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Bristol Case Study

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This article is a follow-up to the University of Bristol Case-Study, also written by John Parkin, published in ReCALL Newsletter Number 11, June 1997.

The co-ordination and integration of IT and degree-level French

The adaptation of IT to language teaching at university level offers enormous possibilities, but requires specialist co-ordination and advanced technical support. My own department has taken the initiative in appointing a language co-ordinator to oversee our methods and approaches, and my university benefits from a newly-founded Institute for Learning and Research Technology which continues to produce materials adaptable to our teaching requirements. My paper outlines the ways in which these two advances can be used to improve the teaching of French, particularly French grammar, using several modern methods, yet in the context of a traditional syllabus and examination pattern.

I work in a department which has retained traditional methods of written assessment in Final Honours BA French since the beginning of my career twenty-six years ago; and that for good reasons. Prose translation is an excellent way of testing students' grammatical and stylistic ability plus their active vocabulary; unseen translation into English demands a wide passive vocabulary while also probing candidates' competence in their own language, which competence they should develop in whatever degree course they are taking; finally the extended essay in French reveals their awareness of register, their ability to construct and sustain a written argument, the extent of their knowledge of idiom and structure, and their ability to use both with sensitivity and precision. So a pattern of assessment of proven worth survives not out of inertia but with our active support. However the preparation for these same examined tests is something which modern technology can improve significantly and will continue to do so as systems become more powerful, more flexible and above all more widely available.

The particular area in which I have therefore concentrated my efforts as a final-year language tutor is tuition in grammar. Again this is with good reason. No educated French person enjoys hearing his/her language misused, and however low standards of grammatical knowledge have fallen at sub-degree level, it is therefore unworthy of a European country to produce specialist graduates who cannot handle the main language they have learnt at a level which its partner nation's citizens cannot merely tolerate but approve. The problem is how to achieve the progress required between first-year and final-year level efficiently enough to make the effort worthwhile, and adaptably enough to handle particular areas of difficulty in sufficient depth and in a way appropriate to students of different levels of ability. There are two solutions which Bristol favours: specialist co-ordination of language teaching, and the customising of grammatical exercises using computers.

The cadre of language teachers operating in the department possess vast experience. However language teaching is scarcely their only role, nor is it a role which in any case they were appointed specifically to fulfil. In other words, while being much more than a mere chore, the weekly language class is rarely more than a supplement to lecturers' specialist work on content units, literary and other, in which the linguistic ability of students is of course developed, particularly in seminar presentations and extended essays, but in which it is again not the prime concern. Accordingly, in the summer of 1998 the University of Bristol sanctioned the appointment in French of a full-time colleague to co-ordinate language teaching. To what extent this trend is common within universities I do not know, but the job description published last session attracted a field of high-powered candidates among whom the appointee, Mademoiselle Pascale Lenig, had the advantages of experience in lectrice work at a British university, plus specialised skills in linguistics: she has recently completed (with distinction) a ma�trise in the University of Strasbourg.

Already in 1997 the University's Teaching and Learning Group had awarded the French department funds sufficient to recruit a one-year part-time language co-ordinator, whose specific role was to assess, evaluate and report on our language-teaching methods, and to make suggestions and prepare materials which would help address or solve the specific problems we face. It was said when the award was made that this was something from which all similar departments could benefit, and certainly we regarded the experiment as one which might lead to better practice within the department and throughout the School of Modern Languages of our home university. Key tasks were to assess the teaching-patterns within the different years of our course, to assemble a dossier of good practices and produce study-skills packages relevant to the needs of all years, and particularly the final year, who return to us after prolonged residence abroad during which their oral abilities develop very markedly, whilst their sense of register and their grammatical accuracy may actually decline. Considerable progress was made in all three areas and the ground-breaking work done by our part-time co-ordinator has already been taken over by our new full-time co-ordinator who was appointed for the session now commencing. In the immediate future her role will be to further clarify and systematise the Department's approach to the language teaching by defining its goals, to assess and develop the methods most likely to result in those goals being achieved, and to brief successive waves of new language tutors (French and English speaking) as they are recruited as lecteurs from French universities, as lecturers nowly appointed, or as teaching assistants from our pool of research students.

In terms of grammar teaching we already benefit from full, home-produced dossiers of material covering both the terminology and the basic areas of grammar at first and second year levels. These dossiers are the basic tools for two courses entitled Structures of Language and Language Skills Development (the latter having two components corresponding to the levels expected of first- and second-year students), and we are aware of how closely they fit with the programmes GRAMEX and GRAMDEF produced by the TELL consortium in Hull, which we possess and which aim to cover precisely the needs which we have identified. First-year students come to Bristol often with minimal training in formal grammar and often not understanding basic terms like transitive verb, indirect object etc. By integrating our own courses with the said programmes we should be able to fill these gaps more effectively, with class-time and private study being devoted both to dossier work and computer work, while mailing lists will allow us to gain instant feedback on the progress of the enterprise: student rooms in the Bristol halls of residence have this year been fully wired up with computer connexions.

Even without the TELL software, moreover, first-year LSD, as comprising its own dossier of hard-copy material, represents a basic course in elementary French grammar in a series of ten modules corresponding to the ten weeks traditionally assigned to the unit. As a supplement to that unit, and using ToolBook course-ware produced by Bristol University's Educational Technology Service (ETS: now the Learning Technology Support Service which operates within Bristol's Institute for Learning and Research Technology), I have, acting as IT co-ordinator in French, already produced CALL exercises which provide back-up to these different modules, as well as some more advanced exercises used in fourth-year teaching. These exercises have been demonstrated at various open days within Bristol, were also shown to the Teaching Quality Assessors who inspected the French Department in February 1996, and were the subject of a presentation at the ALT-C conference in Strathclyde University in the following September and of an article in the June 1997 number of ReCall. Subsequently a number of colleagues in other universities requested and have been given copies for demonstration purposes while the material is used internally by our own Bristol University Language Centre, which teaches French at sub-degree level..

The exercises comprise a series of adaptations of CALScribe, a programme initially devised as a teaching tool by Bristol ETS and already used in different contexts by other Bristol departments including Dentistry and Law. CALScribe is a sophisticated but highly flexible ToolBook template which allows the programmer to ask questions of several types (Multiple choice, Pick from list, Point to, etc.) and to comment, mark and offer explanations accordingly. Using a variety of such questions, our first-year LSD CALL exercises provide a linear, self-paced learning track which covers such matters as basic tense usage, agreements and articles, the subjunctive mood, the active and passive voices and the use of prepositions. The materials are mounted on two servers in computer labs available to students for private study the clock round, and technical support has been provided by the Arts Faculty Computer Officer and Computing Service. Matters like the insertion of accents (always an irritation on Windows machines) can be rendered simple using a special chart installed as a background item on all modules, and additional explanations can be added to existing files using a DICTION.ARY function which produces a pop-up chart at any point in a screen where a difficulty has been foreseen by the programmer.

The Language Co-ordinator's short-term brief in the context of this project will therefore be manifold. Firstly the said exercises require improvement in design and quality. More significantly we are looking for her to integrate a second-year CALScribe programme which has been devised by her part-time predecessor, M. S�bastien Pascal, to support our more sophisticated and ambitious second-year Language Skills Development unit. This latter covers problems like gender and number, relative clauses, advanced tense forms, the distinction between C'est and Il est (superficially a simple matter, but in practice hard to define and codify) and finally a dossier concerning letter-writing in different contexts and using different registers..

In terms of fourth-year grammar, our intended programme is less rigid, but no less significant. Despite the relatively high standard achieved by our students in final-year language work, it is important to identify the remaining areas of weakness and produce useful materials accordingly, particularly given the third-year slippage mentioned above. This process I have again piloted using CALScribe on three particular subjects. Firstly I have sought to clarify the agreement rules concerning so-called reflexive verbs, which term is in fact a misnomer referring to verbs like se souvenir and s'en aller which are always used with an object pronoun. The said agreement rules are sufficiently subtle to guarantee that few native speakers could reliably articulate them, yet they are systematically and accurately applied in print, and they can, moreover, be quite simply explained on the basis of a few types: passive reflexives (e.g. la guerre s'est d�clar�e), which simply mirror the passive voice; reciprocal reflexives (e.g. ils se sont �crit), which describe actions performed mutually by members of a group (cf. they kissed one another: ils se sont embrass�s); genuine reflexives (e.g. nous nous sommes lav�s), where the agent does the action to him/herself; and subjective reflexives (e.g. elle s'est empar�e du couteau), that is verbs where the object pronoun has no logical function but must still be included for purposes of grammatical accuracy. To explain these distinctions and their subsequent ramifications in class always generates confusion, confusion which can be largely dispelled by the simple, ever-patient computer programme, with its in-built explanation function.

The second application concerns adverbs in -ment of the type l�galement (as formed from l�gal), savamment (as formed from savant) etc. This is an area where Francophones themselves hesitate, and I have recently seen charmantement and appar�ment in print in French newspapers - signs, perhaps, of a worrying trend. Once more, the basic rules covering this issue are not many, nor are their exceptions, but to distribute lists is often merely to provide pupils with folder-fodder: the lists will never again be consulted, let alone learned. By contrast the computer exercise, by taking some of the pupil's initiative but pre-empting most of his/her embarrassment, can help to explain the different points lucidly and even attractively, as can be said of the third matter I have addressed, namely the morphology of adjectives ending phonetically [al] (e.g. bancal, sale, conjugal, ovale etc.) which remains an incidental matter of spelling which students find it inexplicably difficult to master.

The three subjects outlined, albeit significant, are really little more than personal hobby-horses in the wider context of fourth-year teaching. Again, given the preparatory work undertaken in 1997-8 and the availability of qualified and enthusiastic co-ordinator, colleagues' established course materials and OHP slides can be combed for similar points of difficulty at advanced level. Similarly, and in a way more importantly, students can be invited to submit requests for support on points of usage and grammar where they themselves feel weak, and it is again a considerable advance for the department to have a co-ordinator who can link teaching teams to student needs in this way. The immediate prospect is therefore for a whole wealth of other customised files to be made and distributed to our different access points.

However the medium term prospect is vastly different in scope and the more exciting for that. The number of students possessing their own PCs and laptops continues to increase all the time and there is no reason why the same files cannot be given to them individually for home rather than laboratory use. Colleagues, including French-speaking colleagues, are already doing precisely that with the materials I have described above. CALScribe files can be loaded on any Windows computer and a smaller memory than that recommended for programming is needed for actual installation and operation. Within a very short time one can therefore envisage a store of home-produced language exercises related to known areas of grammatical weakness being opened at nominal cost to all students (floppy discs are hardly an expensive item these days) and which they will use, share and discuss in their own studies and homes rather than in the less friendly environment of the computer room.

Once one has a certain acquaintance with CALScribe, plus a machine with 16MB of memory (scarcely an excessive requirement these days), it is possible to output a specific exercise of, say, 60 pages relatively quickly, certainly in less than two working days, and no technical programming skills are required. Moreover to edit such files is even easier. However two days can be a long time in academia and a considerable enrichment of our CALL activities will come on-stream this session via the work currently being done in Learning and Research Technology on a replacement for CALScribe, whose original author moved on from Bristol some months ago. The new template, CALNet, has been developed by Simon Price at LTSS and will be pressed into service by French as soon as is practicable, extending our horizons still further. It has been devised in collaboration with Asymetrix, the company who produce ToolBook, and has been tested successfully in other departments at Bristol. As an authoring template it will continue to offer the same kind of sample questions as CALScribe, but with a simpler and much quicker authoring procedure, meanwhile, though its files will be downloadable to floppy disk and CD, they are primarily designed to be made available on the Internet, at the same time offering the facility for tutors to record login information, scores achieved on tests and also the length of time a student has spent on a particular module. This of course is precisely the kind of information which is needed to monitor remote learning effectively and to assess its efficiency as a system.

CALNet is already available to our co-ordinator and we anticipate that she will be outputting new grammar modules well before the end of this session. Even as things stand at present, however, the basic equipment is in place at various campus sites, whilst upwards of 50% of students now possess their own PC, increased technological expertise is available to us via our colleagues at LTSS and ILRT, the flow of information from the student body has been initiated, and the Teaching and Learning Committee of our Department is fully briefed on these different projects.

At a time when colleagues remain, and for good reason, preoccupied with research output in their own specialist areas, it is fair to say and good to know that developments such as those we have initiated at Bristol can free up time for their reading and writing, speed up and enrich the proliferation of new and valuable teaching methods, and hand over the specialist co-ordination of language teaching to those with the time and particular expertise to run the work to maximum efficiency.

John Parkin, French Department, University of Bristol
Tel 0117-928-7911, Fax 0117-928-8922, Email: [email protected]

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