Start:  Jun 14,   2018 05:00 PM
End:    Jun 14,   2018 06:30 PM

Location: Room 803, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL

The session explores the concept of Language MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and presents the current challenges for research and educational practice in this field. Dr Cláudia Hilsdorf Rocha, Professor at the University of Campinas, Brazil, presents the main features of Pluralidades em Português Brasileiro, a LMOOC focused on reading and listening skills for intermediate learners of Portuguese as a foreign language. The course is guided by the notions of language as a situated and context-bound practice and of learning as a collaborative process of reshaping knowledges and meanings. The interconnected presence of a multiplicity of multimodal resources – such as  written and oral language, images and videos-  a central characteristic of the course design, represents a move towards the recognition of  modes  other than language as constitutive elements  in communication and learning in foreign language courses. As part of the presentation, the audience will be invited to analyse some course material in order to discuss the multimodal design of the MOOC in relation to the design team’s rhetoric intention as realized in the LMOOC proposal.

About the speaker

Cláudia Hilsdorf Rocha is a Professor at the Applied Linguistics Department, University of Campinas, Brazil. She holds a PhD degree in Applied Linguistics and her main field of interest includes foreign language teaching and learning, literacies and education technology. Her current research is on academic literacies and foreign language learning in digital environments.

 

Registration

The Visual and Multimodal Research Forum is a platform for academic discussion on multimodality which is free and open to all postgraduate research students and other researchers from both UCL and other universities. The Forum is one of the activities of the UCL Centre for Multimodal Research and is facilitated by Sophia Diamantopoulou. For any enquiries please contact sophia.diamantopoulou@ucl.ac.uk