The pedagogy of languages for specific purposes: Developing key professional competences through a massive open online course for language teachers

Résumé En

Although MOOCs dedicated to the teaching and learning of languages - Language MOOCs known as LMOOCs in the published literature - have gained popularity since 2008, this is not the case for language teacher education courses which are still rarely delivered in the form of MOOCs. Unsurprisingly, very little is therefore known about the effectiveness of such courses for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and initial language teacher education. To fill this gap, a study was carried out based on a MOOC addressing the needs of current and prospective teachers of languages for specific purposes, which was designed by the consortium of the Erasmus+-funded CATAPULT project in 2019, and which has been run three times since its launch. The present study aims to probe the reactions of participants on the MOOC in terms of its usefulness and how it matched their reasons for joining. It is based on post-course surveys administered to course participants (n=50) as well as on feedback provided by instructors and on focus-group interviews with Teaching Assistants (n=4), whose role was to support instructors in providing feedback and comments in the third iteration of the course. Data analysis shows that if course participants' overall satisfaction has grown steadily between season 1 and season 3 of the course, it is partly because their initial objectives have been revised along the way. We also show that, from a MOOC designer's perspective, a combination of the xMOOC and cMOOC models seems to be relevant for any language teacher education MOOC and that creative solutions exist to address the issue of sufficient instructor presence in such online courses, however open and massive they may be.