New Perspectives on Audio Description: Enhancing creative accessibility for didactic purposes

Over the last few decades, the multi-faceted nature of Audio Description (AD) hastransformed this modality of Audiovisual Translation (AVT) into a versatile resource thatbenefits sighted audiences as well. This evolution has pushed scholarly attention past thetraditional boundaries of accessibility and into more experimental landscapes, giving riseto a prolific literature that investigates the creative and emotive dimensions of AD, as wellas its complex discursive layers. Most recently, there has been a surge of interest in itsdidactic value within Foreign Language Education (FLE), where AD is being used as apractical, complementary tool to foster learners’ language proficiency.Although AVT has long been a staple of FLE pedagogy, it has recently gained momentumas a supplementary pedagogical methodology following a new elevated vision of the learnersuggested by the CEFR/CV (Common European Framework Reference for Languages,2001, 2018, 2020), where the language student is presented as a “social agent” acting inreal life situations and carrying out multiple tasks. This Action-Oriented Approach (AoA)allows learners to put their skills to the test through active involvement, while also improvingtheir intercultural competence. This work explores the potential of Creative Didactic AudioDescription (CADAD) based on a practical experiment conducted at the University ofPalermo in 2024, involving two groups of Italian upper-secondary school learners of Englishwho produced AD scripts for three diverse audiovisual genres: drama (Billy Elliot), talk show(The Ellen DeGeneres Show), and observational documentary (Aagaswadi – Village in theSky). The study combines quantitative and qualitative methods. First, the scripts generatedthrough the writing tasks are analyzed using AntConc to examine lexical dispersion andidentify the most salient lexical patterns within the corpus. The analysis then adopts aqualitative perspective, interpreting the scripts along a creativity continuum to classify themaccording to Bardini's Audio Description Techniques (ADTs) and Rizzo and Spinzi’sstrategies, while also evaluating their functional adequacy. Finally, the Appraisal Theory islayered in to account for evaluative and subjective stances in the learners’ language. Todeconstruct the "architecture of subjectivity" in the scripts, the Attitude sub-system (Affect,Judgement, and Appreciation) of Appraisal is applied to evaluate the learners' creativeagency and their intersubjective relation with the AD elements.