Academic Language MOOCs: from needs analysis to implementation

This article focuses on the designing process of two LMOOCs created within the LMOOC4Slav project – Romance languages for Slavic-Speaking University Students, an Erasmus+ funded project involving five universities: University for Foreigners of Perugia, coordinator (Italy), the University of Porto (Portugal), the University of Masaryk (Czech Republic), the Jagiellonian University (Poland), the SS. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje (The Republic of North Macedonia), and the FENICE - National Federation of Teachers Centre of Initiative for Europe (Italy). Their primary target audience consists of university students, mainly with Slavic languages as their mother tongue (L1), learning Romance languages, specifically Italian and Portuguese, and who intend to do a mobility period at a university in Portugal or Italy. The main objectives of these LMOOCs are promoting students’ linguistic fluency and intercultural awareness in academic contexts, improving their strategic learning skills and digital competencies. In this environment, students must speak, listen, read, write academic tasks, and interact in different communicative situations. In this context, we intend to show to what extent an analysis of the linguistic profile and the consideration of previous pedagogical experiences and the learning styles of the target audience were at the basis of the instructional design of LMOOCs, regarding the learning contents, the proposed activities and the technological resources used. To this end, we first proceed with a description of the main difficulties of Slavic students learning Portuguese and Italian as L2, based on the literature review and the perceptions of Slavic teachers of these romance languages. Secondly, we applied a survey to students learning these languages in immersion and non-immersion contexts to assess their perceptions regarding these language difficulties and their learning experiences in academic contexts. The results of this survey, completed by more than one hundred students of Portuguese and Italian, were subject to a quantitative and descriptive analysis. The results obtained for each of the contexts (Italian and Portuguese) allowed validating the creation of a framework design common to both LMOOCs, at the organization level of the course modules, the activities proposed, and resources used. The learning contents must observe the specifications required by the differences at the linguistic level and the academic culture of the target languages.