Abstract:

Each year, thanks to the Erasmus programme, thousands of students in Europe make part of their studies in another country using a second language they know with a proficiency level B1/B2. A path to facilitate a successful mobility exchange, as well as students inclusion in a multicultural and multilingual environment, is: stimulating innovative learning and teaching practices using digital devices and content, offering educational models to modernize and internationalize the higher education system as well as to place European training experiences on the global training scene through MOOCs; addressing digital transformation through the development of digital readiness, resilience, and capacity, through the achievement of higher mastery levels in specific domains of use.

These are the main priorities of the LMOOC4Slav - Romance Languages for Slavic-Speaking University Students, an Erasmus+ funded project (2021-1-IT02-KA220-HED-000027501) coordinated by the University for Foreigners of Perugia (Italy), in partnership with the University of Porto (Portugal), the University of Masaryk (Czech Republic) the Jagiellonian University (Poland), the SS. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje (The Republic of North Macedonia), and the FENICE - National Federation of Teachers Centre of Initiative for Europe (Italy).

Its primary target audience, although not exclusively, consists of university students, mainly with Slavic languages as L1, learning Romance languages, specifically Italian and Portuguese, who intend to do a mobility period at a university in Portugal or Italy. Learning a Romance language presents several difficulties for Slavic native speakers, including, for some Slavic languages, the need to acquire a different writing system. Furthermore, and contrary to other languages, little work has been done to produce innovative and open access quality pedagogical resources and materials for teaching Italian and Portuguese for academic purposes. The project proposes solutions regarding those difficulties while facilitating the development of linguistic and intercultural skills in the target academic contexts.

The project centres around the production of two MOOCs, one for Italian, and the other for Portuguese, organised into six modules that promote students’ development of linguistic fluency in academic contexts, their access to authentic academic situations as well as learning tools to enhance their ability to learn how to learn. Besides supporting the creation of a learning path, the project also focuses on developing a repertoire of Open Educational Resources (OERs) intended for Slavic language teachers of Portuguese and Italian and students. These resources will allow their reuse in different learning environments, which will be guided by the publication online of a pedagogical guide for integrating MOOCs and OERs will be published online and aimed at Slavic teachers and students.

The project outputs will remain available in an open-source repository after its end ensuring its sustainability.

Keywords:

LMOOC, OER, Italian, Portuguese, Slavic Languages, Mobility, Academic discourse.