Learning with fun--dubbing

Have you ever imagined that you are one of the main characters in movies who can always experience amazing adventures? Have you imitated what they say in films? I used to memorize their lines and act out the plot when I am alone, so I have to say many people may dream to be the main character just like I do. 

Since you are full of emotion and passion, why not take it as a drive to foster speaking skills? The application that I am going to talk about is popular among these groups of learners in China, which is called 'qupeiyin'. 

This app extracts many video clips from a large number of movies, documentaries, and TV shows and provides them for English learners to do dubbing. 

How does it work?

In this app, you are able to have different lessons given by teachers from various fields from accent training and IELTS to career training. Interestingly, the learners do not simply listen to what teachers say, instead, they learn it by dubbing it. In other words, you can dub everything in this app, yeah! 😄

All you need to do is to choose a video you like and start dubbing. Since there are so many videos, all of them are labelled for users to select by filters. They are categorized by genres, level, accent, speed of utterance, number of characters and number of lines. 

When a video is chosen, you'll be at the dubbing page, where all lines are broken into sentences. You can hear the original voice as many times as you like, then dub your voice into the clip and you will hear your dubbing playing on a loop. If you satisfy with it, move on to the next line, otherwise, you can redub it. 

After finishing all the lines, your work will be shown in public for everyone to evaluate. You can also appreciate other dubbing the other way around. Some dubbings are incredible and delivered with emotions, which are well worth learning. 

I have dubbed a video for myself. 😜

How to fit this app into language learning?

I believe this would be an exciting activity in the classroom that engages students in the lesson. Teachers could use this app as an additional task to practice learners' pronunciation a few minutes before the end of the course because those videos are not long. Students are randomly chosen in each lesson to have the opportunity to experience role-play and dubbing. Maybe this action would motivate students to dub more after class since people who do not get the chance to try something in most cases desire to experience it. Hopefully, they will dub as much as they want as they go home from school.

Limitations

😥The application is only available in Chinese

Considering that dubbing is popular among learners, so it is suggested to have more language available so that learners from all over the world can enjoy such a fantastic tool.

😥 Feedback is only for premium users

I'm sorry that the feedback on dubbing is not for free. It's understandable the application needs to make profit, but learners might have limited capacity to improve their speaking skills just by imitating the original speaker time by time. The only way for free users to strengthen their pronunciation is to listen over and over again but a lack of feedback from a professional tutor, except for those who fortunately receive informative comments from listeners, which actually seldom happens though.