South Africa is a country characterised by aspects of multilingualism and multiculturalism. With its eleven official languages, it is a unique country in the world where problems of literacy and second language acquisition arise among its local and foreign population. It is my contention that these problems can be remedied by introducing intralingual and interlingual subtitling in the South African education system. This paper discusses the contribution to literacy and second language acquisition of subtitling from a South African perspective. For this purpose, it is divided into three main sections. The first section defines and examines the basic concepts of subtitling, literacy and second language acquisition in the South African context. The second section discusses the contribution to literacy of intralingual subtitling as a learning strategy for native speakers. The last section elaborates on the relevance to second language acquisition of interlingual subtitling as a teaching/learning strategy for both native and non-native speakers living in South Africa. The paper concludes with some recommendations and suggestions for using both types of subtitling in the language classroom in South Africa.

Kajingulu MUBENGA is a postdoctoral research fellow in audiovisual translation in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch of Stellenbosch University in Stellenbosch (Republic of South Africa). Kajingulu Mubenga has a first PhD in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) from the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK). He has a second PhD in Translation with a specialisation in subtitling from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (Republic of South Africa). He has taught a variety of courses in Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, TEFL Methodology, Discourse Analysis, Functional Grammar and Research Methods in Translation Studies in DR Congo and in South Africa. His main research interests are contrastive pragmatics, multimodal discourse analysis, listening comprehension and second language acquisition, systemic functional grammar, TEFL and translation.