9 Instructor’s Guide Unit 0
Make this chapter invisible to your students on the right of this window or on the “Organize” page to the left.
This unit orients the students to the four types of activities in each of the content units: reading and working through the Atelier, doing a curation, preparing for Talk Abroad with a fake session, and bridging to the next unit in Jeter le pont 0→1.
Preparing the Atelier tasks
For this I generally assign readings and tasks from the Atelier. It is typical beginning week work all the while some students play the add-drop game, a.k.a, course shopping. I give surveys (interest and past experience in the language or a modified FLAS for language anxiety), we play games like Kahoot, we do a lot of classroom community building activities that also review earlier French language acquisition such as: salutations, favorite activities, courses and majors, recent holiday travel or festivities, favorite foods, favorite movies and media, etc. Especially, however, I get them looking at and using the Atelier, by doing readings and activities in it.
There is a companion app, LangWay, for both Android and Apple phones and tablets. It will be available soon. It will connect to a stripped down clone of the course. TBD.
Curation 0
Curation 0 has a Google Doc if you want to use it. Typically, after a getting to know one another activity, I’ll ask students to team up with one or more partners to do a collaborative curation. You may opt over time to assign more curations as team work, but I generally one do this orientation curation collaboratively. Since this first week or two is spent on learning how to use the materials for this course and for review of what they should know by this level of French, I use this curation to build a collective review site. For Curation 0 I ask them to identify what they feel is their weakest link in their French. Often they choose a grammar point (too often the subjunctive, as if . . . ) or a skill (speaking, listening, vocabulary retention), but some focus on pragmatics or intercultural communication. I give free reign. If there is time, I prepare them for doing good internet research with the help of the university Humanities librarian, John Glover. Here are the three Kaltura videos that that they created especially for our French 202 course, but which serve all our French language learners: Searching basics , VCU Libraries Search & Databases , and Finding News. Obviously, the VCU bent on these pertains to our holdings, but much of what is shown applies to most college and university libraries today, so they may be relevant. The Google Classroom documents for finding a topic and doing preliminary research and writing site summaries is here. I may wait until the Unit 1 curation to go deeply into researching or I may divide up researching across the first three curations, adding to their digital literacy and proficiency as the course proceeds.
After an introduction to research, as individuals, students search the web for sites that address their point faible. I insist here that the site be authentic, i.e., in French by native speakers, not something made by American students on YouTube or in English by Francophone wannabe French teachers. This insistence is to familiarize them to doing research in target language in authentic materials. Once they have three to five good sites, they discuss them with partners, sharing and saying what they like/dislike about the sites. It is a good point at this juncture to underscore your Google Translate policy. More importantly, I would highly suggest using Dr. Errol O’Neill’s training on best practices for using Translate. Make a copy of my French version of his Google Form. It works well to have each group input sentences they think would be good to include in their group curation as a whole class exercise. After starting to learn how to use Google translate, students write up a summary of one or more of the sites, along the lines of an annotated bibliography. They share their summaries in groups and the group chooses one or two to present to the whole class. They draft a brouillon together, using the summaries and the discussions. Furthermore, I teach them how not using Google Translate to take an English draft into French (and reinforce that it would be a violation of the Honor Code), but also how to successfully use workreference.com, bonpatron.com, linguee.com, and, if there is time and interest, the Centre National de Ressources textuelles et lexicales site. Post 2022, language faculty need to work with their students on the best ways to use Chat GPT and other AI intelligently, honestly, and competently. There is a student chapter (Comment profiter des outils numériques pour améliorer votre français) you can include in your version of this etextbook that may prove useful to students, clarify your plagiarism and cheating policy, and introduce digital literacy lessons on using technologies to improve language learning.
Sometimes, there just isn’t enough time or the class enrollment is so volatile that we just do a curation 0 as a whole class. Together we survey the most pressing class “trous” to shore up. Everyone, then, just looks up one site on that topic and we all share. Together we draft the brouillon and we revise it. All these choices on the professor’s part have to do with time factors, class size, student proficiency levels, and motivation.
In the rare instance that I have 3 weeks built into Unit 0, I will start the entire curation task using the Question Formulation Technique from the Right Question Institute. If not, I save that for introductory work in Unit 1.
Talk Abroad 0:
Instructors may choose to use other virtual tutoring sites (Conversifi, iTalki, Boomalang, etc.) or set up a teletandem with another class in a target country or maybe even language leaners of the same language in other states or countries (eg., I’ve done so successfully with the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Hidalgo). The Google Doc contains the information on TalkAbroad, but here goes again:
Tandem Canada has a great video to support student strategies for preparing a successful virtual exchange:
Jeter le pont 0→1
This short task bridges Unit 0 and Unit 1. It is designed to get students to reflect on what they learned in Unit 0 (mainly how to use these course materials) and to prepare them for the work of Unit 1 where they will focus on their identity and expressing who how one presents oneself in autobiographical or biographical ways.
The CV that they start here spirals back in Unit 4 where they will build on it. For the moment, however, they are learning what a CV is and how a Francophone CV is built in contrast to the American resume. To that end, they should have one or more model CVs. I’ve provided one from one of my 202 students as well as a link to a French one. You can, however, opt to use one of your own. If it is a Google Doc, you’ll need to make sure the doc is shared publicly under the share button (top right of the Google Doc). Then, you’ll publish the CV (under the file menu/publish), grabbing the embed code. Replace my embed code in your cloned Atelier on the “Jeter le pont” page. You’ll probably have to delete any text that comes after the ‘pub’ of the link :
https://docs.google.com/document/..../pub. You may get an error message if you leave anything after ‘/pub’.
In Unit 4, students will have access to CVs that are oriented to specific career paths. Since the thrust of this task is simply to get the students used to a CV and to consider themselves as learners, multilingual individuals, and future professionals, the assessment of the CV is essentially that they selected a format and filled in some of their information. They should be encouraged to do as much as possible now since it will ease their workload during the last unit, at the end of the semester.
Here are the Google Classroom instructions and the templates.
Template for students to create their own CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u_f9xMgw7vhOFsrfKgtq3p7U2Dboaj2VmvaLl2oCiSg/edit?usp=sharing
