 8%. However, the most remarking result is that students assessed with an A+ (Excellent) increased around 46%, which proves that audiovisual translation was very useful to make students master and consolidate the use of past modal verbs. These results confirm the potential of audiovisual translation as a teaching resource to improve linguistic competence in foreign language.

Keywords:

Audiovisual translation, teaching resource, foreign language learning, secondary education, Game of Thrones.