The project SubESPSKills: Subtitling tasks for students of Business English to improve written production skills

This study accounts for the results obtained from a teaching innovation project called SubESPSKills (Subtitling tasks in the English for Specific Purposes class to improve written production skills) with a control and experimental group of undergraduates taking a course on Business English. The study was conducted during the 2018-2019 academic year at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Among our main goals was the improvement of writing production skills in the English for Specific Purposes class. In order to do so, reverse subtitling was used as an audiovisual translation tool to enhance participants' written skills in a course of Business English (Degree in Commerce). With the aim of using reverse subtitling as a tool for the practice of writing in English as a foreign language, the participants were required to submit a number of activities of written production on topics related to business and commerce. Additionally, they had to subtitle two videos from Spanish/Chinese into English, related to the aforementioned area of knowledge. Subsequently, a mixed method was followed since quantitative and qualitative data were gathered and analysed. The results presented here aim to prove the potential of active reverse subtitling as a tool for foreign language learning. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.