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This paper presents an experiment on the potential pedagogical benefits of collaborative reverse subtitling in foreign language education. The principal objective was to discover whether reverse subtitling used as a collaborative language learning tool could enhance general translation and writing skills. The participants involved in the study had two and a half months to subtitle two short clips and were monitored as they followed a series of steps guiding their work week by week. The findings obtained from the analysis of the language tests results, the answers given to questionnaires and the teachers’ observations are promising. Given the small size of the sample (20 students), it is difficult to make generalisations. However, the main conclusion is that writing and general translation skills can be fostered by the use of reverse subtitling within an online, collaborative learning framework. This is a very encouraging result that we believe will lead the way to further research in the field.

Business English teachers nowadays have a wide range of resources available to them in their classes such as DVDs, videos, blogs, virtual platforms, applets, multimedia or wikis. This study presents a proposal for innovation, attending to the needs of students, aiming to improve the processes for mastering their English in the business sphere. One hundred first year Economics students took part in two information collection methods: a test with specific Business English questions and a personal interview. Both had the aim of obtaining data from the students in relation to their level of English. The priority of the research was to minimise the disconcerting results of the low levels of second language that the students showed. ICTs in the form of the Moodle platform and the use of wikis where students can work together with their classmates whilst being monitored by their teacher, were used.

This paper presents the ongoing work carried out by the research group ATLAS from the UNED in its most recent project I-AGENT (Intelligent Adaptive Generic English Tutor). The aim is to combine face-to-face classes with individual and collaborative work carried out using innovative ICALL (Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning) software. The limitations in the type of learning which can be achieved using a computer can be directly addressed with the presence of personal interaction in the classroom. Thus, activities do not have to follow a set structure of selecting just one answer, but can offer a limitless array of openness, given that there is a human tutor who can revise them. Peer feedback and collaborative activities are also a fundamental part of the learning process and all of these different methodologies are integrated in order to guide the student through the scaffolding structure of the course. The units follow the story of a person through different situations to which the student can easily relate, and the intercultural aspects of learning a second language are highlighted with each scenario. Each part of the computer-based work is consolidated in face-to-face sessions, and these deal directly with the communicative aspects which would be difficult to test purely electronically, such as free speaking and writing. The student is informed of the learning which will take place in each unit in the form of can-do statements taken from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (Council of Europe, 2001).