Aurélien Faravelon

Stéphane Frénot

Stéphane Grumbach

Chasing data in the Intermediation Era Economy and Security at stakes

Keywords: Big data, economics, intermediation

Intermediation is the action to match two types of actors (users, clients, services, etc.) in a world with incomplete information, where the matching would have been difficult without intermediaries. We show the increasing role of on-line intermediation platforms in the economy, and their growing responsibility for ensuring global security of people and society. Our contribution is twofold. At a theoretical level, we better define algorithmic intermediation by establishing a hierarchy of intermediation actors, based on their degree of abstraction from specific services. Then, surveying data from web analytics tools such as Alexa.com, we show that there are only few important intermediation platforms, headquartered in few countries. These results underline the strategic importance of intermediation actors in terms of security and that the more abstract they are, the more influence they reach.

Introduction

The growth at an unprecedented pace of the production and exchange of data in digital form has lead to the rapid development of new industries. Their services disrupt the old economic models and raise complex social issues, ranging from the protection of individuals and their privacy, to threats to the society * Electronic addresses: firstname.lastname@inria.fr as a whole and its security. New equilibria are taking shape between corporations of the digital age that spread their activities worldwide across borders on the one hand, and states that have legal responsibilities and legitimacy over restricted and well-defined territories on the other hand.

In this paper, we show the dominant role of online intermediation platforms, and their increasing responsibility for ensuring global security of people and society. Intermediation players are of great importance for their growing impact on the world economy, their fantastic promises changing our lives and our organisations, as well as for the profound disruption they impose on traditional actors in both the private and the public sectors.

Intermediation dates from the pre-digital era. The term comes from the financial sector, and designates the capacity of an institution -such as a bank -to match the funds of depositors with the needs of potential borrowers. The absence of complete information leads to the existence of intermediaries, able to make the match, that single actors would not achieve, while making profit out of successful matches.

Intermediaries connect distinct groups of users, such as borrowers and lenders, following multi-sided economic models, with different pricing techniques. Intermediaries are moreover in a position to create new services such as, very importantly in the banking sector, the mutualisation of risks.

The advent of new technologies for data processing has completely changed the intermediation business. The complexity of financial intermediation, for in-stance, has grown since the 1980s, and has lead to the handling of high frequency data flows, and very abstract financial products. The growth of data in the last decade has created avenues for intermediation in an unbounded number of sectors. The first online intermediation service of importance has been developed in the late 1990s. It is the search engine, which intermediates between users and the knowledge they seek, and has revolutionised our access to knowledge. Since then, a powerful industry has emerged with brand new services, such as social networks, which enjoy a remarkable growth, and reaches also sectors historically dominated by local actors.

Data fuels intermediation corporations the way crude oil fuels the traditional industry. Leaders in these sectors are now rivalling with the oil industry as the top capitalisations. On the web, the leading corporations are all in the intermediation business.

Intermediation corporations are not all alike though. Our first contribution is to establish a hierarchy of intermediation actors, divided into four levels, based on their degree of abstraction. Production actors are involved in the making of the goods or services they offer, such as media corporations. Then, distribution actors, as Amazon or Netflix, essentially provide products produced by others. Sectorial intermediation actors, such as LinkedIn or eBay, target specific economic sectors. Finally, intermediation platforms offer essential services to support intermediation as well as other services provided by third players. These categories are not exclusive and most corporations have their activities at one or two levels.

We then show that intermediation corporations are ineludible, thanks to their central position in the web. Usually, research focuses on the structure of hypertext links [START_REF] Lehmberg | Graph structure in the web: Aggregated by pay-level domain[END_REF][START_REF] Ihm | Towards understanding modern web traffic[END_REF] to show that some pages are central. Being so is crucial for business as well as influence. Various types of analysis of the centrality of positions have been made, such as for specific top-level domains for instance [START_REF] Hale | Mapping the UK webspace: Fifteen years of british universities on the web[END_REF]. It has also been applied to the study of specific sectors such as hotel sites [START_REF] Scharlr | An integrated approach to measure web site effectiveness in the european hotel industry[END_REF] and the analysis of trackers -i.e., sites which track users on other sites -in order to assess their income [START_REF] Gill | Follow the money: understanding economics of online aggregation and advertising[END_REF]. In contrast, we analyse the web from the perspective of visits and show that intermediation actors are central.

Intermediation platforms are revolutionising many economic sectors such as transportation or the hotel business [START_REF] Zervas | The rise of the sharing economy: Estimating the impact of airbnb on the hotel industry[END_REF]. As they build new services and gather large number of users, they disrupt legacy economic models.

Moreover, as platforms acquire more power, they might acquire dominant positions and weigh on local policies for instance [START_REF] Themelis | Information and intermediation, abuse of dominance and internet 'neutrality': 'updating' competition policy under the digital single market and the google investigations(?)[END_REF]. Sometimes, they conflict with local legislations. The relationship between corporations controlling the new services and states is of increasing importance. Geographical territories, where laws apply in areas limited by boundaries, conflict with "digital territories" which ignore most of these frontiers. Such conflict strongly imparts data security.

The dependency of most countries on foreign platforms raises many issues related to trade, sovereignty, security, or even values. Global issues of data flows and data storage are at the heart of today economic, political and business agendas. Edward Snowden's revelations starting in june 2013 have made the debate on these technical issues accessible to a large audience. Consumers regularly protest against the lack of privacy protection when states pass new laws and corporations adjust their storage strategy according to data policies, left aside financial or fiscal arguments which are beyond the scope of this paper, to install their data centres.

We consider the domains on which platforms and states are either cooperating or conflicting. Conflicts concern in particular labor laws, taxation, money, privacy rules as well as security. Conflicts have led to trials, new laws, as well as interruption of service of platforms over a territory, as was recently the case for Google News in Spain. We then consider the common grounds on which platforms and states are collaborating, which include economic as well as security issues.

The paper is organised as follows. In the next section, we present the methodology of our approach. In Section 3, we define more precisely the concept of intermediation and present a hierarchy of actors based on their abstraction level from specific services. In Section 4, we analyse the relationship between intermediation platforms and countries. Sections 5 and 6 are devoted to respectively the most powerful plat-forms and countries, demonstrating the extreme concentration of the intermediation power both in the industry and over the geography. Finally, in Section 7, we consider the role of platforms as disruptive operators -especially in the field of security and then we study their relations with states.

Methodology

We use data extracted from Alexa.com and Trafficestimate.com1 .

Our sample contains 30 countries, which include the Top 25 countries of the world based on their 2013 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 2 . Additionally, we have included countries, which figure in the Top 5 GDP in their respective continents, but did not make it to the Top 25 global GDP list, to ensure a sufficient representation of each region of the world. The final list of countries we study contains China (CN), India (IN), Japan (JP), South Korea (KR), Taiwan (TW), Thailand (TH), Indonesia (ID), Australia (AU), United States (US), Brazil (BR), Mexico (MX), Argentina (AR), Colombia (CO), Venezuela (VE), Canada (CA), United Kingdom (GB), Germany (DE), Italy (IT), France (FR), Poland (PL) Spain (ES), Netherlands (NL), Russia (RU), South Africa (ZA), Egypt (EG), Algeria (DZ), Nigeria (NG), Turkey (TR), Iran (IR), Saudi Arabia (SA).

For each country, we consider its Top 25 sites, according to their Alexa rank. Ranks are based on the traffic data provided by users in Alexa's global toolbar panel over a rolling three months period. A site's rank is based on a combined measure of Unique Visitors (the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day) and Pageviews (the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site).

The restriction to the Top 25 sites is rather meaningful. Indeed, according to our computations from Alexa's data, the Top 25 sites represent about half of the traffic of the Top 500 sites in average in most countries we study. The Top 25 sites of each country therefore amounts to a significant part of the data flows and give a good estimate of the global picture. The overall number of sites in the Top 25 in the 30 countries we study, amount to 419 sites. They can be seen as the most influential worldwide.

Throughout our study, we define a platform as a set of services -such as mail or social networks. A platform belongs to a corporation -such as Google and Facebook -which can possess several platforms. A platform may be distributed over several sites -such as google.com, google.fr, etc. Throughout our study, we group the metrics of the different sites belonging to the same platform.

We use the number of visits as an indication of a platform's importance. Indeed, visits testify for users and the possibility for a platform to retrieve data from its users and, in return, develop new services or enhance existing ones or benefits from phenomena such as the network effects to grow bigger. Google Translate, social networks and services such as carpooling websites, for instance, all owe their rise to the data they collect. As they grow bigger, platforms acquire more and more disruption power.

To capture the features of the economics of intermediation, we design metrics, based on the flow of visits to the top actors of the Web. Our goal is to reveal that the higher the abstraction of intermediation activities, the larger the traffic a platform attracts is. These metrics allow to experimentally establish that the importance of intermediation systems follows a power law, with a very rapid decrease of their influence.

Firstly, we investigate the importance of platforms. To do so, we analyse the number of visits to our sample of websites in order to determine the most visited platforms. We also study the relations between platforms by analyzing the upstream to a site -i.e. the visits to a site X from another site Y -and the downstream from a site -i.e. the visits from a site X to another site Y . Eventually, we define the international influence of a platform as the number of countries for which it belongs to the Top 25.

Then, we measure the influence of a country over another. We consider that a country X influences another country Y , if a corporation, headquartered in X, has platforms in the Top 25 of Y . For each country of our sample, we compute the size of its"influence zone", i.e. the number of countries influenced by a country.

The rise of intermediation

Intermediation allows new services that only intermediaries can deploy. Banking, is an example of such services. The use of algorithms to carry intermediation in potentially all economic sectors is new. Algorithmic intermediation is being generalised with the explosion of data and the advent of complex data analytics. Its role in the digital economy is already remarkable. It applies to a large spectrum of sectors of activity, with distinct economic models.

Our aim is to understand why intermediaries are so important today. To do so, we build a model of intermediation activities. We propose to distinguish between different types of intermediation according to their relations to the products or services they deal with. These relations strongly influence a platforms's relations with its users.

An "abstract" service does not focus on a specific usage. For instance, a social network is an abstract service as it offers a wide set of functionalities not restricted to an economic sector, and it allows to built other functionalities on top of it using its API. In contrast, an online shop provides a limited amount of functionalities.

We distinguish four levels of intermediation activities, ranked according to their degree of abstraction in ascending order (Figure 1). Levels may overlap: a company may develop services in several categories of activities.

At the bottom of the hierarchy, the production level encompasses industries that produce goods or services and sell them online to their customers, essentially with a very restricted form of intermediation between their services and their customers. The press constitutes a good example of such industries, with a direct relationship to their readers.

One level above, distribution corporations commercialise goods produced by others. Netflix is a good example of that level, giving mostly access to cultural products they do not produce but distribute to their customers. Eventually, the highest level, intermediation platform, is constituted by corporations that offer an ecosystem on top of which others can build and distribute their services. Facebook and Google, for instance, are the most prominent platforms. At this level, corporations offer a sort of global operating system disconnected from physical supports, that allows the development of unbounded types of activities.

Categories may overlap. Amazon, for instance is mostly in the distribution category but operates as well as sectorial intermediation, while Netflix mostly distributes digital contents but also produces some. For production systems, the intermediation activity might be shallow. Transport operators can be seen as intermediating between drivers and clients for instance. But what is of interest, is that although the intermediation might be shallow, there is a possibility of desintermediation of the activity, which is what is going on in the transport sector in particular. Companies may challenge traditional transport business models -which focus on production and distribution activities -by performing intermediation. Carpooling platforms are examples of such challengers.

Corporations at all levels harvest data, which is of strategic importance for their activity. Production systems might get a good knowledge of their users -such as their purchase history or specific tastes. Yet, very sophisticated recommendation algorithms, as those successfully deployed by Netflix or Amazon, only appear at the distribution level. For Sectorial intermediation systems, the main challenge is to maintain direct connection with their users, while ensuring the gatekeeping to the services they propose with no middleman. As they do so, they collect a large amount of information from their users. Eventually, intermediation platforms also ensure a direct link to their users, and try to become a universal gate to all services. For that purpose, they facilitate the development of services developed by others, by offering APIs. They thus collect data about their users and about the traffic generated by applications built on top of their services.

Intermediation platforms are the main players on the web as they attract hundreds of millions of users and thus collect the largest amounts of data and meta-data. The Top 25 global sites according to Alexa correspond to 22 distinct platforms. 7 platforms mainly have activities of the intermediation platform level, and 14 whose activities mainly belong to the sectorial intermediation level. Only one has activities which mainly belong to the distribution category, Amazon.

The absence of corporations mostly dedicated to production activities from the Top 25 may be explained by the dependency of their activities on a specific geographic territory. Intermediation corporations are over-represented because they offer so many functionalities that users are likely to need them. Indeed, orders of magnitude separate each level of abstraction of the intermediation in terms of visits. Corporations mainly involved in Distribution only attract 1,1 billion montly visits month when sectorial intermediation corporations attract 9,4 billions visits and intermediation platforms 15,1 billions of visits. Once more, as intermediation platforms offer a large range of services which can be used for pretty much anything, they are able to attract most visits. Thus, tey also capture most data on the web.

Platforms and Countries

Large intermediation systems play a fundamental role in the economy. They offer essential services, much like electricity or water supply, which are used by people as well as corporations to support their own services. Unlike essential utilities, such as energy, telecom, or transportation, which are strongly regulated in all countries by local authorities to ensure their fair distribution over the territory and in the whole population, the new services are provided by multinational corporations and are only starting to get the attention of the legislators.

In the words of Joe Nye, cyber-power is "a set of resources, that relate to the creation, control and communication of electronic and computer-based information -infrastructures, network, software and human skills" [START_REF] Nye | The Regime Complex for Managing Global Cyber Activities[END_REF]. No doubt that platforms which manipulate data and meta-data and possess infrastructures hold cyber-power. As such, they play a central role in cyber-security. We understand cybers-ecurity both as security at a national and international level and security from the viewpoint of individual which may try to protect their data for privacy reasons for instance. The relationship between countries and platforms is of outermost importance when considering issues such as privacy and security. Indeed, both issues are related to the legal framework implemented in each country, while platforms operate on a global basis. Hosting major digital corporations is thus a key factor in the power of a country. The American Patriot Act, for instance, demands that American platforms provide the US government with data no matter where platforms store data.

The rather uneven distribution of platforms in the world leads to an unbalanced geopolitical situation. Figure 2 shows the difference of context in the US, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom (UK). For each country, the proportion of national actors from the country's Top 25 sites mostly belonging to a specific category (such as Intermediation platform, distribution, etc.) operating on its territory is shown. The Production category appears in all national Top 25 list when it was missing from the global Top 25 list. Users, indeed, access online newspapers and buy goods from national retails operators. However, only three countries possess intermediation platforms and, in the UK and France the sectorial intermediation corporations are mostly dedicated to goods selling. The US host most of the sites which their citizens visit, the same stands for China. Russia still hosts most of the corporations which attract its citizens but in a smaller proportion. In contrast, most sites which operate in France and the UK depend on by foreign countries.

This unbalanced distribution of platforms creates new opportunities for surveillance and security enforcement that we investigate in Section 7.

Platforms of influence

We now focus on the relations between platforms and countries. We hypothesize that only a few platforms strongly influence the web and that a small set of platforms reach most countries.

Indeed, when we order the web traffic to the platforms in descending order according to their global Yet, there is a strong imbalance between the platforms. Google receives twice as much traffic as any other platform. This observation echoes the domination of Google over the global Top 25 sites.

The international influence also follows a power law. Only 9 platforms belong to 50%, or more, of the top 25 lists we study. From the 10th to the 50th sites, there are only "local" platforms which only influence a small set of countries [START_REF] Falahrastegar | Anatomy of the third-party web tracking ecosystem[END_REF].

Interestingly, the international influence of platforms does not exactly mimic their rank. For instance, Baidu is ranked 5 worldwide on Alexa. However, it only belongs to 4 Top 25 national lists. This situation may be explained by the rank's mode of computation (on Alexa.com, a rank is a combination of average daily visitors and page views over the past three months) and the corporation's international development strategy. At any rate, Figure 4 highlights Google's dominant position. This place partly comes from the global use of Google services. However, not only does Google influence all the countries we study, it also attracts a large part of the traffic to the Top 25 sites of each country (Figure 5). Eventually, local policies may not hinder the development of platforms. Google is officially absent from China but Google.co.hk appears in the Chinese Top 25 sites.

It is customary in Europe to discuss the Influence of the "GAFA", namely Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple on the digital economy. Our study casts another light on their power. Apple is no major web actor. Yet, Google oversteps the influence of other platforms with a comparable rank. Indeed, Facebook only has half of Google's influence. Amazon does not belong to all the Top 25 lists we study and Wikipedia only has less than 20 percents of Google influence. If we admit that the Top 25 world sites represent half the traffic to the Top 500 sites, Google attracts 10 to 12% of the traffic to the Top 500 world sites.

We have focused so far on the overall visits to platforms. Yet, the distribution of the "upstream" also shows the importance of intermediation platforms. Users surf between them and use them as hubs to other sites and platforms. The platforms thus control the streams of visits and may collect data out of it, through cookies or social tools for instance. As they do so, they may develop new innovative services. The study of the upstream also shows another side of the relationships between countries: locally hosted sites may belong to a country's Top 25 but the stream of visits is still centered around intermediation -and mostly foreign -platforms. This conclusion stands in our sample even though the proportion of foreign websites in the top 25 differs from on country to another. In the US or China, for instance, the upstream is centered around intermediation platforms but most sites are nationale ones. In the rest of the sample, the top 25 is still centered around intermediation but pretty much all intermediation corporations are foreign and most of the time American. France is a good example of such countries.

Countries of influence

We have analyzed the extreme concentration of activity over a few intermediation platforms. The same phenomenon happens at the level of geographical territories. Out of the 30 countries we considered, only 11 host an influential platform (Figure 6). The US hosts most of the influential corporations, while the other countries considered, apart from China, host one influential corporation. By hosting corporations' headquarters and data centres, countries influence other countries, reached by the services of these corporations: the services influence local usages and practices and capture data submitted to the influential country's privacy and security frameworks. In our sample, US platforms reach all the the countries we studied Figure 7). Chinese influential platforms reach 8 countries, while Brazilian ones do so in 5 countries, Argentinian appear ones in 3 countries, British and Mexican ones in 2 countries. The influential sites of the other countries only reach one country but the country where they are headquartered. We identify three categories of countries. "Global powers" influence most countries, as they host a large number of influential platforms. Only the US fits into this category. "Regional powers" reach a limited number of countries, generally in a regional or linguistic area. The 10 subsequent countries of Figure 7 belong to this category. Eventually, the 19 other countries we have studied do not host any influential platform, they are "influenced countries".

To capture the difference between these categories, let us keep in mind that all Top 25 global platforms are American and consider a particular country, France, an "influenced country", representative of the situation of most European countries.

Most of the platforms belonging to the French top 25 are foreign. The traffic figures are even more impressive, with only 22% of the national traffic on national platforms. Foreign platforms thus capture 78% of the traffic to the Top 25 platforms in France. Out of the 30 countries we considered, most follow a pattern similar to France (Figure 8). Most of the traffic of all countries goes to US sites, about a third to national sites, and a tiny portion to sites of third countries. Platforms alter existing services and create new ones by introducing new intermediaries. For instance, ecommerce platforms are intermediaries between customers and sellers. In the publishing sector, platforms challenge existing actors such as publishers by disintermediating them, while becoming intermediaries between service providers -such as editors -and customers. Thus, intermediation can also be seen as the ability to play the role of intermediary and, by doing so, create or alter economic sectors.

As platforms become major intermediaries, they become basic utilities while disrupting economic models.

For instance, the so-called "sharing economy" disrupts traditional industries and collaboration models [START_REF] Cusumano | How traditional firms must compete in the sharing economy[END_REF]. Independent workers have more and more opportunities to work for several platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk5 . This disruption will lead to adjustment in labor laws as the employer/employee relationship evolves and independent workers claim a new status to protect their rights 6 .

From a state perspective, platforms possess cyber power as they hold sensitive information and incomparable surveillance power. Indeed, several reports such as [START_REF] Garcia | Mass surveillance[END_REF] show that platforms have become both opponents and partners of governments which try to enforce security through means such as surveillance. We identify three main roles of platforms security wise.

Firstly, platforms may provide useful data or metadata. Several legal frameworks authorize lawful targeted surveillance and most terms of services of platforms include a paragraph which explicitly states that the service will comply with lawful requests. Yet, platforms data may also support mass surveillance or extend a states surveillance power. As the US possesses most top platforms in the world, its reach is thus unprecedented. In particular, meta-data processing allows to retrieve useful sensitive information about people [START_REF] Pontes | We know where you live: privacy characterization of foursquare behavior[END_REF]. Some governments thus collabo-rate with platforms to get their data. For instance, the collaboration between the Chinese government and systems such as QQ is well-known [START_REF] Garcia | Mass surveillance[END_REF].

Secondly, platforms -and especially their commercial interests -may conflict with governmental strategies. In Europe, the data processing and conservations policies of American firms have raised several privacy concerns 7 . In the US, the government has unsuccessfully tried to get data stored abroad by corporations such as Microsoft8 . Lately, most platforms have decided they would encrypt at least a part of their data to protect them. The US government is strongly opposed to this decision9 . The Chinese corporation, Xiaomi on the other hand has recently announced it would store its data in the United States out of privacy concerns10 . As a result, states may implement tools to break in the datasets platforms hold.

Eventually, platform may take up new roles. The "right to be forgotten" [START_REF] Mantelero | The eu proposal for a general data protection regulation and the roots of the 'right to be forgotten[END_REF], for instance, has famously opposed Google and Europe in 2014. A Spanish citizen claimed the right to ask for the delisting of pages which threatened their image. The EU court condemned Google to offer such an opportunity. However, as of today, there is no European actor responsible for the right to be forgotten. On the contrary, Google is in charge on its own and responsible for collecting the delisting claims and processing them.

The relationships between countries and platforms is thus extremely complex, as demonstrated in particular by the Snowden revelations, and it will evolve dramatically in the coming decade. As platforms possess big data and can process them, they are becoming mandatory partners when it comes to cyber power and security. Yet, as we miss a comprehensive international legal framework for instance, civil rights, commercial interests and security imperatives still need to be balanced.

Discussion

We have studied the features of the revolution intermediation introduces in the digital economy. We have shown that it overpowers all other types of activities in terms of importance: it attracts most visits on the web. It is also a concentrated phenomenon: there are only few influent platforms, headquartered in a small number of countries. Our work emphasizes the supremacy of countries such as the United States and China over other areas of the world, such as Europe.

These conclusions lead to a contrasted picture of data security. Influent countries are able to enforce data surveillance and impose their views on data protection. Influent platforms have become both potential partners and opponents in definining of cyber security, be it from an individual point of view (when it comes to privacy for instance) or a state viewpoint.

Our work confirms and extends other inquiries [START_REF] Falahrastegar | Anatomy of the third-party web tracking ecosystem[END_REF][START_REF] Castelluccia | Data Harvesting 2.0: from the Visible to the Invisible Web[END_REF]. It also emphasizes the importance of legal frameworks in business strategies: as privacy becomes a competitive advantage, corporations turn to countries with the appropriate security context. Our measures highlight again the importance of the US on the web: they attract most data flows.

No doubt intermediation platforms will set the upcoming political and economic agenda. Several further analyses are needed. First, we have left aside several economic domains of studies, such as tax management in digital activities. We have also ignored several rising types of use, such as mobile applications. Both raise stringent political and economic issues. Uber, for instance, a booming intermediation platform, mostly works on mobile.

Eventually, our metrics should be finer and completed with qualitative measures. We believe that the higher the abstraction level of the platform, the higher the quality of the data harvested. More elaborate measures based on the abstraction level are needed to better quantify and qualify the influence we have diagnosed.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the reviewers for their useful comments as well as Nadeem Anjur and Damien Reimert for their help in developing the tools to collect and analyse the data. This work has been funded by the European project Big data roadmap and cross-disciplinarY community for addressing socieTal Externalities (BYTE). Stéphane Grumbach, senior researcher at INRIA, is director of IXXI, the Complex Systems Institute in Lyon. Specialist of data, his research interest focus on the systems handling social data, and their impact on our economies and societies.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Levels of abstraction of intermediation

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Proportion of national corporations at each intermediation level of the 5 permanent members of the UN Council

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Global traffic of top world corporations

Figure 4 :Figure 5 :

 45 Figure 4: Top 50 sites international influence

Figure 6 :

 6 Figure 6: Number of influential platforms by country

Figure 7 :

 7 Figure 7: Size of influence zone by countries

Figure 8 :

 8 Figure 8: Ratio of sites in the Top 25 of each country headquartered in the US, nationally, or in a third country

10

  About the authorsAurélien Faravelon holds a PhD in computer science. His Phd also contains a twist of philosophy as he holds a M.A of philosophy. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the Data at the Core of the Internet (DICE) team at Rhone-Alpes Complex System Institute (IXXI). He currently focuses on data economics and its socio-political consequences.Stphane Frénot is full professor at Universit de Lyon, works in the CITI Lab at INSA Lyon, and comanages the INRIA Dice team. His research interests focus on Internet based communication systems. He is specialized in Web software architectures, observes their trends and innovations since 20 years.

alexa.com,trafficestimate.com, data were collected on 19 december

2014, we explicitly state when otherwise. 2 https://www.cia.gov/library/

For this Figure, data was extracted on January 6, 2015. We have

http://www.forbes.com/

https://www.mturk.com/

http://www.theguardian.com

http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/

http://www.wired.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11139023/USgovernment-seeks-to-stop-Apple-and-Google-encryption.html

[START_REF] Mantelero | The eu proposal for a general data protection regulation and the roots of the 'right to be forgotten[END_REF] http://www.reuters.com


Denyze Toffoli
email: .dtoffoli@unistra.fr

Keywords: Plurilingual profiles, learning preferences, representations, language and teaching policies

come

University students' plurilingual profiles in a French

frontier city

Introduction

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF, Council of Europe

2000) defines

Plurilingual and pluricultural competence [as] … the ability to use languages for the purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural interaction, where a person, viewed as a social agent has proficiency, of varying degrees, in several languages and experience of several cultures. This is not seen as the superposition or juxtaposition of distinct competences, but rather as the existence of a complex or even composite competence on which the user may draw (p. 168).

This definition of plurilingualism resonates with Claire [START_REF] Kramsch | The Multilingual Subject[END_REF] concept of The Multilingual Subject, who, although she has chosen the term "multilingual" over "plurilingual", is describing the individual's repertory and relationship to language(s) and not necessarily a situation related to geopolitical context.

Stephen [START_REF] May | The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual Education[END_REF] and the contributors to The Multilingual Turn (Lourdes Ortega, David Bloch, Ofelia Garcia and others) criticize the historically monolingual position of researchers in applied linguistics, a position which idealises the voice of the native speaker and creates concepts such as interlanguage and fossilization to explain phenomena that are seen as departures from this norm. In a context where a growing consensus of researchers regard language learning as a complex process, both epistemologically and empirically [START_REF] Larsen-Freeman | Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics[END_REF], de Bot 2007, etc), many applied linguists challenge the monolingual paradigm. Notions such as languaging (Maturana & Varela 1998;Becker 1988, cités dans Garcia & Wei 2014) and translanguaging (Garcia & Wei 2014) contribute to the elaboration of a new, multi-pluri-lingual framework.

Languaging is essentially the construction of language through the integration of the linguistic code, the individual and social contexts. Translanguaging involves this type of language creation, as practiced by plurilingual individuals and communities, "as well as the pedagogical approaches that use those complex practices" (Garcia & Wei 2014, p.15) The complex development of language competence recognises partial skills emerging differentially in individual learners, in a constantly but irregularly changing context, both influencing and being influenced by innumerable factors, including other languages and people(s) (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). As we are exposed to other languages, other people, other cultures, we are more likely to nurture interest than fears, thus increasing mutual understanding and limiting mistrust (Kramsch). This is the base of the Council of Europe's language policy (CEF 2001).

In line with the monolingual image of speakers of different languages portrayed in school textbooks and carried through the secondary school system [START_REF] Castellotti | Social Representations of Languages and Teaching[END_REF], young French adults arriving at university are generally perceived of as monolingual, having added a few notions of other languages to their scholastic baggage, but having few plurilingual skills. This perception / denigration / self-denigration is reinforced by some serious studies, such as the First European Survey on Language Competences (European Commission 2012), which relegates 15 year-old (end of middle-school) French students to last place in terms of second language competence in virtually all skills areas. Students arrive at university with a reputation for being "bad at languages" [START_REF] Poteaux | Autonomie et plurilinguisme : une même aventure ? Arena Romanistica[END_REF]) and far from attaining the European targets of two foreign languages at a B2 level.

This perception is also accompanied by representations of these students as lacking in autonomy. Bézille (2002) accuses institutional (scholastic) conditioning of consigning students to passive and receptive modes of learning, which prevent them from fully taking charge of their own learning. This is reinforced by educational traditions which place more value on transmissive teaching than exploratory and experiential learning.

To recapitulate: in a European context where plurilingual skills are valorised and targeted at supra-national levels, for both pragmatic and ideological reasons, prevalent representations of French university students portray linguistically impoverished learners, lacking in the necessary autonomy to make significant progress in this area. This paper describes a study undertaken to confront these stereotypes with students' perceptions of their own language skills, language learning practices and autonomy. All students arriving at the University of Strasbourg from secondary school anywhere in France, have studied at least two foreign languages during the course of their education, the principle one (often, but not necessarily English) for seven years and the secondary one for five. They are supposed to have attained a B2 level in the primary language and a B1 level in the secondary one by the end of secondary schooling, as defined by the National Education objectives (BO spécial N°2 du 19 février 2009). At the age of 15, they are expected to have attained an A2 level, which is globally the case, according to a comparative study between countries (European Commission 2012), but this level is significantly lower in France than in most European countries. Many language instructors at university intuitively feel that entering students do not have the expected B2 level, and this would appear to be confirmed by B2 certification testing during the course of their degree, where some 50% of candidates do not achieve the required results (Bilan national CLES 2012-2013). For university entrance, language level certification is not required and entry measurements are not performed.

Context of the study

Language policy for non-specialist language students at the University of Strasbourg is directly related to the policies existing in the three previous universities, with those from the previous scientific university being the most coherent and rigorous, while those from the law and economics university were the least formalised and those from the Arts and languages university the most traditional. Over the last ten years, numerous meetings, studies and projects have been instigated with the aim of providing coherent, institution-wide language policies and provision. In January 2014, two project leaders were nominated to propose a reorganisation of language instruction for "specialists of non-language disciplines" (langues pour spécialistes d'autres disciplines or lansad, in French, perhaps best translated as Institution-Wide Language Provision or IWLP [START_REF] Morley | UCML-AULC survey of Institutionwide Language Provision in universities in the UK[END_REF] in English). While various studies had been carried out to look at the similarities and differences in instructional design and pedagogical approaches, or to compare resources and organisational policies, the students themselves had never been formally questioned as to their own perceptions of language learning at the university.

The survey detailed below thus targeted the following research questions:

 what are the plurilingual profiles of University of Strasbourg students,  do these profiles influence the perception students have of their language learning at the university  and if so in what ways?

Methodology

In spring 2014 an extensive questionnaire was created by a researcher in applied linguistics, assisted by three Masters-level research assistants and a researcher in sociology1 . The survey targeted the opinions of these "non-specialist" students, regarding their language learning at the university. Questions underwent several revisions; consultations with concerned bodies and preliminary tests to validate the individual question formulation and comprehension by prospective students. In spite of all these precautions, we have of course discovered with retrospect questions that should have been asked, but weren't and others that could have been better formulated.

The final version is composed of five parts: "My Profile", "Languages that I know", "My language learning at the University of Strasbourg", "What I think about my language learning at the University of Strasbourg" and "What I think about my language learning in general". The questionnaire was formatted in Limesurvey, allowing on-line delivery and collection of responses. Students were approached by e-mail, during the last two weeks of April, with an accompanying message from their Dean or language instructors at the university. In 120 cases, paper copies of the questionnaire were given to students at the end of a language class and collected upon completion. These copies were entered into Limesurvey by the research assistants. Statistics were treated used the application Sphinx. In all 1446 responses were gathered, representing about 3% of the 45000-strong student body. 1181 of these were complete (all questions were answered) and the remaining 246 were returned only partially completed. The sample population reflects the demographics of the student body, although it is not strictly representative: predominantly undergraduate (80% of participants, compared to 60% in the university), feminine (63%, compared to 57%), of French nationality (85%, compared to 80%). The disciplines represented in the sampling are as follows:

[Please insert Table 1 here]

Results

Despite the predominance of French nationals in our sampling, 75 different native languages were cited, the most common of these being French and Alsatian, with high representations of Turkish and Arabic, followed by Spanish, German, and, practically on par at just over 1%, English, Chinese (although this includes diverse Chinese dialects), Russian and Portuguese (see Table 2). Other languages account for 7.9% of responses, 47 of these (among which Dutch, Norwegian, Kurde, Hebrew, Serbe or Thai, but also Picard, Wolof, Occitan, Berbère, Lingala, Zaza and Dioula) being cited by only one person. The answers cumulate at well over 100%, presumably because several people gave 2 answers, indicating that many have what they consider to be 2 mother tongues. This situation represents 14,5% of those questioned.

The greatest number of these "bilingual natives" are Franco-Alsatian bilinguals, accounting for 5,5% of the surveyed population, followed by Franco-Arabic (2.1%), Frano-Turkish (1.2%) and Franco-German (1%) bilinguals.

[Please insert Table 2 here] The languages students had studied at school provided a fairly classic reflection of the foreign language offer in French schools, with English in first place (90%), followed by German and Spanish. The specific numbers however (German in a strong second place at 67% and Spanish in third at 29%) represent an inversion of the national norm for the second and third foreign languages, undoubtedly reflecting the importance of German in the frontier region of Alsace. Interestingly French was cited by almost 1% of the sample group as being a foreign language studied at school. We presume this refers to foreign or immigrant students having received special instruction in French, although it may represent a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the question. One question specifically concerned "the language of schooling" and interestingly, only 24 people (2%) indicated a language different from their native tongue. This may be because they felt they had already responded to this question in citing a second native language. While all students declared having studied at least two foreign languages over the course of their secondary studies, the vast majority are only studying one foreign language at university, although nearly a third of those questioned are studying two or more and 186 (15%) declare they are studying three or four foreign languages at university. All of the languages offered officially for study at the University of Strasbourg have attracted students among those answering the questionnaire. In fact students declare studying 28 different languages, although only 23 are part of the official offer. I shall return to this point in the analysis and discussion section.

Students were asked to evaluate their own skills in the foreign languages they speak.

Although the CEF scale is used at the university, we were not sure all students would be familiar with it for all languages they were studying, so proposed a simple, perceptive, Likerttype scale instead. In Table 3 below the self-assessment of the most numerous group for each number of languages appears in bold: in their first foreign language, of 1224 respondents, nearly 80% rate themselves "quite good" or better. This positive self-image erodes significantly for the second foreign language, where fewer students self-evaluate in the "good" categories and more in the "not good". Although this overall trend continues for each successive language, we do find more "very good" evaluations for languages 3 and 4, than for language 2. We also find that while a majority of 2 and 3 FL learners assess their ability as "not very good", the 4 FL majority self-assesses as "quite good".

[Please insert Table 3 here] The information collected in the preceding question was used to identify two subgroups of plurilingual competence. The first group includes students learning only one foreign language, while the second isolates those learning four foreign languages. The answers of the two groups to various other questions were then compared, despite the difference in size of the two groups (932 vs 62), with a view to establishing correlations between more and less plurilingual profiles and other criteria. The first comparison explored was their representations of language learning itself. Students were asked to rate a number of popular conceptions about language learning: whether they consider it to be primarily mastery of grammar or of quantities of vocabulary, the ability to communicate, or to speak without an accent, knowledge of the culture of the corresponding language, the capacity to understand all that they hear or read in the language.

Both groups present similar rankings regarding these representations (see Table 4), in that they both consider language learning to be first and foremost an ability to communicate.

Furthermore, approximately 22% of students in both groups believe that language learning involves vocabulary acquisition. In both groups, listening comes in fourth place, right before, or on a par with learning grammar. However, the two groups show major differences regarding their conception of learning a language as a means to discover a foreign culture.

Those students learning four languages (4 FL: the "more plurilingual" group) rank language learning as a means to discover a new culture in second place, 30% of them (19 students) choosing this definition of language learning, whereas in the 1 FL ("less plurilingual") group, this definition is ranked in seventh place, with only 7% of the group's students choosing it (although this represents 65 people).

[Please insert Table 4 here] Further analysis indicates that the majority of the students learning four foreign languages are majoring primarily in arts, literature or languages (for 35.5% of them) or alternatively in law, economy, management, political and social sciences (25.8%). On the other hand, most of the students learning only one foreign language are majoring in health sciences or sciences and technology (48.1%)see Table 5. This could well provide one explanation for the emphasis the "more plurilingual" group places on the cultural aspect of language learning, as their studies likely raise awareness of cultural issues. However, it should be noted that these numbers are to be treated with some circumspection due to the relatively small sample size of the "more plurilingual" group.

[Please insert Table 5 here] The survey also contained questions focused on students' preferences for different types of learning activities (Table 6). We asked them to check the activities that most help them to learn.

[Please insert Table 6 here] In order to interpret these preferences, we grouped them into three categories:

1-Receptive skills (watching video and reading articles), 2-Interaction activities (conversation workshops and exchanges with peers or instructors), 3-Teacher-guided activities (material on the LMS and in textbooks).

The term "teacher-guided" in this instance designates activities designed and organised by language teaching specialists, not necessarily activities accomplished by students under instructors' supervision or in their presence. According to the rankings established by counting the number of responses for each activity, both groups share similar attitudes to the three categories of activities: both groups tend to prefer learning with receptive activities (watching videos and reading articles), interaction activities rank second and teacher-guided activities are felt to be the least helpful (see Table 6).

This corroborates the results for the following question, whether or not students prefer to manage their own language learning (see Table 7).

[Please insert Table 7 here] The high percentages (64% and 70.6%) of positive responses clearly indicate that these students not only feel comfortable with activities requiring autonomy and selfdetermination, but actually prefer taking charge of their own learning. This attitude may be related to the fact that approximately 55% of the students questioned (803) are learning foreign languages in self-directed open access centres where they are responsible for their own learning trajectories, including setting learning objectives, choice of subject matter and choice of materials.

[Please insert Table 8 here] Looking at the reasons selected by both groups to explain this preference for selfdirection (Table 8), being able to make headway according to individual strengths came in first place, being able to work on subjects of their own choice in second and personal time management, which presumably includes progressing at one's own pace, third. The aforementioned all took priority over the potentially "entertaining" aspects of self-directed learning.

As for the 234 students who prefer not to manage their own learning (only 16% of the total sampling), the main reason cited is that they consider themselves in need for supervision and direction. These are of course pleonasms for the original question. Other reasons (in order, when the numbers for the two groups are taken together) include the perception that self-directed learning does not allow for progression, lack of time, lack of motivation, a preference for lectures, and not having the appropriate tools. In all cases, the results for the "4 FL" group may be regarded as anecdotal given that the number of persons involved is only between 4 and 9 students, that is to say between 0.2% and 0.6% of the overall sampling.

[Please insert Table 9 here] Finally, we decided to confront the answers of these same two groups on the subject of study abroad. This delivered perhaps the highest differences between the groups. As can be seen in Table 10, proportionally fully 15% more students are interested in study abroad in the "more plurilingual" group than in the "1 FL" group. The difference between those having already spent time abroad is also significant: almost 13% in the "4 FL" group, as compared to only 1.5% in the "1 FL" group. Note that only 1.9% of the "1 FL" group are foreign students doing their study abroad in Strasbourg, while fully 9.7% of the "4 FL" group are in this situation. Once again, the small numbers in the "4 FL" group mean that these results must be treated with some circumspection, but the general trends are probably reliable.

[Please insert Table 10 here]

Analysis and discussion

In this section, I will first analyse the different results presented above, relating them both to the framework of plurilingualism presented in the introduction and to the initial representations that were being challenged (poor results in languages, lack of autonomy, etc.). I will also attempt to associate these results with research in other areas, which can give them meaning in a new light, specifically work on out of classroom language learning (OCLL), online informal learning of English (OILE), and self-determination and autonomy constructs (notably in conferring aspects of learner control).

This study has provided some basic information about plurilingualism in the student population, concerning both the vast diversity of linguistic origins and the widespread and diverse interest in language learning. Some 250 students are studying languages that would be considered in the less widely used and less taught (LWULT) category. These include languages like Dutch, Italian, Turkish and Japanese, but exclude Arabic, Chinese, German, Spanish, French and English. I mentioned that students declare studying 28 different languages, although only 23 are officially on offer at the university. The "extra" languages are ones proposed by a multilingual open-access centre, which provides resources for several languages not on official offer, on a non-credit basis. It would appear that French students, like their British counterparts, have an interest in languages beyond the purely "compulsory" (Britain has seen a significant increase in enrolment in optional language classes since the disappearance of compulsory language learning in secondary school, cf [START_REF] Morley | UCML-AULC survey of Institutionwide Language Provision in universities in the UK[END_REF].

Beyond culling this basic information, it appears that some of the insights gained into student interests and representations in this study may well be linked to students' plurilingual profiles, that is to say their involvement with learning more (or fewer) languages.

As indicated above (see Table 4) the interest in culture and learning about culture as part of language learning was rated very differently by the 1 FL (less plurilingual) and 4 FL (more plurilingual) groups. The link established between the majors of both groups (Table 5) could be a point of departure for exploring this area further:  Might there be less emphasis on cultural issues in scientific programmes?  Are science, health and technology majors essentially studying English as a lingua franca (ELF) with more utilitarian objectives, and NOT as a cultural artefact?

 Do the students in the principle disciplines represented in the 4 FL group have other elements in common that might explain their interest in culture?

Most of the students in scientific and health disciplines are studying English, with a small proportion studying German. This is perhaps indicative of a perception in these fields (relayed by professionals) that English is the only foreign language required in order to have access to international research and attain international exposure professionally. This in turn may favour a utilitarian approach to the language, to the detriment of interest in wider cultural aspects.

It could be argued that law, economics, political sciences, literature and languages are all disciplines in which culture has an important place and in which national cultures influence the very content of the discipline. At the University of Strasbourg, languages in these majors are also predominantly taught in traditional classroom settings, under the direction of teachers who are for the most part products of "language, literature, civilization" programmes of study. This background may incite them to put more emphasis on cultural elements in their course material. On the other hand, students' interests in culture in the 4 FL group might also be a consequence of their developing pluricultural identity and have nothing to do with the type of study they are pursuing. Our exploration of the data to date does not allow a more nuanced vision of this question, although presumably the introduction of information about students' language levels, about the specific language centre in which they are studying their languages, or about their level of satisfaction concerning their language learning experience would influence this panorama and merit exploration in a further study.

Language self-assessment was used in the questionnaire (with the results given above in Table 3 and by asking students to supply their "CEF level" for their first FL), but exploited only for the creation of the two sub-groups. Looking more carefully at this data might also allow links to be established between learning increasing numbers of languages and more or less favourable self-assessment or between level in the first FL and the number of other languages pursued later on, and so on.

The results presented above regarding the types of activities that students find most helpful for language learning also invite commentary. My own "teacher intuition" led me to expect that interaction activities would rate higher in these results, primarily because it seemed this would be perceived as most useful in "being able to communicate", which they ranked first as a definition of what language learning is (see Table 4). It is also more difficult for students to practice interaction outside of formalised learning situations. The relative preference for receptive activities therefore came as a surprise. Does this suggest a certain lack of initiative, or seeking of comfort zones that require little effort? Further exploration and correlation with aspects such as language level might reveal that proficiency is also a criterion for preference of certain activities. Research such as that of [START_REF] Mercer | The Self from a Complexity Perspective[END_REF] or [START_REF] Rubio | Self-Esteem and Self-Concept in Foreign Language Learning[END_REF] into the L2 self indicates that questions of face, confidence, comfort with error-production etc.

may also be important reasons for preferring receptive over interactive activities. Proficiency has been shown to play an important role regarding these aspects of self and could be a determining factor here. As such it may indicate that this preference for receptive activities is not an indication of lack of autonomy at all.

It could, in fact, be considered representative of a superior degree of self-direction, in that it is the students themselves who decide where, when and how to watch videos or read articles, mostly choosing their own content as well. From this point of view, preference for receptive activities doesn't necessarily express a lack of autonomy: these are often cited by students as informal online learning activities they undertake outside of all formal learning (cf.: [START_REF] Toffoli | How non-specialist students of English practice informal learning using web 2.0 tools[END_REF][START_REF] Toffoli | L'apprentissage informel de l'anglais en ligne (AIAL), qu'est-ce que ça change pour les centres de langues ? Recherche et Pratiques Pédagogiques En Langues de Spécialité[END_REF]; these are also the types of activities which learners engage in during time in the open access centres (CRL, cf.: Rivens Mompean, 2013) where many of them are enrolled and where they choose their own learning material. Again, further exploration into the specific correlations between these preferences and the type of language centre where the learners are enrolled could reveal additional insights.

Because watching videos and reading are the principle activities cited in Table 6 as useful for learning, it might be tempting to interpret this as indicating that the students concerned are motivated more by the entertaining aspect of these activities than by their learning potential, despite the wording of the question ("…the activities which most help me learn languages"). Yet, when analysing the hierarchy they establish between reasons for preferring autonomy, entertainment, or the "amusing" aspect of directing one's own learning comes in last place, with over 30 percentage points of difference, indicating that this definitely seems to be a secondary consideration.

The questions concerning autonomy and self-direction in language learning were of particular interest, as the majority of language provision at the University of Strasbourg takes place in self-access centres which are regularly subject to criticism from various internal bodies who advocate a return to "traditional" language teaching. Despite the fact that only 55% of the students questioned in this survey are learning language principally in self-access centres, fully 64% of them state a preference for managing their own learning. While this may indicate that many students find they can manage their own learning within traditional pedagogical structures, it may also indicate the frustration of some students, faced with teacher-directed learning that they probably did not choose. The reasons for not assuming or not wanting to assume autonomous behaviour are well-documented in the literature (cf. [START_REF] Candas | Analyse de pratiques d'étudiants dans un centre de ressources de langues : indicateurs d'autonomie dans l'apprentissage[END_REF][START_REF] Kannan | The Positive Role of Negative Emotions: Fear, Anxiety, Conflict and Resistance as Productive Experiences in Academic Study and in the Emergence of Learner Autonomy[END_REF][START_REF] Little | Autonomy in language learning: Some theoretical and practical considerations[END_REF][START_REF] Poteaux | Histoire d'une innovation et trajectoires d'acteurs[END_REF] and include perceptions about the lack of ability to do so, lack of motivation, time or tools (which are often excuses) that appear in the results in Table 9. Interestingly, only 16% of respondents actually give reasons for not wanting to manage their own learning. This may point to an important role for teachers in the preparation of adults capable of undertaking lifelong learning: the absolute necessity of fostering self-directed learning during the university years. While the research team had anticipated that degrees of plurilingualism would influence desire for self-direction in language learning, this hypothesis would appear to be unfounded, as the results for our 1 FL and 4 FL groups are very similar, both in preferences for self-direction and in the reasons given for those preferences (see Tables 7,8,9).

The final factor that was explored in terms of differences between students with different degrees of plurilingualism is the question of international mobility. As the results indicate (see Table 10), more 4 FL students not only state interest in study abroad, but have already undertaken such mobility. Wondering whether such mobility is an initiator or a result of plurilingual skills and interests would appear to be a moot question, the relation between the two being fundamental, within Europe, but also worldwide. Relating this information back to the most represented disciplines in the two groups would indicate that health, science and technology students are much less involved in international mobility than their humanities, business and law counterparts.

Conclusions

While leaving room for more exploration, this initial study does give us a clearer picture of students' plurilingual profiles (languages of origin and languages being learnt), at least at the University of Strasbourg. Contrary to prevalent French stereotypes, the student population is linguistically diversified and quite plurilingual (all students having at least two languages), with self-assessed skills that are felt to be "good" in their first foreign language.

This study provides evidence that "more plurilingual" students are likely to have different attitudes and approaches toward language learning than "less plurilingual" students, especially as concerns international mobility and the cultural finality of language learning, perhaps due to their perception of the necessity of international mobility in a globalised workplace, but perhaps also linked to a perception in some fields that "English is sufficient".

In line with other recent studies in OILE [START_REF] Toffoli | How non-specialist students of English practice informal learning using web 2.0 tools[END_REF][START_REF] Toffoli | L'apprentissage informel de l'anglais en ligne (AIAL), qu'est-ce que ça change pour les centres de langues ? Recherche et Pratiques Pédagogiques En Langues de Spécialité[END_REF], the students queried here also demonstrate an interest in learning tools that are directly and informally accessible, probably highly influenced by their overall internet culture. Confronted with stereotypes of lack of autonomy, this study points to the interest in and desire for self-directed learning of the vast majority of students, in terms of content, activities and planning / timemanagement.

Influencing language policies?

These conclusions could be taken as pointing to inflexion of university language policies in several areas:  maximising self-direction in language learning, thereby providing students with solid skills for lifelong learning.


Ways that these objectives could be achieved involve inciting language teachers to think not only about what to teach and how to teach, but more about what students need to learn and how they prefer to learn, for example optimizing opportunities for interaction (speaking) in the organisation of language learning and doing more with subjects that really interest students, for example those they have chosen as majors (developing CLIL), while perhaps also finding opportunities to introduce a cultural focus into some learning or allowing discovery of how different approaches to scientific phenomena may be culturally based. CEF (2000) provides different curriculum scenarios for integrating several languages.

These scenarios focus on the common base of language awareness and language learning strategies that can be introduced with an FL1 and suggest differentiated and specific objectives and teaching approaches for FL2 and FL3 (for example more comprehension-based approaches, or job-specific / discipline-specific approaches). By integrating teaching principles based on the provision of plurilingual instruction (not all courses in all languages have the same, general, communication goals, learning strategies do not need to be taught in conjunction with all language courses, intercomprehension strategies could be elaborated and build on, etc. -CEF: 169). True meaning could be given to coordinated, coherent language policy decisions at university level.

"Language teaching is still seen primarily in terms of mutual ignorance, if not strict separation; this view is reinforced by the institutional structure of most European education systems, which operate according to the principle of disciplinary compartmentalization" (Castellotti & Moore, 2002: 15). Linguistic diversity is desirable on the basis of global understanding (Kramsch), but also from the point of view of cognitive enrichment [START_REF] Bialystok | Language acquisition and bilingualism: Consequences for a multilingual society[END_REF]

  One of the oldest European universities, the University of Strasbourg's geographical location in Alsace has meant an agitated history, alternating between German and French nationality, torn between Catholic and Lutheran influences. Recent history saw a separation of the University into three distinct entities in 1971, following the student upheavals of 1968. Twenty years later in 1991, an experimental "European University Pole" preluded the reunification of the three local universities into the present University of Strasbourg in 2009. This recent merger has made Strasbourg into one of the largest French universities, attracting some 45000 students in 2014 and employing over 4700 faculty and staff. Geographically and demographically Strasbourg is near both Germany and Switzerland, bordering on the former and less than a two-hour drive from the latter. A member of EUCOR, l'Université du Rhin supérieur (University of the Upper Rhine), Strasbourg and the Université de Haute-Alsace (Mulhouse) provide international degrees in partnership with the German and Swiss universities of Fribourg, Basel and Karlsruhe. Linguistically, with 23 languages offered for study, Strasbourg officially teaches more languages than any other French university. Eighteen of these languages are taught to degree level.

  taking into account plurilingual difference,

	o integrating OILE and OCLL research into teaching
	approaches,
	o by valorising in some way these skills (Duchêne & Heller 2012),
	o by constructing a curriculum based on plurilingual concepts (see
	below),
	 increasing plurilingualism, with a view to increasing international
	mobility and global tolerance
	o by inducing more students to study more diversified languages,
	especially in health, sciences and technology
	 building on student preferences for language learning content and
	activities,
	o introducing stronger content and language integrated
	learning (CLIL) approaches (Taillefer, 2013),

Table 7 Table 8 I

 78 demonstrates, for example, how bilinguals experience some "protection" against Nb. cit. Freq. Rank. Rank Nb. cit. Freq.

	Alzheimer's disease and give evidence of reduced cognitive age, compared to their unilingual
	counterparts.). Universities thus have many reasons to promote plurilingualism, in a global
	strategy of educating future world citizens.
	Bibliography

Table 9 I

 9 prefer to manage my own learning because 1 FL learners 4 FL learners Nb. cit. Freq. Nb. cit. Freq.

	I can proceed according to my own strengths 272	70.5% 27	75%
	I manage my time better	248	64.2% 21	58.3%
	I can work on subjects that I like	272	70.5% 23	63.8%
	it's more fun	126	32.6% 12	33.3%
	Total responses	386	36

Table 10

 10

Sincere and deepest thanks to Dominique Dujardin (research engineer), Monicá Fierro-Porto and Fatima Hamade for their help, especially in the statistical treatment of this study. Special thanks to Samah El Khatib, for her tenacity in the face of challenge, her implication in the study and in the treatment and presentation of the results.


University teachers' use of their students' Online Informal Learning of English (OILE)

Denyze Toffoli & Geoff Sockett, Université de Strasbourg ince 2008 we have been developing a multi-faceted study into Online Informal Learning of English (OILE). In practice, OILE involves language development through online activities such as social networking, streaming and/or downloading television series or films, listening to music on demand and web browsing.

UNESCO's definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) in its Guidelines for Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (2011) is that "OER are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified, and shared" (p.1). OILE is not therefore strictly speaking usage of OER and we are aware of the proviso in the Guidelines specifying that "'OER' is not synonymous with online learning, eLearning or mobile learning" (p.v), be it informal. OILE differs from OER in that the learning produced is largely incidental rather than targeted, as the aim of the activities is not language acquisition. Rather the language users see themselves as involved in leisure activities of which language learning is merely a by-product. It is the student and not the teacher or course designer who identifies the resources to be used and these resources were not developed specifically for language learning. One of the specificities of language learning (as opposed to say mechanics, biology or literature) is that the learning objectives are not content (especially in a purely communicative or competence-based perspective), but rather the vehicle that carries the content: a capacity to use the language in question. To this extent language learning can build upon very diversified contents, as the "content-based language learning" approaches over the last thirty years [START_REF] Mohan | Language and content[END_REF][START_REF] Crandall | ESL through content-area instruction: Mathematics, science, and social studies[END_REF][START_REF] Snow | A model of academic literacy for integrated language and content instruction[END_REF] have demonstrated. OILE thus extends to any and potentially all internet content in English. To qualify as an OILE resource, the content need only be consulted and used by language learners.

We have chosen to anchor our research within the theoretical framework of complex dynamic systems theory [START_REF] Larsen-Freeman | Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics[END_REF], as this seems the most apt to account for the organic, multifarious, constantly changing and interacting nature of such learning. Our aim is to understand the mechanisms at work in the (parts of the) systems outside instructed learning, even where this latter involves computer mediation, distance, or other recent developments in instruction. In terms of language learning, research into this area could help us to understand the part OILE plays in an overall learning process and thus provide input into future instructional design, for example.

Our investigations began with a survey of 228 non-English-major students' practices with informal learning of English [START_REF] Toffoli | How non-specialist students of English practice informal learning using web 2.0 tools[END_REF]. Their most prevalent activities are viewing American series (with or without subtitles in English) and listening to on-demand music with accompanying lyrics. Other important results of this survey include:

 Students listen more to English online than they read it.

 They listen as much to TV series and films in English as to music and very few listen to music alone.

S

 In terms of written language, students read in interactive contexts (forums, instant messaging, social networks, e-mail) as much as they do in a purely receptive mode (consulting sites).  Through social media, students are involved in writing online, albeit mostly in a responsive, repetitive and short-statement mode.  Very few students speak in English online, regardless of support and content.

A second study [START_REF] Sockett | Beyond learner autonomy: A dynamic systems view of the informal learning of English in virtual online communities[END_REF] aimed to gain a more detailed view of these practices. Six learners recorded their daily activities in English over an 8-week period. Our findings varied from the sublime to the ridiculous (one of our participants actually logged an average of over 50 hours of on-line activity in English per week -the median for the five others was closer to 5). Results show primarily that these students are  users of English (as opposed to "just" learners of the language),  engaging in activities for their pleasure and entertainment (TV series and music on-demand),  but also using the English language for various pragmatic purposes, such as:

o to gain new skills (for example consulting on-line tutorials for computer programmes), o to further their investigations into other areas of study (computer graphics or Japanese) o to achieve personal goals (plan a holiday, translate online content).

While we did not find extensive material allowing us to have insight into uptake of new language, we did find some indications of how students process the language input they are exposed to. These include  extensive listening,  listening for gist,  listening for pronunciation,  listening and doing online research to clarify meaning,  developing fluency and vocabulary through written interaction (e-mail, Facebook, participation in forums and chatrooms),  building vocabulary both incidentally (intensive exposure to certain expressions in a TV series, for example) and intentionally (looking up, translating or otherwise managing content in an effort to understand and master the words used).

In an attempt to discover more about the specific language these learners are most exposed to in one of their preferred activities, Sockett (2011a) performed cluster frequency analyses of 4-word chains in a 500 000-word corpus of television scripts (1 season each of 5 popular series). His results indicate that the material listened to is high in "ordinary" language content (conversations concerning daily life), corresponding to B1 descriptors for speaking in the CEFRL. These include structures that are problematic for French learners (the example "I want you to" being illustrated by the literal translation from French "I want that you"). Sockett hypothesises that regular exposure to these items (as would be the case for a student who is "faithful" to a favourite series) might lead to adoption of the standard English form (ibid, p.13). He is currently (2012) working on a study attempting to measure uptake of such items.

Objectives and scope of the teacher beliefs survey

In view of the seeming potential of OILE activities for language uptake, this paper focuses on a new survey examining OILE from the other side of the educational relationship: teachers' perceptions of and beliefs about these practices, both as "practices" and as influences on the language learnt by the students. This survey explores 30 French university English professors' knowledge and use of student practices with OILE. This is slightly fewer than the 50 responses we had hoped to obtain, but sufficiently representative to allow some generalizations.

Our attempts to identify any correlations with gender, age or national origin of the teachers reveal no significant results, with one possible exception. We have however gained some insight into their awareness of the OILE phenomenon amongst students, the perceived or imagined effects of these practices on their students' English and the ways they do or do not integrate this knowledge into their own teaching.

In our initial study, fully 97% of the students surveyed answered questions attesting to regular on-line activity in English. If we average the teachers' estimations of the number of students concerned, we find they believe it concerns less than half (44%). Graph 1 below indicates the distribution of teachers and their beliefs about numbers of students practicing OILE. The three teachers working in the language centre where the initial study was carried out also provide estimations below 50%. Correlations were sought between belief that OILE activities are prevalent among non-specialist students and three independent variables: age, gender and nationality of respondents. A statistically significant correlation at the 0.05 level (0.41 using the Phi correlation) was found for nationality. Indeed 50% of respondents indicating their nationality as French considered that OILE was a minority activity, whereas none of the English or American teachers surveyed believed this to be the case.

While the university teachers we questioned are certainly familiar with students' on-line activity in English, their responses are nuanced (see Graph 2 below) and only 21 of the 30 affirm with conviction that they are aware of such activity1 . Given the numbers of students who actually declare to be engaged in such activities, a surprising number (10 out of 30) teachers feel that this only concerns a minority of students. Most teachers (23) feel that this number is increasing and none find it to be diminishing (Graph 3). What are the effects of OILE ?

Teachers do believe OILE affects in-class behavior as well as English skills (Graph 4). Twenty-five of them (5/6) feel that this effect is positive, although four mitigate this by doubling it with a negative response. These represent the same four the five who find it negative. Four others qualify the effects as neutral.

Thus, only one teacher in our sampling actually qualifies the overall effects of OILE as negative. She justifies this position noting, "they think that watching TV series is studying at a university level". On the positive side, teachers cite increased curiosity about English, increased motivation to learn the language, often promoted by the students' impression of being able to understand, more confidence and a general feeling of being at ease with the spoken language. They find that for some, English has become a part of their daily lives. They notice more familiarity with English / American cultural habits and that students appear to have greater knowledge about English-speaking countries than in the past. Some students ask their teachers to explain or translate expressions they have heard in their favorite series, or exclaim in class "yes, that's like in [Lost, or whatever]".

Other remarks on the negative side indicate a "copy and paste" approach to learning and a lack of critical distance. One teacher is concerned that the level of language input "is not appropriate to the university context".

Practically all of the teachers in the study believe that these practices have a positive influence on students' skills in English, as Graph 5 below indicates.

Graph 5

The results concerning listening, where 22 of the 30 teachers find a positive effect, would tend to corroborate the results of our first study, where students indicated spending time primarily on listening activities. The noticeable effects on speaking are more surprising (12 teachers find such an effect) and can perhaps be related to the extensive exposure to native-speaker accents and discourse, as our 2009 survey indicated that students do not themselves participate to any great extent in speaking activities online. In the same way, our insights into student practices indicate that the types of writing they are involved in online are mostly in a responsive, repetitive and short-statement mode, quite different from the types of writing required from them by English teachers. This might explain why only five teachers feel there to be an effect on writing.

Specific examples provided by teachers to back-up their claims of influence on language skills include the facts that students  are less disturbed by rapid speech,  use current idiomatic expressions with appropriate pronunciation,  have better comprehension,  demonstrate better pronunciation in general,  are more fluent.

One (non-native) teacher stated that there was no evidence of improved pronunciation in class.

Influences of OILE on teaching practices

Slightly over half of the teachers say that students' practices with online resources influences their teaching. As examples, two refer to their own use of internet in preparing courses or seeking responses to student questions in class, four indicate using television series in class; one refers to students' favourite series in her teaching and another works with them on how to exploit these resources specifically for learning English. She encourages them in this type of practice, shows them how they can use these types of activities to improve their English, has them keep learning logs and tries to get them to realize that in fact they use English every day and fluency is "just around the corner" (Teacher #5).

Slightly over a third of the teachers ( 12) indicate that they would like to adjust their teaching practices to better integrate this new given in the English learning landscape, although only a few provide specific reasons. Among those stated are: to build motivation, "to be in phase with my students' practices and interest them as much as possible", "it is that type of English that students will need most during their lifetime -that which they will come into most contact with".

Among those who answer that they don't intend to modify their teaching, reasons cited include the fact that their subject area doesn't lend itself to such contents, that the teaching programmes are very rigid and cannot be adapted, that they don't want to be the only one in their department to make such changes (although they don't indicate exactly what kinds of change they envisage).

Perceived problems

Finally, teachers were questioned about perceived problems with using these online practices in the classroom. Their answers (Graph 6) predictably target the illegal aspects of downloading songs or series and also hesitations related to intrusion into the private lives of their students.

Graph 6

One teacher comments quite extensively on this question: "My idea of teaching to specialists of other disciplines means that I do not subscribe at all to the problems you quote in question 9. Yes, some activities are illegal. And they do them anyhow. We may as well build something on that. Bad quality English? I don't know what that means: if we're speaking of register, we can also use that to construct something on style. It's still English and that's what's important" (Teacher #5).

One teacher's position

In order to flesh out this composite description of teachers' attitudes towards OILE, a look at one teacher's position (Teacher #5) could be read as somewhat typical of the group. These are the opinions of a 34 year-old French woman teaching in a political sciences institute, which she considers to be a "privileged context". She thinks that OILE concerns about 50% of her students, that the number is increasing and that this has both positive and negative effects on English courses. She notices improvement in both the listening and speaking skills of her students, due, in her opinion, mostly to watching series, and cites the use of "netspeak" idioms as proof of participation in OILE. She thinks that internet has brought English into the daily life of her students, occasionally refers to their extra-curricular contacts with English and at the same time considers such contacts to be part of her students' private life and therefore that it does not really have a place in the classroom. Despite this, she gets her students to keep learning logs and tries to encourage them to make use of these resources in a more "educational" and less passive way.

This teacher demonstrates a rather paradoxical position, that may be typical of many in the profession.

Although young, she is already somewhat disconnected from the practices of her students. She feels she has no place in the "private life" of her students, yet she senses the learning potential of what they do in their free time and would like to capitalize on it. This position is backed up by similar practices of others; teacher #8, for example "asked my students to list the daily activities that bring them into contact with English. They shared their ideas in order to develop new practices (podcasts, radios, series, Facebook or Twitter pages configured in English, funny sites like Fmylife, etc)". We again encounter the idea that somehow teachers would like to "tap into" these activities in English, but do not as yet do so in any systematic or targetted way.

Teacher #5 also seems to feel there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to learn English, or at least an "effective" way (where cognitive processes such as questioning the content and "noticing" play an important role) and an "ineffective" way (identified as learner passivity): "these activities are not yet really, I believe, used for learning (not enough "conscious processing"). In the end they are really quite passive (ok, they watch a series, films in English, read forums, but haven't yet developed the reflexes of a "specialist" -questioning the vocabulary used, picking out structures or simply remarking language used."

Both the potential and the wariness expressed here are shared by Teachers #9 and #7. The first states: "The phenomenon is interesting especially for students who cannot travel, but annoying for the false conclusions that they can come to or the register of English which is not always perceived by them as too familiar." The second finds: "The principle drawback with these practices is in my opinion that they don't hone a rigourous mind. Students often surf on the internet without really paying attention and absorb things without any ulterior systematisation, with the risk of reinforcing vague, indeterminate knowledge, a phenomenon all too present with students in non-language disciplines."

These converging comments about language learning methodology lead us to wonder why teachers express these types of hesitation. Is it to maintain or reinforce their role as an educator (authority), is it because they have no confidence in the previous education of their students to have prepared them for autonomous learning, is it because they feel only one model of learning is correct or appropriate, … ?

One of the conclusions we may come to, based on the comments of 5 or 6 teachers from our sample, is that teachers seem to be convinced of the potential interest of internet resources for language learning, especially concerning the spoken language, but feel the need for adaptations or educational frameworks for such resources. This would thus take such content out of the realm of the fully authentic and of course out of the area of informal learning and bring it more fully into the scope of OER.

  percentage of students they think are involved teachers' estimates of numbers involved in OILE Graph 1

  practice English online in their free time"Graph 2

The total number is over 100%, as 3 teachers chose

answers each.