Enhancing EFL University Students’ Readiness for Learning Academic Content in English: the Effectiveness of Combining MOOCs with Data-Driven Learning Activities in an English Language Classroom

The increase in English-medium instruction (EMI) courses in higher education has created many linguistic challenges for EFL students. This study was designed to test the effectiveness of using massive online open courses (MOOCs) and data-driven learning activities to prepare EFL students for learning academic content in English. The participants were 33 freshman students enrolled in an English course at a university in Taiwan. Nine English-taught MOOCs were pre-selected by the instructor, and a corpus of the transcripts of the course videos was built. The students were assigned to take one MOOC with group members over 4 weeks. Every week, before watching the video recordings of the MOOC, they explored the corpus to identify words that interested them and gathered with group members to discuss the words and predict the course content based on those words. After watching the course videos, they gathered again to discuss their learning experiences. The results of the pre-test and post-test showed that the participants made significant progress in their academic listening abilities. The results of the questionnaires suggested that integrating MOOCs, data-driven learning, and group discussion activities may also help learners acquire other abilities needed in EMI contexts.