Audiovisual Translation and Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition in Colloquial Arabic

Over the past few years, a renewed interest in employing translation in language pedagogy appears to be gaining momentum over the more commonly-celebrated communicative approach. The present paper describes a pilot study on the effectiveness of audiovisual translation in vocabulary acquisition. A group of (13) learners of Arabic in a large public university in the US took part in an 8-week project where they carried out the interlingual subtitling of a full-length Egyptian film into the English language. Data was collected by means of a pre- and a post-project survey to measure the progress made by learners at the end of the project with regard to incidental acquisition of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions. The study participants were also surveyed to determine their perception of the relevance of translation in their language studies. The findings corroborate the argument in favor of the incorporation of translation activities in L2 classes.