From anxiety to pleasure: A case study of online foreign language learning

Nous examinons la fonction de l’affectivité, notamment l’anxiété et le plaisir, qui sont exprimés par des étudiant.e.s chinois.e.s et français.e.s lors d’un projet de télécollaboration en cours d’anglais, langue étrangère. Les étudiant.e.s ont communiqué ensemble au sujet de leurs études, leurs lieux d’origine et leurs projets de classe en employant des moyens écrits, oraux et iconiques. La création d’une “communauté” semble avoir favorisé une réduction de l’anxiété, un affect fréquemment associé à l’expression orale en langue étrangère.This paper examines the function of affective factors, specifically anxiety and pleasure, as manifested by Chinese and French students during an English language telecollaboration project. Students communicated about their studies, places of origin, and class projects through written, oral, and iconic means. The creation of a “community” appears to have fostered the reduction of anxiety commonly associated with foreign language oral expression

Impact of software design on on-line text reconstruction

This study examines the impact of software design on user practices concerning progression and performance while working on a text reconstruction activity that is preceded by an audiovisual presentation. The entries of participants during their first task of a science-based on-line activity aimed at French-speaking University students are analyzed. The entries of 97 students working on the first activity are described in detail, and then the impact of correctness on terminating the first activity of a larger population of 142 students is examined. Students of varying degrees of motivation and language knowledge appear to personalize the task. Users generally proceeded in a linear fashion, although the option of skipping from one sentence or one paragraph to another within the text is fully available. The immediate feedback after mistakes appears to encourage users to re-enter a new spelling or conjugation of the word or a new word. While high-frequency grammatical words were often entered, avoidance of more difficult words was also recurrent. The findings suggest that users do rely upon meaning as well as language knowledge when searching for answers. There is a greater short-term retention of words in the first paragraph of the text and of text incorporated within the visual supports. While the use of dots representing letters is not relied upon by users, the immediate feedback appears to offer learners the opportunity to immediately review common mistakes such as homophones or word endings. This immediacy of feedback is a strength of computer learning that is often difficult to achieve in a classroom

Portraying the language-culture link through spatial representation in three US language textbooks

This paper investigates the representation of "linguistic space", in three recent foreign language textbooks published in the United States of America. It follows a tradition of textbook research concerning ethnic community stereotyping and the objective of peaceful and just nation-state representation. This perspective intersects with principles of multicultural education, an important tenant of teacher education, teaching practice, and education research in the United States (cf. Banks, J. A. and McGee Banks, C.A, 2004). The premise is that no textbook is neutral, but disseminates political positions. Greater awareness of how these positions are depicted may help teachers and students to create more critical and reflective learning experiences and judgment. This paper examines the representations of where English, French and Spanish language communities are geographically situated through illustrations in language textbooks for adults published by an influential firm. A brief review of the goals and issues of both textbook research and multicultural education research will set the context for this case study. A quantitative analysis bridges three overlapping spatial facets: nation representation, land-use, and time-period. Space, which can be divided into spatial gradients for analysis, has been accorded attention in the fields of geography and sociology. Sociologists Lobao et al (2007) summarize four existing trends in discipline-wide research when considering space inequality: (1) space distribution, use, and experience across lines of class, gender, and race/ethnicity; (2) as a channel or amplifier of inequality, such as in schools; (3) its creation through uneven development b

Portraying the language-culture link through spatial representation in three US language textbooks

This paper investigates the representation of "linguistic space", in three recent foreign language textbooks published in the United States of America. It follows a tradition of textbook research concerning ethnic community stereotyping and the objective of peaceful and just nation-state representation. This perspective intersects with principles of multicultural education, an important tenant of teacher education, teaching practice, and education research in the United States (cf. Banks, J. A. and McGee Banks, C.A, 2004). The premise is that no textbook is neutral, but disseminates political positions. Greater awareness of how these positions are depicted may help teachers and students to create more critical and reflective learning experiences and judgment. This paper examines the representations of where English, French and Spanish language communities are geographically situated through illustrations in language textbooks for adults published by an influential firm. A brief review of the goals and issues of both textbook research and multicultural education research will set the context for this case study. A quantitative analysis bridges three overlapping spatial facets: nation representation, land-use, and time-period. Space, which can be divided into spatial gradients for analysis, has been accorded attention in the fields of geography and sociology. Sociologists Lobao et al (2007) summarize four existing trends in discipline-wide research when considering space inequality: (1) space distribution, use, and experience across lines of class, gender, and race/ethnicity; (2) as a channel or amplifier of inequality, such as in schools; (3) its creation through uneven development b

I think we need…: Verbal expressions of opinion in conference presentations in English and in French

This paper examines the frequency and functions of English and French opinion markers in 60 presentation transcripts of the EIIDA corpus in Linguistics and in Chemistry, Geochemistry, Marine, and Water Sciences. These functions, found in all four sub-corpora, include highlighting a general or strong opinion, proposing a hypothesis or negotiating with the audience, expressing doubt, or classifying information. Several important differences can be observed. First, the English verb think frequently functions as a discourse marker, more so than the French penser. In French, adverbials, the pronoun on and the conjunction que are frequent with an opinion verb, but were largely absent in English. In Linguistics, English speakers are more likely to express the subjective opinion that a result is “interesting”, whereas in the other three sub-corpora speakers are more likely to employ a modal verb, except with think, to hedge a statement. As regards to discipline, there appears to be slightly more markers of opinion in Linguistics. In the Sciences, markers of opinion are often related to an observation (on se rend compte, ‘one realizes’). Overall, opinion verbs tend here to be dialogic, serving to express doubt or to negotiate with the audience, rather than to confirm a forceful personal position