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Listening and self-subtitling

At each of the 20 interview times, I asked my four case studies what they were experiencing as they were listening to French. At the end of year seven, one of them – Helen, told me ‘Usually when I’m listening  – especially in French – I can see the words in my head.’. This wasn’t something I’d heard of before and it intrigued me, so I began to check in on this phenomenon regularly. Often with Helen it seemed to be that she could identify individual words that she didn’t know, and these the ones that she ‘saw’ spelled out in her minds eye. That seemed to help her ‘park’ those words and gave her the ability to come back to them later and build meaning even though the echo memory had passed. She said she didn’t control it – the phrases she struggled with would just ‘pop up’ (her words) in her mind eye, quite automatically. 


My conversations with Helen made me wonder how unusual this was – there’s some academic research into the idea of ‘Inner Experience’ from academics Heavey and Hurlburt (2008), who touch on this ‘self-subtitling’ and suggest that it’s reasonably common. 

It made me start to ask around my students across the school. Many did so, and there seemed to be a sliding scale of intensity. One or two said that in every conversation, even in English they would ‘see’ a subtitling of whatever they were hearing. Others would do it in their foreign language lessons but not in English, and for some, like Helen, it would fade in and out depending on how many problematic words there were. 

In fact, in the past few years at school I have had the privilege of teaching a blind student who uses Braille. At one point when he was listening to some French I watched his eyes darting from side to side, with movements that you would see in a sighted person as they were reading. I asked him whether he was reading what he was hearing in his mind’s eye, and he confirmed he was, although he was ‘seeing’ the language in Braille rather than in script. He confirmed that when listening he would also have a slightly kinaesthetic experience of being able to almost ‘feel’ the Braille letters as he was listening.

Something to think about! 
Do you self-subtitle when you listen? If so, to what extent? (I can’t make myself do it in English or French, but I can force it in my weaker languages.) 
If you can get yourself to do it, is it helpful, or a distraction, or both? 
What about your students? Address with them that there’s a huge range of individual differences when it comes to the ‘inner experience’ of listening; this will encourage and empower them to consider what their own inner experience is, in a non-judgemental way. 
You might find that your younger students self-subtitle more than older or more advanced learners. 
You might notice that those who have better literacy skills are more likely to do it than those who are less keen on reading and writing. 
If you teach more than one language, do you see a difference in the amount of self-subtitling? And if so, it’s worth thinking about why this might be, or discussing it with colleagues.
Some academic thoughts 
For readers who like a bit of research and academic thoughts, here’s my take on what might be going on with self-subtitling. I think it’s an indication that our senses cannot always be easily separated – here, the visual and the auditory are working together. There are several arms of academic research which take this as a starting point and build from it to think about how languages are learned and how indeed we can enhance language learning. 

When we consider what it means to ‘know’ a word, we acknowledge that we need to know about how it is spelled and how it sounds in order to properly know it – and that we are more likely to learn things when they come at us from different senses simultaneously. (This is the idea behind the current darling of pedagogy which is ‘dual coding’, but which also has a long history within language learning, including ‘greatest hits’ like Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis.) 

There’s quite a lot of research that suggests that one way to enhance listening understanding is to watch videos or films with same-language subtitles: here, of course, a professional has done the subtitling, so the learner does not need to do it in their head. It appears that this not only boosts comprehension of the film that’s being watched, but contributes to better progress in language learning too. 

Teaching ideas 
This is all very interesting, but where does it leave us in the classroom? 

I think there are two directions we can take this finding: 
  1. To have a sense that this is a ‘thing’, and therefore to know which students might be doing it (one element of exploring the individual experiences of listening) 
  2. To ask whether it can be taught, and if so, whether it will enhance listening skills. How then, might one teach ‘self-subtitling’? 

It seems to me that variations on the theme of ‘listening while reading’ might be a very good starting point. Try: 
  • Gapped dictations (where you could do the same transcript on two sides of the sheet, where one side has more gaps than the other), 
  • Faulty transcripts, where students need to read along and identify the deliberate mistakes you have planted into the text. The easy way is simply to identify the mistakes: more ambitious or proficient students can identify and correct them. 
  • Listen and read a text, then ask students to close their eyes and put their heads down, and ask them to listen to it again and to try and ‘see’ the text in their mind’s eye. 
  • Classic dictation in the style of the new GCSE, where a student listens to a sentence in the target language, then writes it. Note, though, for the purposes of boosting listening skills, we do not need to worry too much about accuracy of spelling or grammar (which is one element of what the GCSE tasks is testing).
My own next step is to undertake some proper research comparing and contrasting progress in listening skills between students who are actively taught to self-subtitle, and those who just continue with their usual curriculum. Do you think self-subtitling can make a difference, or is it simply an interesting phenomenon?

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