How is the Effect of French Online Instruction?

“Bonjour à tous，Aujourd’hui，nous discutons le sujet de…”

This is typical scene of Celine Doucet, a lecturer of French in WKU on Blackboard, who will repeat this process 4 times per week.

This is a fresh new experience for her, even though she used to employ PowerPoint as auxiliary tool to teaching, just as many her peers do before, however, this is a an absolutely brand new attempt which leverages digital power for every step of instruction.

It could be challenging sometimes, especially, as we see, French has unique signs such as à ç ê ë œ… which might be tough for students to get used to on Blackboard.

But she firmly believes that teaching online is a trend of future, no one could deter it. Therefore, instead of opposing it, she developed an optimistic attitude of embracing it and adapted herself to the new platform.

“Language learning depends tremendously on interaction, which is something that I missed in traditional classroom. But I also found the new teaching vibe is rather dynamic, which I think could be incorporated to my teaching arrangement in the future.”

Due to a lack of face-to-face communication, it is hard to draw the attention of students and convey the key points efficiently. In order to resolve this problem, she adopted an interesting French textbook, serving as a flow diagram. Besides, she would try to add some small activities to motivate her students occasionally.

“For French beginners. It could be hard to involve in discussion part. But I will ask student to compare the similarities and differences between different languages. It encourages them to reflect on the process of acquiring a new tongue and ties new information to their previous knowledge network.”

“Usually, Students are asked to submit a video or audio in French on various topics related to daily life.” She told me, with the assistance of online teaching tools, students even presented a gratifying progress that she had not expected.”

Time-management, Good Plan and Persistence are the keys to excellence. Those universal qualities are also applicable to stand out on online courses. She encouraged students to keep practicing French and keep up good performance!