Developing translingual and transcultural competence through pedagogic subtitling

This paper expounds a language pedagogy that is framed within the ecological perspective on language learning elaborated by Leo van Lier (2000, 2004) and Claire Kramsch (2009, 2010) and adopts Maria Tymoczko’s (2007) holistic approach to cultural translation. Next, I report on a case study where the proposed methodology was integrated in the syllabus design of a 3-credit module taught as part of a professional development course for secondary school EFL teachers. The course was offered at the University of Bari Aldo Moro during the 2013-2014 academic year. Working collaboratively in groups, the teacher trainees had first-hand experience of a multilingual pedagogy. They analysed and translated salient scenes of the bilingual drama La stella che non c’è/The Missing Star (directed by Gianni Amelio, 2006). In so doing, they unveiled the connectedness between language and culture and how they both are “discursively constructed” in social contexts (van Lier, The Ecology 184).