From scribe to YouTuberA proposal to teach the History of the English Language in the digital era

Resumo

The present paper deals with a proposal for enhancing students’ engagement in the course ‘History of the English Language’ of the Degree in English Studies (Universitat de València). For the purpose, the traditional lectures will be combined with a research project carried out by groups of students (research teams) in which two digital tools will be used: electronic linguistic corpora and YouTube. Electronic linguistic corpora, on the one hand, will allow students to discover the diachronic development of certain linguistic features by looking at real data and making conclusions based on frequencies by themselves. YouTube, on the other, is a most appropriate online environment where students will share a video lecture so that their classmates can benefit from the research work they did, fostering peer-to-peer learning. The expected results are to make students more autonomous in their learning process, as they will be working on their project from the very beginning of the course; and to engage them more effectively since they will be working in a format that resembles what they do at their leisure time.