Integrating Digital Humanities in First Year French Language Instruction through Project-Based Language Learning

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Speaker

Ando Rasolofo
Lecturer

Brief Description

This presentation will give an account of the steps adopted in the curriculum to allow the integration of Digital Humanities during the first year program of French language teaching. The goal is to provide students opportunities to showcase what they can do with their French language abilities and demonstrate ownership of their projects and the language.

Full Abstract

This presentation will give an account of the steps adopted in the curriculum to allow the integration of Digital Humanities during the first year program of French language teaching. The stages are paired with Project-Based Language Learning (Beckett and Slater, 2005) where students use their foreign language skills to talk about actual issues or career related topics. The goal is to provide them opportunities to showcase what they can do with their French language abilities.

The skills necessary for Digital Humanities in the classroom seem to be inversely proportional to the foreign language skills of students in first or second semester second language courses. Students are at the beginner levels of their foreign language studies while Digital Humanities seem to require a good amount of knowledge of programming language. Furthermore, many Project-Based Language Learning projects seem to be geared for students with intermediate language level and higher. Students are expected to be able to know about and read French literature to extract part of speech in one of Molière’s work (Bénard and Frontini, 2018).

The stages implemented in the first year French curriculum is born out of Cro’s (2020) characterizations of both Digital Humanities and language teaching approach. Digital Humanities is categorized as weak (e.g. a single day activity), medium (e.g. multiday project), or strong (e.g. a project spanning an entire course). Similarly, language communicative approach is classified as weak, medium, or strong depending on students’ level of immersion. The content of the projects and activities used in the first year French language learning are aligned with the lessons topics and goals. To talk about their projects, students uses descriptions, asking questions, likes and dislikes. After revisions, they share and do an oral presentation of their projects on VoiceThread at the end of the semester. This process allows students to reap the full benefits that Project-Based Language Learning has to offer. Students have a platform to demonstrate ownership of both their projects and the language.

References

• Beckett, Gulbahar; Slater, Tammy. 2005. The project framework: A tool for language, content and skills integration. ELT Journal, 59 (2), 108-116.
• Bénard, Élodie; Frontini, Francesca. 2018. Les Sganarelle de Molière: un nom, des syntaxes?
• Cro, Mélinda. 2020. Integrating the Digital Humanities in the Second Language Classroom. A Practical Guide. Georgetown University Press.

Session Objectives

At the end of this session, participants will:

1. be able to have a better understanding of the role of Digital Humanities in foreign language classroom
2. learn how to implement a student-oriented project for first year language learners

Biography

Ando Rasolofo teaches all level of French language at Purchase College. Among her teaching and research interests are language teaching and technology, Second Language Acquisition, Digital Humanities, Francophonie, Linguistics.

Session Notes

Attending the presentation? Take shared notes in this Google Doc and view the final notes below.