Línguas, Literaturas e Culturas Estrangeiras | Capítulos/artigos em livros nacionais / Book chapters/papers in national books
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- Português de Viva Voz / Portuguese Live: strengths and challenges of teaching a non-native language onlinePublication . Castelo, Adelina; Braz, AnaThe open and distance education is crucial to offer many people the possibility of continuing their education and lifelong learning. Nowadays, many open educational resources including MOOCs are available, but these do not offer mentoring. Consequently, there is a need for online courses with the support of a teacher. In the field of non-native languages, these courses face essentially two main challenges: to help the learners maintain their motivation and develop all the communication skills needed in a nonnative language. These challenges were considered when the course “Português de Viva Voz / Portuguese Live” was designed at Universidade Aberta. This is a general language course, and its target public is composed of any adolescent or adult who does not speak Portuguese as their mother tongue (no matter where s/he is living or what her/his education is, as long as s/he has some digital skills and knowledge of the English language). The goal of this work is to discuss the strengths and challenges of the before-mentioned course based on some proposals on second language instruction (e.g., Ellis, 2005; Kumaravadivelu, 2006) and online teaching (e.g., Guitert and Romeu, 2019), as well as on its piloting with some learners during the second semester of 2020-2021. First, we point out the main ideas drawn from the research literature that support the analysis. Second, we present the macrostructure of the course and the (micro)structure of a unit while simultaneously showing how the course contributes to developing communicative skills online and which challenges still need to be overcome. Then, the course functioning is illustrated with a specific unit. Finally, a synthesis of the course’s strengths and challenges is presented.