Exploiting Films and Multiple Subtitles Interaction for Casual Foreign Language Learning in the Living Room

Films at the cinema, at home or on the computer screen are a fundamental part of today’s entertainment culture. The careful listening and watching of foreign films with or without subtitles is often used as an aid for the learning of foreign languages. This paper presents the ongoing development of an entertainment/learning computer based DVD subsystem for the home environment that has been extended with the aim of further enabling the learning of foreign languages while watching films. By providing a “DualSubsView” of subtitles of 2 languages (native and foreign) as the film plays, users can become more familiar with the vocabulary of the foreign language that they want to learn. With this approach, vocabulary in a foreign language is presented as extra information embedded into the film and learners can exploit the information directly or indirectly for entertainment and for learning. Potential users of the system were involved in the initial design stages and in the informal evaluation process of the initial prototypes.