Page 51 - Compétences plurilingues : perspectives et actions / Plurilingual competencies: perspectives and actions

Research conclusions and implications

positive participation in learning another foreign language, as well as the ef iciency of their
self-regulatory learning process.
From a didactic point of view, by introducing this project into our courses of business
French/ Spanish/ Russian, we wanted to support and develop autonomous and re lective
learning, and provide the students with a new path to foreign language acquisition. Our
goal was also to point out the importance of the ability to give and receive feedback as a key
soft skill that is essential for advancing their career. However, we also wanted to implement
a synthesis of project-based (authentic tasks) and competency-based (measuring skills and
learning rather than time spent in the classroom) learning elements in professional lan-
guage teaching.

Research conclusions and implications

We believe that the project was generally bene icial in showing students that YouTube could
be a potential tool for language learning. In the irst questionnaire, 80% of students stated
that they do not regularly watch LinguoYouTubers; while at the end of the semester 57%
of students stated that they considered watching LinguoYouTubers and videos in multiple
languages as helpful in their learning process. This positive reaction to the involvement of
multiple languages when watching selected videos was already evident after the analysis of
the irst phase of the research, after studying the students’ papers in which they compared
and commented on the three watched videos of YouTubers. Students were exposed to a va-
riety of information and creative content about the given country and language. Therefore,
based on the results of the research, it can be concluded that there is a signi icant effect of
using YouTube on students’ motivation in learning multi-language vocabulary.
As expected and hoped, the project helped many of them realize that the knowledge of one
foreign language helps in the process of learning another foreign language (through per-
ception of the differences among languages, or gaining motivation to study or improve the
other foreign language). The students got to know the concept of plurilingualism in a partic-
ipatory way. If at irst this might have been unconscious, after the inal phase of the project,
they were consciously aware of what they were able to gain by watching YouTube videos.
Another conclusion is that the students positively evaluated the experience of trying and
verifying in practice that using YouTube tools as part of their self-regulatory learning pro-
cess could be part of their continuous life-long language education.
Regarding the follow-up to the research and challenges to its improvement, we would con-
sider it bene icial to elaborate more on the inal questionnaire regarding positive partici-
pation and motivation, and to gauge the effect of long-term viewing of multilingual videos
on the development of their plurilingual competence. We would also devote more time to
the analysis and subsequent evaluation of the trilingual glossaries. From a plurilingual per-
spective, for the effective utilization of this part of the project to streamline the conscious
learning process, it will be necessary to guide students towards peer evaluation and re lec-
tion on the extent to which parallel words in the glossaries resemble or differ.

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