Overview: External audience provides a set of questions; UQ students record short videos in response which are housed on Flip and are therefore accessible by the audience.
For beginning students, the challenge is to find an external audience with simple needs that correspond to the language covered in their textbook.
In the case of FREN1020, we were contacted by New Caledonian secondary teacher who was organizing a school trip and wanted to bring her students to visit the UQ campus. This provided an opportunity to rework our existing 'Welcome to my city' video assessment, to make it an authentic instance of intercultural communication.
Ideally the New Caledonian students would have written questions about Brisbane and these would have become the assessment prompts. However, they were on holiday when the UQ students needed the questions, so the assessment prompts were based on their teacher's impression of what they wanted to know. I then had to add a question about the UQ campus in order not to disadvantage UQ students who didn't know the Brisbane CBD well.
In response to the assessment prompts ("how can I get from Roma St station to a good souvenir shop in the city" "What is there to see at UQ" etc) , UQ students recorded videos of 90-120 seconds. Consenting students' videos were shared with the New Caledonians.
Footnote: the two groups did actually meet on campus
The model could be repeated with other visiting groups.
Details
- CLASS SIZE
- 20-40, 40-60
- CLASS LEVEL
- First year
- ASSESSMENT SECURITY
- Medium security
- TIME REQUIREMENTS
- Medium time
- CONDITIONS
- Identity verified
- FEATURES
- Authentic
Advantages
The use of Flip meant that we could easily share our students' videos with the external audience, and only with them (access via a link). This would have been much more difficult to achieve with Media Gallery or Youtube.
This was a motivating task with a purpose beyond the assessment item; the existence of an audience beyond teachers can promote consideration of how to speak to a "real" audience; there isa requirement for critical thinking in that students must reflect on the information which would be useful for the audience.
For marking and feedback purposes, short videos can be marked when and where the marker wants, in contrast to live orals; richer feedback can be provided, in particular on pronunciation.
Challenges
- Finding an audience - a group of target language speakers who genuinely need the simple information which beginners can provide.
- Providing very clear instructions to UQ students as to where and how to upload their videos.
Tips for implementation
- Plan ahead so that you can locate a suitable audience.
- Provide students with practice in uploading Flip videos.
- Be aware of the maximum length of Flip videos.
- Create two Flip groups/ channels: one which is moderated to which all students can upload their assessment items students can only see their own work; one which is open, to which staff copies the videos of all consenting students, for sharing with the audience.
- We have found it useful to ask students to provide a transcription of their recording, to facilitate the provision of feedback. (This can help marker comprehension in the case of the weakest performances).
Learning outcomes
- Describe [your] family, living conditions, educational background, present or most recent job. [...] describe people, places and possessions in simple terms" (CEFR scale for Sustained Monologue (Spoken Production), A2).
- Show some awareness of French-speaking cultures and cultural practices (including terms of address and generic conventions)
- Demonstrate ability to use communication technologies, in French.
How it supports academic integrity
It is possible that students could work from a script written or corrected by an expert speaker or by generative AI. The assessment criteria have however been designed to require demonstrated engagement with course content: the criterion "Linguistic quality" rewards correct use of language seen in the course, language not seen in the course isn't considered; the criterion "Delivery" rewards confident, natural, conversational delivery, and awards 0 to "the impression of being entirely read from a script which you have difficulty following".
Less punitively: by redesigning this assessment item to allow the students to speak in their own voice, to a real audience, we hope to have increased the intrinsic motivation of the task itself and so to have engaged students in it.
Dr Barbara Hanna
uqbhanna@uq.edu.au
The continuing interest underpinning my research is that of the self-presentation of the non-native speaker, in different genres. This has led me to work on: culturally determined practices; cross-cultural comparisons; and on intercultural behaviour, how this is conceptualized and how, in practice, encounters between different expectations of appropriate behaviour play out.
One focus of my attention has been the proliferation of new intercultural encounters which are made possible by online technologies. In particular, Juliana de Nooy and I undertook a project examining discussion fora on media websites, culminating in our 2009 book. The pedagogical implications of this work, and my own teaching practices have allowed me to develop expertise in language learning and technology which I have extended through other collaborations (e.g. Cowley & Hanna, 2013 on Wikipedia) research supervisions and publications which derive from it (Gao & Hanna, 2016, on instructional software; work with Khosravi, Gyamfit et al; and a forthcoming paper with Aljohani). Find out more