Audiovisual materials have been used in foreign language teaching for a few years now and there is ample literature on the benefits of using such materials. At the same time, new technologies have entered the foreign language classroom in different forms, which help students acquire new competences and allow them to practice in a more autonomous way and in a more amusing environment. In this paper we will present a new online pedagogical resource: Clipflair. This platform combines both audiovisual materials and new technologies in foreign language learning. It is designed to provide and develop educational materials for different levels and languages that have one trait in common: they all use clips and engage students in tasks of captioning or revoicing. Therefore, it goes one step forward in comparison with traditional activities involving audiovisual materials, where students use to practice more passive skills, mainly listening comprehension. Apart from passive skills, revoicing and captioning tasks put into play more productive ones, namely writing and speaking. In sum, this platform allows students to make different sorts of exercises to practice the four basic language skills as well as to focus on specific grammar and cultural issues. Apart from presenting the platform and showing a couple of activities designed for Chinese language learners as an example, we will also analyze the first results obtained from the piloting stage of the project. These data prove that students find this tool very useful not just in terms of actual learning results but also in terms of motivation.

1. Clipflair: the use of captioning
and revoicing for TCFL
Helena Casas-Tost & Sara Rovira-Esteva
Departament of Translation and Interpreting
Autonomous University of Barcelona
The First International Conference on Teaching
Chinese as a Foreign Language
Hong Kong, December 4-6, 2013

2. Outline
• New online pedagogical resource: Clipflair
▫ Main characteristics
▫ Pedagogical possibilities
• Examples designed for CFL
• First results from the piloting stage

3. Audiovisual materials & foreign
language learning
Ample literature on the use of audiovisual materials
Subtitling
• Díaz Cintas (1995, 1997, 2001), Vermeulen (2003), Talaván
(2006a, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2013), Wagener (2006), Sokoli
(2006), Sokoli et al. (2011), Romero et al. (2011), Incalcaterra
et al. (2011, forthcoming)
Dubbing (more recently)
• Chiu (2012), Danan (2010), Martínez Martínez (2012),
Navarrete (2013), Talaván et al. (2014, forthcoming)

4. The Clipflair project
Online pedagogical tool for language learning
Combines text + image + sound
• subtitles
• intertitlesCaptioning
• dubbing
• audiodescription
• voice-over
• karaoke
Revoicing

5. The Clipflair project
10 members from 8 countries
Coordinator: Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
ICT and Educational
Technologies:
Computer Technology Institute (Greece)
Pedagogy of Translation,
Applied Linguistics and
Second Language
Acquisition:
UPF, CTI, Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona,
Imperial College, Babes Bolyai Univ., Univ.
Deusto, Tallinn Univ., Warsaw Univ., Univ. of
Algarve, National Univ. of Ireland, Galway
Authoring and creation of
activities:
All partners
Internal coordination: As Work Package leaders, UPF, UAB, ICL and
NUIG communicate with partners and
organize piloting.
Evaluation: Univ. Deusto

6. Spain
UK
Greece
Rumania
Estonia
Ireland
Portugal
Poland
ClipFlair partners

7. The Clipflair project
• Objectives
▫ Develop material for language learning
– 300 activities in 15 languages (中文 around 20)
– levels A1 to C2 (中文 A1-B2)
▫ Create a virtual community of users
• Users and learning environments
▫ students, teachers
▫ secondary and university level, adults
▫ face-to-face, B-learning, distance/independent

8. Skills to develop
• getting the gist, understanding general or specific
information, listening to pronunciation, dialectal variantsListening
• work on pronunciation, fluency, speed of speech
• revoicing, audio description, narrationSpeaking
• information scanning, guessing out of the context, getting
the gist or learning about cohesion, coherence, register and
styleReading
• writing strategies related to register, style, cohesion,
coherence
• work on transcribing, spelling and decodingWriting

9. Skills to develop
• vocabulary, grammar points,
pragmatics, sociolinguistics
Focus on linguistic
elements
• L1> L2, L2> L1, L2> L2
• oral and written
Translation
• images, nonverbal language
Intercultural
awareness
• AV literacyAudiovisual skills

10. Possibilities
• Wide range of activities
▫ Intralingual (L2-L2)
▫ Interlingual (L1 -L2 / L2 –L1)
• Translation
• Minority languages
• Can help address accessibility issues
▫ audiodescription for the visually impared
▫ captioning for the hard of hearing

11. Clipflair: http://clipflair.net

12. Example 1

13. Example 2

14. Example 3

15. Results
• 1st pilot stage
▫ Chinese 5 activities
▫ students find this tool
– very useful
– amusing
▫ teachers think that this tool fosters
– students’ creativy, autonomy, and motivation
• 2nd pilot stage 2013-2014
▫ peer-review all activities
▫ plan to pilot more activities

16. Concluding remarks
• Main aims of the project
▫ making these resources accessible and easy to use
for learners and instructors
▫ widen the learning community
• You can use the activities in the gallery or create
your own activities
• Easy to use, as shown in the tutorial “
ClipFlair Studio: The Basics”
• You can create your own groups in the social

17. For more info:
Presenters:
Helena.Casas@uab.cat
http://gent.uab.cat/helena_casas_tost/es
Sara.Rovira@uab.cat
http://www.fti.uab.es/srovira/personal
http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/txicc/es
Visit clipflair.net and subscribe to our newsle5er.
Follow us on Twi5er (@ClipFlair) and Facebook.
Come to the ClipFlair Conference, Barcelona 2014.