Most current university students are permanently surrounded by multimedia content, especially in their leisure time, and this is affecting their attention span and the way in which they communicate and learn. As teachers/researchers it is both challenging and rewarding for us to create activities that keep them motivated and focused, therefore we must adapt our courses in order to achieve the expected results, trying to take advantage of what interests students whilst ensuring that their skills are clearly developed. Audiovisual translation can be useful in this scenario when it is integrated in the learning process as a tool, with a pedagogical objective: that is, as a means to an end. This is the goal that a group of researchers from UCM, UNED and UAM aimed for when designing this project: to take advantage of the interest of a group of university students in multimedia content and ICT. All the activities were developed with a definite purpose –that of the improvement of writing skills in English and the use of specific vocabulary related to their degree in Tourism–. The students undertook reverse subtitling activities before handing in written compositions at several stages of the project. The researchers gathered data about the effect that these reverse subtitling activities had on the improvement experienced by the students in their writing skills and compared them to the performance of a control group

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)

The OFFTATLED Project: OFFensive and TAboo Exchanges SubtiTLED by Online University Students. Every culture has its own idiosyncrasies when it comes to what is considered to be taboo language. For this reason these terms are some of the most difficult to translate from the source language into the target language in audiovisual translation. This study aims to report on how a group of university students dealt with this issue when given the task of subtitling clips from several films, both from English into Spanish as well as from Spanish into English. The participants pertained to the Degree in English Studies at the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) and were taking a course on English-Spanish translation. The researchers later analysed whether the end results displayed a faithful rendering of the original strength of meaning or if, on the contrary, they reflected any softening of intent and effect. The research also sought confirmation as to whether the students were more daring than the source text itself when subtitling into the foreign language.