Integrating students’ informal practices into the formal context of an online course, specifically watching films from their professional field and finding information online, allows learners to be the experts and take part in various forms of mediation and meaningful online interaction, as encouraged by the CEFR’s Companion Volume since 2018.
The hegemony of English online and in the media, along with the expansion of new technologies, give French learners access to a wide selection of contents and an informal contact with the English language, leading to the incidental acquisition of vocabulary (Sockett, 2014). As watching films and television shows in English is a popular practice amongst French students (Toffoli and Sockett, 2010), it seems relevant to rely on this to and use fiction illustrating professional fields, or FASP (Chapon, 2015) as a learning material, particularly in English for Specific Purposes. Our study presents two version of the same online English courses followed by first year Economics and Management students at the University of Paris: one version which explicitly encourages mediation according to the CEFR's Companion Volume descriptors (Council of Europe, 2018) and one which does not. This difference is used to illustrate how integrating learners' informal practices, personal knowledge and experiences into a formal context allows for different forms of mediation and online interaction, as is encouraged by the Council of Europe. More specifically, combining these tasks with students' usual online practices and with the use of film extracts relevant to their study field - thus making their knowledge of English from outside the classroom central to the course - creates opportunities for student mediation (Chaplier, 2011), as they become the experts and knowledge holders. Examples of this mediation include students "expressing a personal response" (Council of Europe, 2018: 116) to the films' scenes based on ethical issues in the banking field or "relaying specific information" to their peers (op. cit. : 107-8), thus developing their digital literacy through online research and interaction. We will present the courses' contents, functioning, and mediation opportunities, so as to demonstrate the relevance of valuing students' own informal online practices in formal contexts in order to make students feel more able and competent to take on the role of the knowledge holder.
