“Los Protagonistas De La Conversación”: The Development of a Digital Plurilingual Pedagogy for Sustainable and Agentive Oral Development

Conference: The European Conference on Language Learning (ECLL2022)
Title: “Los Protagonistas De La Conversación”: The Development of a Digital Plurilingual Pedagogy for Sustainable and Agentive Oral Development
Stream: Plurilingualism - Bilingualism
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Angelica Galante, McGill University, Canada
Faith Marcel, Niagara College, Canada
Enrica Piccardo, University of Toronto, Canada
Lana F. Zeaiter, McGill University, Canada
John Wayne N. dela Cruz, McGill University, Canada
Aisha Barise, McGill University, Canada

Abstract:

While studies suggest that plurilingual pedagogy can relieve learners’ linguistic insecurity, teachers often lack a clear set of strategies to implement and measure its effectiveness (Galante, 2019; Piccardo et al., 2021). We developed the PluriDigit project to address these challenges and asked 1) To what extent does the PluriDigit project assist in learners’ development of oral and plurilingual competence?, and 2) What are the main affordances and challenges of the unique pedagogy developed during the PluriDigit project? First, we collaborated with English, French, and Spanish teachers from an NGO to develop digital language tasks for their courses. Then, we hosted these tasks on the asynchronous VoiceThread platform, and collected data through bi-weekly audio and video posts by language learners (n=103) and teachers (n=12) for 4 months. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with the teachers 4 months later. We used NVivo for a content analysis (Patton, 2015) with interview data and Video Data Analysis (VDA) (Nassauer et al., 2019) with a representative sample of 67 VoiceThread posts. Results show that the main benefits of the pedagogy lied in the non-hierarchical contribution to oral tasks by both learners and teachers. Teachers reported that the pedagogy was agentive, emancipatory, and empowering to learners. We argue that the use of a digital platform which facilitates bottom-up approaches to language learning, coupled with well-designed plurilingual tasks were fundamental for the sustainability of the language courses during a pandemic. We discuss how the PluriDigit pedagogical approach can be used in face-to-face and blended instruction post-pandemic.

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