Portuguese university students’ video practices and plurilingual competence

Abstract

In recent years, watching videos online has become more multilingual. Video-based social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram or TikTok provide spaces for consumers to watch and create videos, and to make comments in different languages or dialects of one language (Baker & Sangiamchit, 2019; Vazquez, Shafirova & Zhang, 2022). These practices around video products open opportunities for students to use their plurilingual repertoires in the digital space and to comprehend and create videos through combined modalities (written, spoken, and images). Following the perspective of Gee (2004) on informal learning, we argue that it is important to analyze these multilingual and multimodal out-of-school language practices to construct multi-situated learning. This is especially relevant when introducing a plurilingual perspective to the language classroom, as linguistic repertoires are developed during life through a variety of language contacts even if those are fragmentary (Blommaert & Backus, 2013). Our project MultiVid (Multilingual video use for plurilingual education at the university level) aims to document the out-of-school, multilingual video uses of university students. Our final goal is to include some of these out-of-school video uses in the classroom to promote building on the online plurilingual repertory (including different semiotic resources), and language awareness. Through a questionnaire (launched in February-March 2022) aimed at students (n=212) of the University of Aveiro, Portugal and ethnographic observations of students’ video productions (two weeks of online observations, 5 participants), we will shed light on the current language practices the students engage in when watching and producing videos, and commenting on them. The results showed that students have “language encounters” with various languages including English, Spanish, French and Japanese/Korean. Among these encounters English is clearly dominating even above the Portuguese language. Moreover, video consumption is not always a passive practice. Firstly, to engage in these linguistic encounters, around 50% of the students used some scaffolding tools, among them subtitles, including intralingual, interlingual and subtitles in foreign languages, and intercomprehension strategies. Secondly, during or after watching a video, half of the students engage in practices surrounding videos such as reading the comments in different languages, writing the comments or participating in online discussions. Finally, not only do students watch videos in different languages, they mostly assume that it helps them to learn these languages, especially in the case of English, Spanish, French and Italian. Interestingly, only around 20% of students make videos. In the case of video production, there is much less language variation, with Portuguese being the most-used language. In addition, students suggested that video production helps them less with language learning than video consumption. The observations of video production partly explained the results as students mostly do not speak in the videos, instead they only briefly write in foreign languages when producing videos such as reels or stories on Instagram, game-plays or video trailers on YouTube. All in all, these results show the importance of video consumption for the students’ informal plurilingual competence development indicating that this field could be further developed in the classroom.