Excellence in teaching

TEACHING FRENCH DOWN UNDER - WHY BOTHER?

After secondary teaching experience in NSW and several years lecturing at the University of Oregon, USA, Noelene Bloomfield has taught French at UWA since 1968. She has also visited many tertiary institutions in France, Europe and North America gathering up-to-date information about the latest trends in language teaching and computer-assisted learning. She is presently conducting research on the French exploration of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Noelene won an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1995. These awards represent a joint initiative by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

Despite Australia's official multicultural policy of recent years, foreign language teaching has always been a major challenge in such an isolated island as Australia, as a large majority of Australians are monolingual and have in the past seen little reason to bother learning another language.

To motivate students, it is important to create a simulated environment in the language classroom, so that from the very beginning they learn to understand French and communicate even at a basic level. The "tools" of the language, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, prepositions and adverbs, must be systematically taught, so that the students can gradually organize their accumulating fragments of language into logical "folders", to use a computer analogy. This is particularly important for adolescents or adults, who are beyond the mimicking stage of learning demonstrated by very young children. It is also vital for the older language learner not to feel embarrassed, so pair or group work encourages students to help each other in both oral and written tasks. Not only does this occasionally lead to romance, it also encourages strong friendship bonds between students, for whom university can be a strange and lonely place at first.

It is useful to orally revise past grammar and vocabulary in a circular pattern, by beginning each class with a short revision of recent and distant material. The overhead projector is very useful for visual reinforcement, as are maps and occasionally video clips. The new Multimedia Laboratory of the Arts Faculty is also immensely useful for student motivation and revision.

A useful technique to encourage participation in class is to use eye contact and to directly target inattentive students with questions. If they are unable to respond, the question can be passed to an "eager beaver", then back to the original student to check that s/he has understood. Moreover, a strategy to which students are particularly responsive is to allow them to re-do an unsatisfactory assignment for a pass/fail grade. This is also useful for the student whose assignment is late, but a strict time limit must be imposed, or all assignments may arrive on the last day of semester.

In recent years I have been conducting research into the many French names on the Australian coast, and have made a video which is now a module for the second-year French course. It is important for Australian students to be aware of the various French scientific expeditions, which charted much of our coastline in the 18th and 19th centuries, gathering botanical, zoological, cultural and ethnological information, before Western Australia was settled in 1826.

I feel that young Australians should be encouraged to study a major world language such as French, which is widely used not only in the European Community, but in islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans and in many parts of Africa. Whatever their future profession, they will then be empowered to work in the international job market, where a professional who speaks only English is severely disadvantaged.