Student-generated job-application videos in English for specific purposeseffects on vocational education and training students’ key competences for lifelong learning

Abstract

Equipping individuals with relevant lifelong learning competences requires methodologies that involve authentic and cross-curricular learning. We examined the effects of two teaching approaches to a career-oriented English programme on the development of students’ key lifelong learning competences, in particular the personal, social and learning to learn, the multilingual and the digital key competences. To this end, we conducted a study with 18 students from two Higher VET groups enrolled in a Professional English module for job search. The experimental group completed a project involving the creation of a job-application video, while the control group continued with regular lessons and a coursebook-based curriculum. This study used a mixed-method quasi-experimental pre-post-test design with nonequivalent groups. Therefore, before and after the intervention, all participants produced a written and read-aloud self-presentation, sat two tests on language and career management skills and completed a questionnaire on digital skills. The language-specific test assessed students’ knowledge of collocations and professional terminology for job search, while the career-related test assessed students’ self-awareness, opportunity awareness and job-search skills. The resulting corpus of self-presentations, including 36 texts and 36 voice tracks, was analysed for complexity, accuracy and fluency to assess linguistic competence development, while genre analysis allowed for the assessment of pragmatic competence development. The job-application video led to improved career management skills, in particular to statistically significant improvements in self-awareness and job-search skills as well as improved opportunity awareness, while the traditional approach failed to develop career management skills, resulting in lower self-awareness, opportunity awareness and jobsearch skills. In the experimental group, participants’ self-presentations successfully combined objective data on qualifications and work experience with subjective but relevant content on transferable skills, goals and interests, which were justified appropriately. Instead, in the control group, participants’ self-presentations lacked adequacy and persuasiveness due to their reliance on objective statements about previous jobs and qualifications without mentioning what they had learnt to do or how this would benefit the employer, thus failing to provide a rounded picture of the candidate and describe a relevant self. Additionally, in the experimental group, students produced more accurate and fluent written texts and more accurate spoken output. The productions became lexically more complex, sophisticated and varied but syntactically less complex, all values reaching statistical significance, whereas in the control group, students’ productions decreased in syntactic complexity and lexical sophistication as well as in written and spoken accuracy, and increased significantly in lexical variation and slightly in fluency. Similarly, the video project led to improved knowledge of collocations and a statistically significant improvement in professional vocabulary, while those aspects remained the same in the traditional approach. Finally, the experimental group achieved a statistically significant improvement in digital skills, and the students’ perceptions regarding the course’s effectiveness for digital development were statistically significantly better than the control group’s, which revealed slight and statistically non-significant improvements in digital skills.