The potential of Audiovisual Online Collaborative Platforms as a teaching/learning aid of ESP: Testing and validating a prototype

The rise of enthusiasts in Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL), benefiting from well-established benefits of consuming audiovisual content for autonomous learning, has risen during the last decade. Simultaneously, there is constant debate about how would an Online Collaborative Platform (OCP) has the potential to respond to the needs of teachers and learners, as well as change their audiovisual consumption habits when the latter is in-tended to improve their foreign language teaching and learning proficiency. Bearing this in mind, this chapter focuses on the content analysis of a Re-search-Development doctoral project, where a prototype of an OCP was developed and tested with teachers of English as Foreign Language (via a Think-a-loud Protocol) and learners of English for Specific Purposes. The oral and written feedback of the trials’ participants identified threats, and proposed improvements to the prototype’s conceptual nature and suggestions that the teachers believe will be useful for the operationalization of the platform. The feedback also shows that teachers would be interested in this platform, as they consider it fulfills a purpose for both teachers and learners, and it has value to add to the English for Specific Purposes/Business English teaching/learning community.