The Role of Subtitles in Foreign Language Teaching

Today, engaging in real language environments and exposing to the target culture often are seen as more appropriate to learn a second language. In this sense, movies in foreign language teaching are important audio-visual tools in terms of reflecting the language, culture, customs and traditions, clothes and lifestyle of a community. In language teaching, it is very important to know how words and expressions are used in different contexts and to pronounce them correctly. Many language learners benefit from these audio-visual tools because of the contributions of movies to foreign language learning. Especially in the development of listening comprehension skills, learners prefer to watch movies in foreign language. There are three options: watching the movie in its original language without subtitles, watching the movie in its original language with subtitles in source language and watching the movie in its original language through subtitle translation in target language. In this study, 68 English Language Teaching prospective teachers have been investigated for their attitudes towards developing their English language skills outside of the educational setting, whether they use English movies to improve their language skills, which genre they choose and their subtitle preferences. Therefore, the factors that should be considered in the selection of movies to be used in foreign language learning, the subtitle as a method of movie translation, the place and importance of subtitles in language learning, the positive and negative aspects of movie translation with the subtitle method have been studied and some suggestions have been made. As a research tool, appropriate sampling questionnaire has been distributed to the students and the collected data has been analyzed by SPSS program. As a result of the research, students believe that watching movies has improved their listening comprehension skills and has a positive contribution to the development of their speaking skills. Thus, they prefer English subtitles more.