Accademic Language MOOCs: From needs analysis to implementation

Abstract

This article focuses on two Language MOOCs created within the LMOOC4Slav project - Romance languages for Slavic-Speaking University Students, whose main objectives are promoting Slavic students' linguistic fluency in Italian and/or Portuguese and intercultural awareness in academic contexts, improving their strategic learning skills and digital competencies. In this context, we discuss to what extent an analysis of the linguistic profile and the consideration of previous pedagogical experiences, and the learning styles of the target audience are of utmost importance and must be the base for the instructional design of LMOOCs, regarding the learning contents, the proposed activities and the technological resources used. The needs analysis considered two sources. First, a review of literature, aiming to briefly describe the Slavic languages present in the project, namely Czech, Polish, and Macedonian, to understand better their differences from the target learning languages, Italian and Portuguese, specifically in an academic context. Secondly, we conducted two surveys for each language to understand the sociolinguistic profile of students, both in immersion and non-immersion contexts, their learning strategies, and their communication needs. This article presents some of the main results of those surveys, answered mostly by Slavic students of Italian and Portuguese as a foreign language or second language, respectively, regarding cultural experiences, linguistic issues and learning strategies.