A students elementary French class portfolio: includes a Twitter (writing) assignment, an extemporaneous speech (Skype) recording with another student, a video on La Belgique, and an ad promoting a French product.
They student’s goal was to visualize the Rabelais’s view of Utopia in a multimedia format after having written a paper on the subject. Her video will be accessible as a ressource to future French students, who would like to learn more about the topic.
Objective: to add a new communicative competencies to a course curriculum that previously only required an reading and writing component.
Sample one : students were asked to professionally subtitle segments of a French film (listening)
Sample two: students were asked to interview a French students on their opinion of the American elections and then subtitle the segment for the local American TV station. Quite serendipitously, one of the American students was in turn asked to be interviewed by his French counterpart, who was a communications major; the interview was run on Radio France and published on their website. (listening, interpersonal modes of communication)
This assignment was part of a process where first semester students were first asked to write up a self-portrait with the intention rendering it eventually into a movie.
Step 2: After the draft and rewrite, one of our native speaker proctors read each portrait and saved an audio file on our server which the students used for practicing their pronunciation.
Step 3: students made a first draft of their videos. This page represents this 3rd stage of the project. Ideally each student was to critique three of his/her classmates work; a rubric was given for this purpose. Unfortunately, we had some technical slow-downs, so students were only able to critique one or two.
Step 4: Create a final version taking into account the comments received from students and their instructor. Again, please note that these are not the final projects.
Objectives: developing 4 modes of communicative competence (listening, speaking, writing, and presentational) , developing the metacognitive skills to improve their personal learning, building a community of learners where students are given the opportunity to help others all while reinforcing their own personal, learning experience.
See authorized samples.
Instructor: M. Toulouse Lafayette College