song

This study attempts to assess the potential use of AREL in English song activities as a learning method to improve the students’ ability in argumentation and English proficiency. AREL – stands for Assertion, Reason, Evidence, Link back has long been introduced as a basic structure for argument construction. Learning AREL has been a major challenge for the beginner debaters, not to mention their constraints in English proficiency. The data received in this study were analysed by means of frequency, percentage, and standard deviation. The students highly believed that the method used in this study was interesting ( =3.79 SD=0.860) and comfortable ( =3.86 SD=0.639), in which it indicates the enjoyable learning process and the absence of the students’ anxiety. Furthermore, this method was able to give a quick comprehension ( =4.00 SD=0.654) on AREL, where applying AREL in song analysis was easier for the students, thus allow the students to gradually step up onto the real argumentation. That could be observed by the average test score where students obtained higher score for analysing song with AREL ( =80) than for making real argumentation with AREL ( =70). However, in order to make this method effective, the students’ attendance was a mandatory. Though no test on English proficiency conducted, nevertheless most of the students agreed that this method helped them improving their English proficiency, which included vocabularies ( =4.64 SD=0.610) and figurative language ( =4.50 SD=0.500) competencies.

Translation Studies (TS) moved away from the focus on literary translation and linguistic approaches to new types of translation called Audiovisual translation (AVT). Technological advancements affected the development of AVT. Technology created a situation in the world of moving pictures within which subtitling and dubbing take an important role in optimizing communication. Despite the growing interest in AVT, song subtitling and dubbing remain on the periphery of TS. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the differences that may exist between the strategies used for subtitling and dubbing the songs on some special musical animations from English into Persian based on Schioldager et al.’s (2008) twelve micro-strategies. The corpus of this study consisted of three musical animations which are Strange Magic, Moana , and Frozen 2 . This study focused on nine songs in each animation. The songs had meaningful lyrics, established the character(s), aided in the narrative, and made the audience relate to the character or the story. Hence, in the selected animations 27 songs were selected. The data were analyzed using a chi-squared test. The results indicated a statistically significant difference between six out of 12 strategies for dubbing and subtitling the animation’s songs. The differences were related to “Direct Translation”, “Oblique translation”, “Adaption”, “Addition”, “Substitution”, and “Deletion”. The results revealed the most frequent micro strategies used by Iranian translators in dubbing songs were “Oblique Translation”, “Deletion”, “Substitution”, and “Adaptation”. However, “Direct Translation” and “Addition” were the most used strategies in subtitling songs in animations. Thus, it was revealed that the translator in dubbing not only transferred the dialogue from the source text but also considered the source text idea. The findings offered a pedagogical implication for translation students, subtitlers, and dubbers to recognize better the subtitling and dubbing strategies that were being used by translators in the Iranian context.

The aim of this study was to find out whether listening to English songs can improve pre-intermediate EFL learners’ listening comprehension. To this end, a non-randomized pretest-posttest control group design as one of the quasi-experimental research designs was employed. The sample of the study consisted of 40 male and female English learners from two classes in an Institute in Marand, Iran. The two classes were randomly assigned into the experimental and control groups. Then, a PET test was used to check the homogeneity of both groups. The listening section of PET was also considered as the pretest of the study. Then, fifteen English songs were used in the experimental group during the treatment period. Each session, within 45 minutes, one song was played for and practiced with the learners. Meanwhile, the control group had their usual teacher -fronted class without listening to songs. At the end, both groups were post tested on their listening comprehension using the listening section of another version of PET. The collected data were analyzed using Independent-Samples and Paired-Samples t-tests. The results revealed a statistically significant improvement in the performance of the experimental group. It is implied that songs are not only an entertaining tool but they can also be used as a pedagogic material in improving learners’ listening comprehension.