Final Report: The benefits of translanguaging as a language learning strategy on the OU’s modern language MOOCs and the implications for the OU’s approach to distance modern language education

The aim of this scholarship project is to gain insights into the use of translanguaging as a communicative strategy within the OU’s online adult modern language learning spaces, with a view to informing approaches to enabling and supporting such practices more systematically across its suite of programmes.

Translanguaging – the capacity of individuals to combine elements of their multilingual repertoire in order to communicate meaning – has been increasingly promoted and documented as a pedagogic practice in recent years, primarily among children in face-to-face additional (second) language classroom contexts.

Pedagogic translanguaging has been demonstrated not only to enhance learning, by enabling the use of a wide range of linguistic resources in the process, but also to impact positively on children’s sense of identity, agency and belonging. Yet, to date, the promotion – indeed sanctioning – of translanguaging within modern (foreign) language learning contexts, particularly among adult learners, and online, remains relatively unexplored. Driven by our interest in the potential application of this communicative practice to the OU’s distance modern language learning environment, our project represents a new direction for research in this area.

Our earlier Language Acts and Worldmaking-funded examination of the synchronous (spoken) tutorials and asynchronous (written) forums associated with the OU’s distance modern language learning modules suggested that learner translanguaging featured very rarely within tasks of an ‘instructional’ nature but was more in evidence in informal, authentic communicative exchanges (c.f. Adinolfi and Astruc, 2017), a reflection perhaps of long-standing, if unsubstantiated, perceptions as to target language only environments contributing to better learning outcomes.

In this study we examine the ways in which adult learners engage in translanguaging within the relatively new and distinct context of the OU’s German and Italian FutureLearn MOOCs. In line with the FutureLearn template, the content of the MOOCs generally takes the form of language-focused instructional tasks, which learners undertake individually and share with the wider cohort, followed by participant-led discussions about each task, which take place in the conventionally less pedagogically-oriented Comments sections that accompany the tasks.

Our analysis of log files from these text-based virtual learning spaces reveals that, while learners routinely limit themselves to using the target language when responding to the language-focused instructional tasks, they deploy their full multilingual repertoire in the task-related discussions, embracing elements of English – as the course’s lingua franca – and other languages in such exchanges. In the latter, learners spontaneously translanguage to explore and share their evolving understanding of the target language, often with reference to elements of other known languages and through language play, while also scaffolding the learning of their peers.

Our observations suggest that the online asynchronous affordances of MOOCs offer a valuable environment for both enabling and making visible such potentially beneficial multilingual individual and group language learning practices.

We consider these findings to provide a useful basis for informing approaches to enabling and supporting translanguaging practices more systematically across the OU’s suite of modern language programmes, with a view to improving students’ learning experiences and outcomes.