Developing aural-visual comprehension in a foreign language by filmed theatre

Abstract

In the last few years, a significant amount of research in the intersection between teaching of foreign languages (FL) and theatre has been carried out. If a lot of these pieces of research are aimed at the improvement of the learners’ oral production through the use of drama, not so many, like our proposal here, look towards aural-visual comprehension from the perspective of the semiotics of theatre. This study investigates the effectiveness of using filmed theatre and guided questions to developing aural-visual comprehension in Spanish FL with university beginner students. The guided questions target the most important theatrical signs so that beginner students can fill some linguistic gaps without being overloaded by all the information received from the auditory and visual channels. The results reveal that filmed theatre has proved to be an innovative and motivating learning tool to improve comprehension in general and develop the strategy of inference in particular.