[INTRO.]
I came late to technology, or rather, technology came late to me. Yet as someone who was taught both English and Spanish by the same method I was taught Latin--mostly by translating meaningless excerpts, devoid of context and chosen, I presume, for their grammatical not their intrinsically useful content--I had sworn long ago to make a point of bringing the real world into my own classroom as much as possible. Now SCOLA was already serving my cause: the moment the daily French televised newsbroadcast arrived in my living-room, I knew I had to bring it to my students--bits and pieces at first, and finally as the core of a new course I devised around it, "French Through Current Events," for the advanced (3d-year) level.
It was a student's remark, however, during one of my third-semester French classes that prompted me do something about the Information Superhighway. That day, the students had been putting the interrogative form to work, trying to learn as much as possible about each other by asking questions. Eventually they came around to me, wanting to know how I had met my American husband. (We met as pen-pals forty years ago.) They had struggled quite a while in their attempt, when finally a freshman brightened up and exclaimed in franglais: "I know! I know! You met through CHAT!" Although my husband and I had at the time corresponded with air-mail sheets and fountain pens--not with stone-tablets and styluses, the generation-gap suddenly gapped miles wider at my feet. I concluded at that moment that it was high time for me to take a dip in the Internet. I sensed that it might constitute a rich, motivating source of texts and information for language learners (and for myself), but how to draw on it was far from obvious to me. I therefore approached the Internet the way I would approach uninviting waters: by dipping a toe in it from as far as possible, not at all convinced that it was safe to dive in that fathomless Sargasso Sea, and wondering if I would ever be able to float, much less do the dog-paddle, in it. After much hesitation, I held my nose, and took the plunge.
[ASIDE]
Before going further, let me immediately say that not the least benefit to a language teacher of going technological is the humbling experience of becoming a learner just like one's students--humbling and extremely valuable. Learning to use computers is much like learning a language. It illuminates the fact that how-to-do-it lectures do not help much; that referring to the manual is a good idea in an emergency, but studying it beforehand is a species of refined torture; that what seems easily understood today will be forgotten tomorrow; that someone at hand to put you back on the right track, preferably another learner sympathetic to your struggle, is often all you need; that you get better at it only by doing it yourself, the hands-on method having no equal; that little by little, some steps become second nature and allow you to extrapolate and progress further. In other words, it gives you renewed empathy as to your students' needs, and shows you numerous ways of being more effective as a teacher.
[BACK TO THE MATTER]
Because of my student's remark, I first tried my hand at Chat. I must say that I found it insipid, haphazard, boring for the most part, and of little value as a serious pedagogical tool. E-mail and the Web, on the other hand, attracted me immediately. I shall therefore first discuss the different ways I put electronic mail to use, and then turn to the ways I use the Web.
A- [E-Mail:]
What language-teacher has not tried at some point to have students correspond with native speakers of the target language? Typically the class writes a nice little letter under the instructor's supervision, and a month or so later, with luck, the class receives a nice little letter written under the same conditions--an exercise mildly motivating, but alas too infrequent to be of much pedagogical value. Behold instead a letter written by a student at 10:00 AM and an answer to that letter delivered on his/her screen at 10:15AM--no longer a class-project, but an individual correspondence, an authentic exchange of information! Colleagues who favor form over content might cringe at the idea of some not-quite-perfect French floating around the Internet. Yet there is truly no need for instructors to control how students write when they use E-mail. E-Mail is language liberated, where personal motivation and, yes, fear of ridicule become the only masters. My view of it is this: students too often take it for granted that correcting their mistakes must be my sole raison d'être. They assume that, grammatically speaking, I must have seen it all, and therefore cannot possibly be shocked by any mistakes they make: in other words, they tend to be slipshod with me. When, however, French corespondents automatically reply with corrections, suggestions, examples, and rules of grammar--and they rarely fail to do so, that gives American students pause (when it does not make them gasp) and they instinctively decide to pay more attention to form, even going so far as to check with me about some finer points of grammar before writing their answers--something they rarely do when they write for me! Practice makes perfect: the old adage holds particularly true in language-learning, and E-mail offers effortless practice, in addition to regular class assignments. Indeed, the purpose of any technology I offer in my courses is primarily to expand the student's use of the language .
Recruiting correspondents is not necessarily an easy task. I shamelessly contact people whose address I see on the Net, and surprisingly enough, many agree to serve with enthusiasm. Most of them, unfortunately for me, are students with only a year or two left at their universities, which means that the pool is constantly changing and that I have to proselytize on the Net more often than I'd like. In any given class, of course, not all of the students are willing to correspond, often simply for practical reasons: although Cornell is now making this increasingly easy, not all of them find getting on line practical . Some of them , on the other hand, have expressed unbounded gratitude for having "learned" E-Mail in French class!
In order to encourage more of my students to participate, if not actively, at least passively in reading messages exchanged by the active writers and their correspondents , I had to take one further step and become a List-Owner! By then, I had more or less conquered E-mail myself and I believed I was ready. The next hurdle, however, was to decipher and digest 25 pages of how-to's in Computero-English before I could assume my owner's functions--and I have the doubtful honor of having had a request from the then Cornell List Manager for permission to use some of my numerous questions for the next edition of how-to's published by Cornell Information Technology.
I use the list mostly for my advanced-level SCOLA course. The students who are not active E-mailers but are nevertheless subscribed receive all messages and participate during class in the discussion of their contents. The other advantage of the list is that, since the correspondence is not one-on-one, fewer native speakers are needed. This is a serious list, reserved for messages that bring up, discuss, and further explore current events. The students have learned a great deal from it simply by getting immediate reactions from their French or Quebecois counterparts. Hot items last semester were, among others, Le Québec Libre, and President Chirac's decision to resume nuclear tests. I also use the list to share quickly with students messages on the same current topics that I receive from other lists , and excerpts of French press-reviews that I also receive through e-mail daily. The result is that. all in one day, students may both view a segment of Scola, read an article, and have native speakers' comments on one and the same topic: style and register vary, vocabulary overlaps, points of view differ, all affording at once a linguistically and culturally rich source of information, and often prompting members of the class to send another comment or question to our list.
The servers to which I myself subscribe have turned out to be fairly painless means of getting extremely valuable information (current events, references, URLs, among others). Between 90 and 150 messages a day may not seem all that painless, but the filter-function of my E-mail program makes them a lot easier to deal with; besides, one's scanning ability improves rapidly, as well as index-finger dexterity on the delete button!
Beyond content, and the manifest cultural singularities which strike the students and are then discussed in class, E-mail also reveals interesting points style to the class. Just as in English, French E-mail language has its specific register, in which the formal "vous" has disappeared even in messages to an unknown correspondent, and in which all the formulas mandatory in traditional letters are replaced by "bonjour" and "au revoir," "salut" and "Ciao." It displays familiar language much closer to spoken language, almost closing the gap between the written and the spoken. Still and all, the vernacular reserved to exchanges between natives is clearly different from the language used when the same natives write foreigners. To elaborate: one of our correspondents last semester was also a member of the French list to which I belong, and would send similar messages to both lists. The difference in his vocabulary, tone and register, however, was most striking! As a quick example, in a message he sent to us when France resumed nuclear testing, he wrote among other things, and I translate: " I am ashamed and not proud indeed of President Chirac." In his message, written 15 minutes earlier to the French list, he had written the equivalent of: "I am more and more disgusted with our pal Chi-Chi and his what-the-hell attitude!" We study these differences in a linguistic perspective, but also draw some interesting cultural inferences from them.
E-mail provides me as well with all the samples I need when, for example, I discuss "The other language" in my third-semester class (i.e., what's going on in the language beyond the standard French of the textbooks), or when we discuss what Americans call the arrogance of the French--their general attitude about their country, about themselves, and about the superiority of their language. It is also a wonderfully quick way to retrieve information in a hurry. Just the other day, for example, my students were discussing the Louvre Pyramid and were extremely skeptical when I told them tongue-in-cheek that Pei had had the nerve to build a similar structure for some museum in this country. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember the details. I therefore sent a query to the French list, and the very same evening I had not only the answer, but also the Web address of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, complete with photographs, which I projected on the screen the following day! Listservs also came in handy last semester when I was faced with a blatant case of plagiarism. I circulated an excerpt of the suspicious text (obviously a magazine article and therefore not easy to locate) that was immediately read by over a thousand people. Plagiarists beware!
B- [The information superhighway:]
My trial run along the information superhighway consisted in dabbling with Gopher. It was rather drab, and some of the information I accessed on France, though interesting, was often outdated. Before I could get used to Mosaic, in came beautiful ,colorful, amazing Netscape. The first Netscape discovery I brought to class was a color print of the now oldest-known paleolithic cave-paintings that had been discovered in Ardeche a mere month before. The idea that one could see on one's monitor something that had been hidden for thousands of years and still remains off-limits to visitors, filled me with awe; I wanted all my students to run to the Lab and read about it! Unfortunately, I quickly realized that my students' enthusiasm did not necessarily match mine; selling grammar, I know, is par for the course, but finding it difficult to sell the marvels of the Internet came as a big letdown. It looked to me as if, in trying to cope with the wide generation gap I mentioned earlier, I had leaped too hard and overshot: most students were reluctant to use the Internet for enrichment purposes. I was later able to understand their reluctance somewhat better, when I started surfing seriously with the idea of finding them useful, intriguing, motivating items. One can spend hours clicking from link to link, can become sidetracked and lost, and can end up with information having nothing at all to do with the initial search and come back empty-handed . Whenever I found something that the students could use with profit, however, I made a Netscape "bookmark," then printed lists of URLs that I distributed in class, exhorting my students to "go look at this!" They did not. Meanwhile I had taken a workshop or two offered by Cornell Information Technologies and had become acquainted with the notion of Web pages. There, I thought, was the solution: to bring onto one page links that would allow any student of French to access information rapidly.
I cannot say that the construction of that page came easy to me. It was in fact an extremely laborious and time-consuming task, as can be attested by one of the most patient , knowledgeable, and helpful young teachers it has been my privilege to work with: Diane Kubarek of CIT. But I did create the page. The fact that I found this difficult should not discourage anyone--remember that I came late to technology, and besides highly sophisticated and ever-improving programs for the purpose, called "HTML editors," are now available that greatly simplify the job.
Henceforth, I thought, all my students had to do was start with my webpage, and they would have a world of information on France--and in French for the most part--open to them. You'd think so, yet they were still reluctant. It is true that some members of the advanced class did regularly look at the headlines and editorials in the on-line newspapers listed on the page, and they searched for information on politics and on education, for example, but I had expected more. Taking stock, I came to the conclusion that I had been misled by my own enthusiasm for the project. The fact was that the MEDIUM had changed, but the students had not! Few are willing to spend time for enrichment alone, beyond what the class requires; unless I wanted to make the Web a requirement, or the core of a course (my next project), it was obvious that they had to be led by the hand. This Spring, I therefore created for my third-semester course a simple worksheet (attached) which was destined to launch them in the Net and acquaint them with what was available to them. This worked! And it was gratifying at one point, as I went around the computer lab, to note that the students were all poring over different things--weather maps of France , articles on Gauguin, list of discotheques in Paris, grammar exercises. poetry; one student commented that he found a poem he had read only in English and was extremely pleased to find out how well he could understand it in the original version . They were working in pairs and were full of questions and comments, and turned to me only when their partners did not have the answers. Two groups even wrote letters spontaneously to the authors of of the webpages they were investigating. Next semester, I therefore plan specific assignments to be done both in and out of class at that level. They will include not only questions about information to be found but also about specific vocabulary to be used in the context of that information, and will call for personal reflections. I have already been making similar assignments this semester in my class "Le Français de l'Hôtellerie et du Tourisme" (intermediate-level): when we studied the touristic geography of France in that class, for example, I asked the students to report and reflect on additional information on French regions gathered on the Web. Some of their reflections, by the way, particularly interested me as their teacher because they revealed a somewhat naive and unsophisticated attitude towards otherness not immediately apparent in class. I imagine that when making discoveries on their own through the Web, they were less inhibited about expressing their true feelings. When we reach the unit on French gastronomy, I will send them (without warning) to a splendid link which lists some fifty of the four-hundred or so cheeses produced by France, including all the specific vocabulary necessary to distinguish one type of cheese from another. Before the lesson on wine, to give another example, I will ask them to take a pre-test offered on the Web, that will tell them how much they know or do not know about about French wines and wine-making.
[CONCLUSION]
It is clear that I am still finding my way, but I know I am now definitely on the right track. One can teach a language with no material at all, or one can teach a language with the most sophisticated of materials. The key to teaching and learning lies not really in material but in activities. Without a model when I started, the best I could do was to keep in mind what I wanted to achieve and to proceed by trial and error. I believe that my intuitions were sound, and that I was wise to be conservative and to preserve the traditional features of my courses before giving technology too much priority. As I mentioned before, I hope--in spite of extreme budget constraints now upon us--to start a pilot course completely based on E-mail and the Web. My sense is that it would be most fruitful at the intermediate level or above, when students can be fairly independent. I have not yet really tackled the audio component of the Web; it unfortunately takes a very long time to load sound, but it should certainly be included to some degree. The Net is being rewired and. we are told, loading will eventually occur at the speed of light.
Discussions with my classes confirm for me that the new technology brings students closer to the reality of another language and another culture. Presented in the right way, it can be extremely motivating because it allows them the independence necessary to all true learning. Motivation in turn brings about more willingness to search, to discover--to learn. I will end with an anecdote to make my point: one day when my third-semester class was working on the Web, a student who is always reminding me that he is taking the class only because he has to fufill the language requirement and who is muddling through with few basic skills and a minimum of effort, chose to sit alone at the computer and sullenly asked me when he opened the Paris page: "You mean I can study the Paris nightclubs?" "Be my guest," I answered. I kept an eye on him as indeed he struggled the whole hour on that link. I must quote a short sample so that you can understand my sense of achievement: "Des caves voutées datant du Moyen-Age et se succédant sur plusieurs niveaux, tel est le décor du Pluriel Club. Il y règne de ce fait, une ambiance des plus intimes qui fait de nombreux adeptes. Réservé aux couples en soirée sauf certains jours, ce club st ouvert aux personnes seules l'après-midi comme beaucoup d'autres. . . ." This is a text more complex than much that we read in third-semester French! When at the end of the hour he got up to leave, he casually said to me: "Cool!"--which, by the way, no longer needs translation into French.
SAMPLE WORKSHEET
French 123 _____________________ PETIT VOYAGE DANS L'INTERNET:
1- Regardez le premier document sur Cornell, qui a été préparé par ma classe HA266 l'année dernière. Lisez l'introduction et puis regardez une ou deux des pages. Notes:
2- Allez à la rubrique "C'est quoi la France?"
a-Ouvrez les pages de Paris (texte français) et promenez-vous un moment.
Notes:
b-voyez ce que vous pouvez faire en une semaine à Paris.
Notes:
c-allez-voir quel temps il fait sur la France aujourd'hui.
Météo:
3-Allez à la rubrique "Textes", choisissez un poème et imprimez-le.
Titre du poème:
4-Allez à la rubrique "Utilisez votre français" . Trouvez la conjugaison du sujonctif présent du verbe pouvoir.
Que je _________________
5-Allez à la rubrique "Pour mieux connaître les Français" ouvrez "le coin des francophones" (la grenouille verte). Partez à la découverte, notez quelque chose d'amusant ou d'intéressant.
Notes:
6-Allez à la rubrique "A boire et à manger". Trouvez une bonne recette et imprimez-la ou copiez-la.
Titre de la recette:
( FIN)