A SHIFT FROM FACE TO FACE TEACHING TOWARDS BLENDED LEARNING TO ENHANCE LEARNING OUTCOMES IN THE CONTEXT OF TEACHING FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

This paper studies the integration of Information and Communication technology (ICT) in the French as a Foreign Language (FLE) classroom in an Indian Secondary School, The Galaxy Education System (TGES) Rajkot, India (tges.org/tges-home.php). The school scenario provided 160 hours over the period of 2 years to finish International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) syllabus equivalent to Diplôme d’Etude de Langue Française (DELF) A2 level. DELF A2 level is achieved in approximately 260 hours in the French Government recognized institute, Alliance Francaise, in India. Hence, to overcome the missing 100 hours in the context of TGES, we opted for a new pedagogical situation which consisted in four times a week of Face to Face (F2F) teaching lessons of 45 minutes each followed by activities exceeding not more than 30 minutes to be completed remotely on the online platform of the School.

During the school year 2011/12, the first blended learning training was initiated on an experimental basis and with an aim to achieve the DELF A1 level of the CEFRL(http://www.france-langue.fr/pedagogie-du-francais/niveaux-de-fran%C3%A7ais.html). The articulation of the F2F sessions and distance learning was done by the same instructor. In terms of online activities, learners were provided with an access to the online platform where the activities were pre-deposited with the instructions. These exercises were basically cloze, multiple choice, fill in the gaps, match etc. Certain resources, multimedia materials and links to the already existing activities from internet were suggested to students. These were presented on the online platform as short training sessions. In the second year 2012/13, open ended writing activities were proposed like letter writing, describing an incident, defending a point of view on a topic among many others.

The focus of the research was to find out if the ICT can help in filling up the required missing hours for achieving the IGCSE level and does it improve the reading and the writing skills of the student.

The study done over two consecutive years 2011/12-2012/13 with a group of students (N=40) was based on two hypotheses:
1) a student will be motivated to participate in online learning only if s/he is correctly supervised in the F2F class and also if the resources and the questions put online are relevant to what has been taught in the class.
2) a student will participate in Online learning only if s/he desires to do so and it depends on his/her discretion.

For carrying out the research related to testing the hypotheses and achieving the desired results, four main points had to be investigated related to teaching of FLE in a secondary school environment:
1) The importance/priority given to FLE in school context;
2) Integration of Blended Learning in French class;
3) Working on the Reading and the Writing skills in off-classroom situation with the help of ICT tools;
4) Correction of the written texts of students online.

These 4 issues were studied based on 3 types of data collected:
(i) The questionnaire filled by the 40 participants,
(ii) Analysis of their texts on the space forum of the platform, Analysis of the corrections done on their texts submitted online.

The paper discusses the outcome of the analysis of the analyses of these three types of data.