Digital plurilingual pedagogies in foreign language classes: empowering language learners to speak in the target language

ABSTRACT

While studies have shown benefits of plurilingual pedagogies on students’ experiences learning languages, more research is needed to examine how these pedagogies can be enacted in foreign language programmes in digital environments. Moreover, prioritising oral engagement has been an urgent need among teachers who use synchronous platforms such as Zoom to teach languages. This article reports on a multiple case study with three teachers – English, Spanish, and French – and 17 students in Brazil. Five plurilingual strategies were implemented in their language courses: cross-linguistic comparisons, cross-cultural comparisons, translanguaging, translation for mediation, and pluriliteracies. Inductive analysis of weekly classroom observations (N = 15) and deductive analysis of individual teacher interviews were conducted to find similarities across the three language courses. Results show that digital plurilingual pedagogy mobilised students’ entire repertoire (not L1 only), encouraged them to speak in the target language, awakened nonlinguistic semiotic resources, and enhanced plurilingual and pluricultural awareness beyond geographical boundaries. Given its multimodal nature, digital plurilingual pedagogy can facilitate oral engagement differently compared to face-to-face instruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Repertoire
• semiotic resources
• plurilingualism
• foreign language teaching
• language learning
• oral practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture [grant number NP-266603].