This paper examines the plurilingual practices of adult learners in the context of online modern language instruction. Our analysis of four FutureLearn MOOCs shows how learners draw on their full plurilingual repertoires to scaffold their own learning and that of their peers, often with reference to other known languages and through language play.
Recent years have seen heightened recognition of the capacity of individuals to combine elements from across their plurilingual repertoires to make and communicate meaning - a fluid multimodal practice often termed translanguaging. At the same time, the value of harnessing learners' plurilingual resources in hitherto largely target-language-only pedagogic environments is being increasingly recognised and promoted (e.g. Creese and Blackledge, 2010; Cenoz and Gorter, 2011; García and Kleifgen, 2018).
Such research has tended to focus on interventions in face-to-face classroom contexts. Our talk examines the plurilingual practices of modern language learners in the relatively undocumented, yet increasingly commonplace, context of online modern language instruction. To this end, we explore the ways in which cohorts of distributed adult learners deploy their plurilinguistic resources within four UK-university-designed FutureLearn MOOCs – Post-Beginners' and Intermediate German, Beginners' Italian and Beginners' Spanish. In line with the FutureLearn template, the content of the MOOCs generally takes the form of language-focused 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 tasks, they deploy their full plurilinguistic repertoire, embracing elements of both English - as the course's lingua franca - and other languages, in the task-related discussions. In this way, they explore and share their evolving understanding of the target language, often with reference to 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 an authentic environment for both enabling and making visible such potentially beneficial plurilingual individual and group language learning practices.
