Reflecting on professional practice

• What I did
• What I would do next time
• I wish this existed

I teach French Beginners at Stage 6 level and wanted an app that sought to revise the grammatical structures of the course, as well as provided vocabulary building and revision within the set topics:

• Family life, home and neighbourhood
• People, places and communities
• Education and work
• Friends, recreation and pastimes
• Holidays, travel and tourism
• Future plans and aspirations

It was very difficult to find an app that satisfied all of this, both grammar and vocabulary revision. I eventually downloaded an app entitled Très Bien French which seemed to cover most of the topics above. This app can be used to teach vocabulary, or to revise topic areas and it covers a wide-ranging list of those. However, students were not able to practise grammar on this app. Although newer apps may now exist, I was not able to find a suitable app for structural practice at the time of research and relied on websites instead.

I used Très Bien with my Year 12 French Beginners class over several periods to help them revise vocabulary. Each student had an individual iPad. This app has the added benefit of sound, so each student was able to learn or revise the vocabulary and listen to a native speaker pronouncing the phrase or individual word. Unfortunately, while this is of benefit for an individual learner, sound can be a distraction in the classroom without earphones. In my classroom situation, I only had 6 students, so this was not an issue. I can see that this would be problematic in a larger class and as a teacher would probably need to supply the buds.

The students loved the app and enjoyed the process; however, as the teacher I felt somewhat redundant. The students were in their little bubble, enjoying themselves, that they forgot I was there. I sat with each individual, I tried to be a part of their learning, but it just didn’t happen and I felt that they really could simply use this technology at home.

As part of their HSC course, students have to understand written and spoken texts, and produce written and spoken texts. Their assessments consist of four components:

• Listening
• Reading
• Writing
• Oral

For each oral task, the student participates in a 5 minute conversation exchange with an examiner. For each assessment for each individual student I chose to record the conversation on Garage Band on my mac and then transcribe the whole conversation. However, for the final assessment I wanted to try out a new app on the iPad that I had recently downloaded – Dragon Dictate. This app supposedly recorded the voice in a selected language of choice, and then simultaneously transcribed it automatically. I was excited, as, if it worked, it could save me a great deal of time. Unfortunately, it didn’t. While the app allowed the user to choose the dialect (in this case Parisian French – the closest I could find), as non-native speakers of French the app could not distinguish the unusual pronunciation and created texts that were incomprehensible! Most disappointing.

What would I do next time? Keep searching for better apps. I have since found an app entitled Rappid Revise GCSE French Grammar which looks promising. However, I do rely on reviews from other purchases, and in the absence of these I am hesitant to download, particularly if the app comes at a cost.

I would certainly not use Dragon Dictate again for the above purpose, and would stick to Garage Band.

I would really like an app designed especially for the NSW French Beginners course. At present, there’s no specifically written hard copy textbook either, so if there were an app that covered all the topics and the grammatical components with practise written and oral exercises, listening tasks, reading comprehensions and other functionalities, it would be fantastic.

It would also be beneficial to have a language learner app that allowed the individual voice to be mapped in a foreign language, for written transcriptions to be produced. Students could record their own voice and read and hear their own errors from a native speaker self correction, rather like a spell checker.

Nel MacBean