Abstract:

This paper focuses on the enhancement of foreign language students’ oral skills, based on the observation of an increase in the number of students not engaging in real life conversation and dialogue in the classroom. Their main oral activity becomes monological question/answer sessions controlled by the teacher and the result is a lack of basic conversational skills in the second foreign language and an inability to participate in a spontaneous dialogue using everyday words. This is a paradox, as Danish foreign language teaching aims at building communicative skills to make students able to communicate adequately and fluently in different contexts.

Based on an understanding of the nature and characteristics of everyday dialogue, an innovative ICT integrated design for learning has been set up and tested by Danish upper secondary students of French as their second foreign language. Students worked on mastering conversation on everyday subjects by developing and testing their dialogical skills in a collaborative, virtual classroom.

We used four technologies; Lino, a flexible virtual noticeboard, Quizlet, where students can design and train their glossary with flashcards, VoiceThread, an asynchronous multimodal tool where students can share, comment and remediate digital products and Skype, a synchronous communication platform.

A crucial element in the learning process is the organization of the students into ever changing communities of practice which enables them to establish strategies to negotiate meaning and flow in various contexts. The two constitutional processes are students’ participation and reification which are facilitated and supported by the ICTs.

Within a framework of learning objectives, learning is designed as a progression where students gradually build their dialogical skills by collaborating through these four ICTs mentioned above. In our design the ICTs are technically independent but didactically dependent. On Lino students share pictures as inspiration for everyday conversation topics. This is further developed on Quizlet where students collaborate in building, sharing and training glossaries for these topics. On VoiceThread students use their pictures from Lino and their Quizlet glossaries to practice dialogue. As this is an asynchronous technology, students have time and space to practice and to reflect on their tasks and come up with input to the dialogue when they are ready to do so. This helps build their self confidence in the second language and prepares them for the next step: real life, synchronous dialogue with unknown partners on Skype.

Qualitative analyses of the recordings of students’ VoiceThreads and Skype conversations, and of focus group interviews about their experiences with all four ICTs revealed that all students added knowledge and skills from the use of one ICT to the next one, and enhanced their dialogical skills. Not only did they develop their everyday vocabulary, they also learned the importance of interacting with and navigating in dialogue by using questions, gambits and similar utterances.

The innovative ICT integrated design for learning, i.e. using the four ICTs in this given order, the design of learning as a progression and the organization of the students in communities of practice, can be used iteratively to enhance students’ oral skills at all levels of language studies.

Keywords:

Second language learning, everyday conversation, dialogue, communities of practise, ICT integrated design for learning.