Page 50 - Compétences plurilingues : perspectives et actions / Plurilingual competencies: perspectives and actions

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V. De Azevedo Camacho, M. Cervenkova, M. Seveckova: Motivation, ...
group, the task being to evaluate, with a maximum of 500 written words, the quality of
speech, originality, content, interaction between the two authors of the video, the quality of
the subtitles, and the technical processing of the video. Emphasis was placed on the fact that
making judgments and evaluations is an integral part of everyday and professional life, as
we are constantly evaluating all aspects of our life and work. The ability to give and receive
feedback is a key soft skill that is essential for advancing students’ careers. Providing feed-
back is widely acknowledged as a critical part of formative assessment affecting students’
learning outcomes (Van der Kleij, F., 2019).

Teaching assistants
In order to strengthen the authenticity of the task, the students were informed before start-
ing to create their own videos that their result would also be viewed and evaluated by Lan-
guage Teaching Assistants, who were peers as well as native speakers of the given language.
This cooperation with Language Teaching Assistants is institutionalized at the MU Language
Center, and foreign exchange students have the opportunity to receive not only credits but
also a valuable experience from this cooperation. By telling the students that the Teaching
Assistants would evaluate their work, the teachers tried to motivate the students to ap-
proach the task in such a way that it was not considered as an assignment for the teacher,
but for themselves and their classmates. The Language Teaching Assistants selected the
three most successful videos and provided detailed feedback, justifying their selection in
the form of a recorded video presented by the teacher in a seminar (in the Spanish and
French classes) or in person in class (in the Russian class). In contrast to the evaluation
of the videos by the teachers, the assistants put more emphasis on creativity, originality,
and quality of the subtitles than on students’ speech when compiling the ranking of the best
videos.

Self-evaluation and self-re lection

During the entire project, the students were required to re lect on their progress, the way
they cooperate in a team, their own results and the results of their classmates, the evalu-
ation of their language level, and their progress in the foreign language. For students of
economics, i.e. non-philology majors, this phase of self-re lection in the process of learning
a foreign language was a great challenge.

Conclusions
The aim of our research was to determine whether our students watch videos of YouTubers
(or LinguoYouTubers), and if so, how and why they watch them. LinguoYouTubers create
YouTube videos that are intended to facilitate the learning of foreign languages and the cul-
tural speci icities of the countries where the language is spoken, turning YouTube into a tool
for learning. What interested us even further in our research was the question of whether
students consciously or unconsciously perceive and use this tool plurilingually. Last but not
least, we investigated whether students perceive the active inclusion of YouTubers’ videos
in teaching as a motivational aspect and to what extent this motivation can in luence their

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