Dialects in the L2 classroom: teaching regional and social varieties of English through screen adaptations

This article focuses on the benefits and possible difficulties of using audiovisual texts in BA and MA courses of English language, in which students familiarise themselves with nonstandard varieties of English also by means of intralingual subtitling. The study of dialectology is usually not part of the syllabi of L2 students of English at MA and, especially, BA level, but the possibilities opened up by an introduction to the most widely spread and recognisable features of regional and social varieties of English through the use of film excerpts is, as this article hopes to demonstrate, worth the effort of overcoming the first objective difficulties due to a still imperfect mastering of the English language.