Examining the Potential of Fansubbing as a Language Learning Activity

The learning of English can help learners to not only understand and enjoy cultural products of the target language community, but also allows them to share what they enjoy in their own language community, or other communities to which English grants them access, with the world. Fansubbing, or the amateur production of multilingual subtitles for media such as movies and songs, is one way by which they may accomplish this. Whether fansubbing can be used by teachers as a means by which learners can use English to make worthwhile contributions to the worldwide conversation on topics they have a personal interest in, however, cannot yet be definitively concluded. The goal of this exploratory questionnaire study was to gather data regarding fansubbers' engagement in fansubbing, their opinions on this activity in general, and their view of it being adopted for language learning, in order to determine its potential for implementation as a language learning activity. It was found that the majority of the questionnaire respondents agreed with the use of fansubbing as a language learning activity, and that they themselves felt engaging in fansubbing benefited them both linguistically and socially