Abstract:

In this paper, I describe a French course at the first level at a Swedish university, i.e. the level directly after at least one year of French studies in upper secondary school, which corresponds to level A 2.2 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The course is given in collaboration between Linnaeus University in Sweden and a language school in Nice, in France. The Swedish students study on campus in Nice, but follow the Swedish syllabus, and the teachers from Sweden are mainly involved in online teaching activities, but have the main responsibility for the assessment and the final grades. It is a situation which creates very specific pedagogical challenges which I here try to analyze on the basis of the didactic triangle (Kugel 1993, Hopman 1997).

I thus analyze the three possible relationships between teacher, content and student, and in the process I try to identify those aspects which are especially important for this kind of course. Such aspects can for instance be the combination campus teaching/online teaching (“blended learning” according to Ellins et al 2007), informal learning, the students’ contact time with the foreign language, the collaboration between teachers coming from different teaching cultures, the different perspectives on education and general knowledge, the different views on subject knowledge, etc.

On the basis of these analyses, I eventually present some suggestions for constructive alignment between the course’s learning objectives, the teaching and learning activities and the feedback and assessment methods (Biggs 2012, Elmgren & Henriksson, 2010).

The main goal of this paper is not only to show an example of a successful collaboration between teachers from different countries, but also to reflect on possible improvements of this course, which has now been given two years in a row, on the basis of recent research conducted in the fields of general didactics and language didactics.

Keywords:

Globalization, language didactics.