Week 1 - The First Blog Entry

Bonjour! My name is Sofie Thielemans and this is my SLAT2002 Language Learning Challenge blog where I will be recording my French language process throughout this coming semester. 

For a little bit of background… For the past two years I have been studying a Bachelor of Civil/Environmental Engineering, and since this semester I will also be studying a Diploma of Languages majoring in French. Ever since finishing my high school French studies, I have wanted to keep up and improve my French language abilities. My acceptance to study at the University of Toronto in second semester this year was just that extra incentive for me to start this diploma!

I’m excited to track my progress and increase my knowledge about the role of new technologies in language learning throughout the semester.

My Challenge:

To evaluate what my main challenge for this project should be, I feel like I first need to remember and reflect on my past learning strategies when learning a language. I moved to Australia from Belgium (where I spoke Flemish) at the age of 11. The first few weeks were quite unenjoyable and scary, as I didn’t speak much more English than “yes, no, good, thank you”. However, through complete immersion in the English language, in no time I was completely bilingual. I can’t replicate this approach for my French learning while living in Brisbane, but from this experience I will try to base my learning approaches off the effectiveness of language immersion.

So now onto French… I feel confident in my vocabulary so gaining new vocab is not really of much concern to me. The main challenge in my French is definitely grammar. In high school I never really got a hang of the conjugations, when to use which, irregular verbs etc. Therefore my main goal this semester will be to see a significant improvement in my grammar. Another problem I recognise is my speaking fluency. However, I think grammatical improvement will definitely indirectly also improve my speaking confidence.

In high school, I used to print out pages with the different tenses and conjugations and put them on my wall so I would be repeatedly exposed to this. This worked quite well at first, but I found that after a while the pages would blend in with the wall and I didn’t pay much attention to them anymore. I also downloaded podcasts and copied these onto CD’s that I listened to in the car. This was a great way to learn, especially since it asked you to repeat the verbs after them, however since moving to Brisbane I don’t have a car and this method is one I can no longer use.  

My Learning Goal:

My main goal for this learning challenge will be to identify, learn, and practice several different tenses and ultimately become proficient and confident in using these. I will aim to learn one tense a week through the following process:

1. Writing down the tense and its rules and conjugations
2. Using colour/visual aids to make it more memorable
3. Do simple conjugation exercises on iPhone apps
4. Finish the week by writing a paragraph using predominantly that tense
5. Asking my dad to correct this paragraph (as he speaks fluent French) 

On top of grammar, I would also like to learn some French songs and enhance my cultural knowledge in this area, so I will choose one song a week I will listen to and try to learn a bit about.

My learning styles and strategies:

Considering the experiences I talked about above, I think a better approach to my language improvement would be to actively learn and also constantly repeat and practice newly learnt things. I also completed the VARK questionnaire in order to determine which learning approaches I should take, with the results shown below:

 

These results are not surprising to me and show that the learning approaches that suit me best are visual and kinaesthetic. I have definitely noticed with my previous studies that when I colour code things I remember them much better. However, a result that I do not agree with from the questionnaire is my low score on read/write. Perhaps with my engineering subjects this is applicable, but I find when learning a language writing practice is essential – especially for learning grammar.

The technologies I am going to test:

For my grammar learning, I will do this on paper as well as online, so I am still in the process of trying to find an app to do the simple exercises I mentioned that I will do at the start while learning the tense. Some examples of apps and websites I have found so far are:

• www.babbel.com
• Très bien
• French grammar and Practice
• busuu
• French Verbs Trainer
• French Grammar Free

 These are just some of the apps I have found so far, and by next week I will refine this list and go through a process of critically analysing each app and its advantages and disadvantages. I will therefrom choose which app I will be using throughout the implementation stage of this learning challenge.

The paragraph I write at the end of each week will be done on Word, and for the song learning I will use YouTube as well as Google.

My plan:

On my next post I will outline the order of my learning challenge and which tenses I will be learning each week, but for now I’ll just revise the simple ones.

My evaluation approach:

As I mentioned before, the last step in my weekly tense learning process is to write a paragraph that I will ask my dad to mark. This will be my weekly evaluation step to assess my progress. Towards the end of the learning challenge I would also like to do a “final” assessment where I will combine all the things I have learnt.

I am yet to finalise my evaluation approach, but hope to have this more completed by my next blog post.

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References:

o   The VARK Questionnaire. (2016). Retrieved 07/03/2016 from http://vark-learn.com/the-vark-questionnaire/