Digital Multimodal Projects in LSP and CLIL Courses

Abstract

Digital multimodal projects are widely implemented in foreign language curricula in different educational contexts, including language for specific purposes and content and language integrated courses. The article focuses on digital multimodal projects in academic settings and explores the projects as an integral part of LSP and CLIL courses, which could provide students’ participation in real life academic events in digital learning environment.The authors describe the ongoing project on integration of international students’ distance conferences into LSP and CLIL curricula. The project started in 2021 for learners of Russian and English as a foreign language for specific purposes in four universities: Novosibirsk State Technical University, Rome University of International Studies, Novosibirsk State University of Architecture, Design, and Arts, Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conferences and classes were conducted in online and distance modes, except for some hybrid conference sessions.There were two groups of conference participants: speakers – LSP students and listeners – CLIL students. RSP students prepared presentations and slides; ESP students created videos on major courses’ projects and presentations; the CLIL students participated in conference question and answer sessions and evaluated presenters’ multimodal products and public speaking skills. Both LSP and CLIL students had different Russian and English proficiency levels, digital multimodal products creation and academic public speaking skills; evaluation of learning outcomes was focused on the following most relevant for all participants aspects: meeting the academic digital multimodal genres requirements, quality of question and answer sessions, and efficient adaptation to online and hybrid conference modes.KeywordsProject workLSPCLILDigital multimodal projectStudent online conference