Podcasts enhance learning in French language course

Stephanie Roulon, graduate consultant at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, and Geraldine Blattner, assistant professor in French and linguistics at Florida Atlantic, are using podcasts as a way to enhance students linguistic skills, especially understanding authentic language and pronunciation. "Even if speakers have an extended grammatical knowledge and vocabulary, they will rapidly be identified as foreigners or outsiders if their pronunciation is not comparable to the native norm," Roulon said. "Consequently it is an aspect of language acquisition that language educators should be concern with."

Blattner and Roulon used the podcasts in a 4000-level French course at Florida Atlantic, "French Pronunciation and Phonetics," that consisted of twelve French majors. "The aim is to understand how podcasting can be implemented in an advanced classroom setting and enhance L2 learners’ linguistic skills, including understanding authentic language and pronunciation," Roulon said.

 The podcasts Roulon and Blattner used were not produced by them, but instead they pulled material from various publicly accessible Web sites that provided a wide variety of authentic recordings. These included news sites such as Radio France and Radio Canada International and podcast sites such as iTunes.

The students were assigned different podcasts throughout the semester, including French news podcasts twice a week and podcasts of their choice. They were then tasked with completing comprehension assignments based on podcast content, and also phonetically transcribing sections of the audio files.

The podcasts were an integral part of the class. Most of them were homework assignments, but some were partially replayed in class. An activity was completed in class for each podcast assignment to ensure students listened to them.

Blattner and Roulon were encouraged by the results. "As the semesters progressed, the listening comprehension results of the students significantly improved," Blattner said. "In addition, the results of a pre- and post- questionnaires given to the students suggested that the students not only enjoyed listening to these authentic recordings, but understood the benefit of such a task."

The majority of students surveyed told Roulon and Blattner that they found the podcasts so useful they listened to some beyond what was assigned. "More than half the participants reported listening to podcasts that were not assigned in the context of the course to further enhance their abilities to comprehend French uttered at a native pace rate," Roulon added. "The majority of the students, nine out of twelve, also reported having used the script that the instructor provided them with for the news podcast they were assigned to listen to twice a week. It appears to have provided a needed help to identify unknown words and was a great support to develop their vocabulary."

The French-language podcast offered went beyond just those from France, and included Swiss- and Quebec-based podcasts so students were exposed to different accents. "A few students specifically pointed out in the end of the semester questionnaire that the podcasts improved their abilities to understand people with ‘different’ accent from the typical standard French taught in a college classroom," Blattner said. "This reflected a development in terms of their awareness of language variation."

The survey results, Blattner and Roulon said, reinforced the idea that technology in the classroom can be useful for learning. "We strongly believe that nowadays it is essential to search for evidence of the most effective ways to utilize technology in the classrooms and guide learners to take advantage of these resources and use them effectively," Roulon said. "In fact, the responses gathered in our post-questionnaire as well as our observation in classroom performance (comprehension tasks) corroborated previous research findings."

Based on the benefits for both student and teacher, Roulon and Blattner both recommended the use of podcasts to other language faculty. "Podcasts provide samples of real speech and authentic material which is invaluable in the context of basic language classes that too often only hear their instructor voice," Blattner said. "In other words we think that education in the 21st century should focus on the development of authentic literacy skills – increase students’ motivation to communicate with real audience vs. only the teacher."

Roulon added that faculty should carefully plan how they expect to integrate them into their coursework. "Such a resource must be integrated in a thoughtful way, just as any activity," she said. "In other words the topic of a podcast must be wisely selected and so do the pre- and post-activities."