Portuguese university students’ video practices and plurilingual competence

In recent years, watching videos online has become more multilingual. Video-based social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram or TikTok provide spaces for consumers to watch and create videos, and to make comments in different languages or dialects of one language (Baker & Sangiamchit, 2019; Vazquez, Shafirova & Zhang, 2022). These practices around video products open opportunities for students to use their plurilingual repertoires in the digital space and to comprehend and create videos through combined modalities (written, spoken, and images). Following the perspective of Gee (2004) on informal learning, we argue that it is important to analyze these multilingual and multimodal out-of-school language practices to construct multi-situated learning. This is especially relevant when introducing a plurilingual perspective to the language classroom, as linguistic repertoires are developed during life through a variety of language contacts even if those are fragmentary (Blommaert & Backus, 2013). Our project MultiVid (Multilingual video use for plurilingual education at the university level) aims to document the out-of-school, multilingual video uses of university students. Our final goal is to include some of these out-of-school video uses in the classroom to promote building on the online plurilingual repertory (including different semiotic resources), and language awareness. Through a questionnaire (launched in February-March 2022) aimed at students (n=212) of the University of Aveiro, Portugal and ethnographic observations of students’ video productions (two weeks of online observations, 5 participants), we will shed light on the current language practices the students engage in when watching and producing videos, and commenting on them. The results showed that students have “language encounters” with various languages including English, Spanish, French and Japanese/Korean. Among these encounters English is clearly dominating even above the Portuguese language. Moreover, video consumption is ...