The Practices of OILE

Abstract

Having reviewed the relationship between OILE and a range of existing paradigms in applied linguistics, and having suggested that it may best be understood in the context of DST, the third chapter of this book seeks to flesh out the day-to-day realities of OILE for millions of language users by taking as an example the practices of students in a French university. This process begins with a longitudinal review of quantitative data on the five skills, demonstrating OILE practices over a four-year period. Secondly, a study is presented with a particular focus on the area of listening to music-on-demand (MOD), the activity which statistically occupies the greatest amount of time for most online informal learners. A third key area of interest, which merits a specific focus, is the role of subtitling. Indeed, the film and television series-viewing activities of non-native speakers frequently involve subtitled material and the impact of this on attention and learning has been studied by a number of researchers.