Jean-Paul Narcy-CombesUniversité Sorbonne nouvelle – Paris 3

Diltec – EA 2288 (Paris 3 – Partis 6)

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Teaching. New York: Palgrave. Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking University Teaching. A conversational framework for the

effective use of learning technologies. London: Routledge Narcy-Combes, J-P. (2005). Didactique des langues et TIC. Paris: Ophrys. Narcy-Combes, J-P., & Narcy-Combes, M-F. (2007). La tâche, réponse à des problèmes

spécifiques dans le contexte universitaire français. Le français dans le monde –Recherches et application Juillet (pp.73-88).

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CSOA :from a blended to a distance course  CSOA is the French acronym for scientific

oral presentations in English. It is an experimental (action research)

course for Master and PhD students in linguistics, applied linguistics or psycholinguistics (Narcy-Combes & Narcy-Combes, 2007, Bertin & al, 2009).

It corresponds to an initial face-to-face course of twelve 90–minute sessions in a term of 12 weeks.

initial session: tutor-led introduction to the course; followed by two five-stage sequences of activities; stage one: learners select a research article in their

domain; stage 2: learners turn the article into a very detailed

plan (titles, headlines, subheads, etc.), they e-mail it to tutor who sends feedback in return;

second meeting with tutor: feedback and suggestions of micro tasks;

stage 3: Powerpoint presentation sent to tutor; who sends feedback in return;

stage 4: rehearsed oral presentation e-mailed as audio attachment to tutor, who sends feedback in return;

stage 5 : final presentation to a group of no more than 12 learners.

This sequence is repeated a second time. Each of the stages can be justified by referring to theories.

Due to their domain of research, the learners are sensitive to this theoretical framework.

The cognitive work of the earlier stages is accepted because the final stage is a real-world activity leading to interaction with the other learners and with the tutor (a specialist of the field).

Results are positive: learner satisfaction is high; second presentation is of better quality than

the first one (process and product). Phonological nativization (Grosbois, 2006) is

not totally overcome and the reading source of the input can be felt in some presentations;

Slides have very few misprints, but errors occur in speech.

The reading techniques, the transformation of the article into a detailed series of titles, and the designing of the Powerpoint presentation could be monitored and feedback sent to the teacher and learner (which techniques are not effective, errors not seen to, etc.).

Words or phrases that are likely to be difficult to pronounce for a French speaker of English could be indicated with suggestions of practice.

A research project is currently under way including the use of teaching agents to see how this could be implemented.

The course will soon be available as a distance course on a web-based platform.

Videoconferencing sessions will replace the face-to-face sessions when the presentations are actually given, which will maintain the possibility of collective debate.

The videoconferencing sessions will:- structure the course (Lamy & Hampel, 2007)- give face validity to the work done by the

learners.

A text in Hungarian is not as transparent as a text in English for speakers of French;

Indo-european words do not look the same; Scientific/technical content will need to be

known in advance; So far colleagues think such tasks cannot be

tackled before year 4 (250 hours), while they can be tackled sooner in English (except for answering questions);

Phonology might be less of a problem (predictable regularity) ,morphology more;

Specific training in reading aloud;

Two parallel approaches: (1) a lexical approach (instance-based L

production); (2) parallel build up of agglutinative

morphological rules in order to deal more adequately with the chunks;

Transforming sentences into titles might be too complex;

Pair work might be approriate; Finnish will offer more internet-based support

(corpora, text-to-speech, etc.).

Resources Texts in English and in Hungarian or

Finnish; Preparing one presentation in English and

one in Hungarian at the same time might help.

A blended approach has certainly improved the situation and the final presentations are very good.

Combination of interaction and individual work is positive.

Favouring a plurilingual approach to language learning whenever possible might facilitate the learning and make it more efficient.

ICT tools can certainly help but they are not always available in the case of the less taught languages.