How to improve academic oral skills in a language MOOC: from needs analysis to course design

In recent years, the number of educational resources freely available online for learning foreign languages has grown exponentially and LMOOCs are an emerging category in this field. One of the main challenges faced by LMOOCs is that learning a language is fundamentally skill-based and practicing skills requires interaction with others. There-fore, LMOOCs should provide an adequate learning environment including activities and tools which stimulate social learning (Motzo & Proudfoot, 2017). In the framework of the LMOOC4Slav project several freely available online learning tools have been created for Slavic-speaking learners who intend to undertake part of their studies in Romance-speaking countries. One of the main results is an Academic Ital-ian language MOOC. To define its goals and contents, we firstly analysed the needs of the target learners, through a questionnaire administered to a total of 209 adult L2/FL learners. Overall findings of the needs analysis revealed that most of the respondents considered particularly difficult those activities which require oral skills, such as per-forming or understanding an oral presentation, taking an oral exam or participating in a formal discussion. The aim of this study is to investigate whether language MOOCs are a viable option to elicit oral production and to improve pronunciation and perception of language learners analysing previous experiences (e.g. Rubio, 2014; Estebas-Vilaplana & Solans, 2020), to evaluate the potential or the limitations of LMOOCs and to propose examples of online content allowing to practice speaking skills with tasks that reflect everyday situations and interactive contexts in an academic setting.