-Lecturer at Cornell University-
Claire M. Ménard
Class blog for a French 102 class (ACTFL Novice High)
Visit : http://travelblogrutgersfre102spring2015.weebly.com
THE PROJECT: Each student was assigned a French speaking country that they would visit virtually through the semester. Then they had to send a postcard once or twice a week to the rest of the class. This postcard had a different theme each time.
This blog project had three main objectives.
1) INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION: First I thought it was important to give my students the occasion to communicate with each other at home, outside of the class environment.
2) AUTONOMY: I wanted to give them a certain level of autonomy and creativity, that is to say I wanted them to start owning their capacity to speak French by experiencing with the language on their own.
3) GENERAL KWONLEDGE OF THE FRANCOPHONE WORLD: I wanted them to get to know more about French and Francophone culture.
The modes of communication used in this project are both interpersonal and presentational and the students have to use computers or language lab resources.
At first sight, it might seem challenging to combine of all those objectives in one activity in a novice class.
The challenges were mostly the following:
1) Finding a written activity which would take place once or twice a week during the semester and which was not going to become too strenuous for novice students.
2) Have students write about a cultural topic with limited vocabulary. At the novice level their vocabulary is still fairly limited even though this activity also aims at expanding their lexical abilities.
SOLUTION: So I came up with the idea of a postcard. Writting a postcard is fun, short and simple, but still convey a lot of information. Also culturally French and Francophones tend to still use postcards when they travel or go on vacation (fairly more than other culture). Then, since we are now in the digital age, I decided we were going to use electronic postcards that were going to be send through a blog, which the entire class could visit.
Instruction sheet provided to the students:
Blog adress on the internet: