Teaching Active Listening and Viewing in the Language Classroom: Subtitling through VisualSubSync

The rapid advancement in video technologies in recent years has made the creating and editing of subtitles for a video increasingly feasible. For a long time, however, the pedagogical potentials of subtitling in language teaching and learning have been neglected. To fill this gap, this technology review introduces VisualSubSync, a free and flexible tool for subtitle editing, as a practical instrument to facilitate the teaching of listening and viewing skills. This review first provides an overview of the main features of the software and then discusses the possible benefits it offers to listening and viewing pedagogies in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. Finally, the challenges that teachers and learners may face with subtitling are considered.