Learner’s Version of a Professional Environment: Film Subtitling as an ICTE Tool for Foreign Language Learning Thanasis Hadzilacos 1, 2 , Spyros Papadakis 1, 2 and Stavroula Sokoli 1, 3 1 ODL Lab, Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece 2 Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece, 3 Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona <thh, papadakis, sokoli>@eap.gr Abstract: Learning a new language can be tedious –except in the environment actually used, in which case it is most exciting. Active learning and engaging learning activities are prominent among the –often not realized in practice– promises of ICTE. Giving learners a special version of a professional environment, not for the purposes of training a professional but for the side benefits of fundamental skills associated is widely practiced in education. In this paper we present a special learning/exercising environment for foreign languages, mimicking a highly specialized professional activity: film/video subtitling. The learner combines listening (to speech, music and other sounds) with viewing (thus incorporating cultural aspects in her learning) in order to come to an under- standing which she must then render by suitable translation into subtitles: they will appear as a sub- titled film clip and be stored for the student’s, the teacher’s and peers’ later review. 1. Pre-view (Introduction) The educational software presented in this paper is a learner’s version of a professional activity and environment: that of film subtitling. A learner’s version of a tool is optimized for learning, not for production. Film subtitling is a special type –art and science– of translation: it need take into account space (available on the screen) and time (syn- chronization); it can benefit and may suffer from the image context: one may skip subtitling a “yes” when accompa- nied by the actor’s nodding in the screen (from English, say into Greek) but will do a very poor job in skipping sub- titling a corresponding “no”: shaking one’s head from left to right is not the way of gesturing discord in Greek! Translation has been overused in teaching and overvalued in testing foreign languages and thus has come under rightful criticism as a tool for learning foreign languages. For example Richards, J.C, & T.S. Rogers (1986) main- tain that translation as a method may encourage focusing in the source text and keep the learner thinking in her mother language, thus discouraging thinking directly in the language being learned; in translating the student often ignores the context and places undue value in “faithfulness”. However, translation remains a good if limited exer- cise and a fundamental faculty: to be able to render in a “target” language, text expressed in a “source” language. Learning a new language can be the most exciting learning task (for a young human at the beginning of life or an adult in a new environment) or one of the dullest (reciting the past tense of the subjunctive of irregular verbs…). ICT has the promise and has been used –not always with great success– for teaching and learning foreign languages. Active learning is supposed to be a great asset of ICTE, often advertised and less often realized by ICTE products, on account of either “activeness” or “learning”. LvS, Learning via Subtitling, the software presented in this paper, surmounts these shortcomings by using multimedia not as a nice add-on but as the core of an activity which even when presented as an exercise for learning remains a valid real-world engaging task: The student is asked to add subtitles to a film thus practicing multimedia comprehension and written expression. This short paper is structured in three views: the learner’s (in Section 2, addressing what the learning environment is), the engineer’s (in Section 3, addressing how the system has been built), and the educator’s (in Section 4, explain- ing why this is a suitable method). 2. The learner’s view (What?) 1. The student reads the instructions or discovers how to use the software –the usual case with young learners and ICT– and starts the activity 2. The student can watch the video clip under her own control (pause, restart, skip etc), keeping online notes 3. The student adds the subtitles