Lycée Paul Héroult students observe Professor Cerles capture Penn State keypals on screen with the Webcam in language technology classroom, Sparks 9.

Project Context and Background

The project is sponsored jointly by the Center for Academic Computing (CAC), the College of the Liberal Arts and IBM Corporation. L3 was established in the early 1990s by a group of faculty in Liberal Arts. Its objectives were to make state-of-the-art instructional software, simple multimedia authoring and Internet tools available to language instructors. Benefits would include increased student language proficiency and exposure to authentic foreign language and cultural material.

Instructor Hélène Gresso, a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of French at Penn State and a native of Montpellier, France, wanted to find a way for her students to chat and have audio-video conferences with students in a French high school. Collaborating with the coordinators and staff of L3 was logical since they are there to help instructors synthesize technology and foreign language acquisition theory.

The staff of L3 have been working closely with Ms. Gresso over the past year to set up and integrate computer-mediated communication such as e-mail, text-based chat, audio-video conferencing, and Web publishing in the accelerated beginning-level French class she teaches.

Typically, Penn State students complete French 1, 2, and 3 over the course of three semesters. Gresso currently teaches French 111/112, a fastpaced French language course designed to cover the equivalent of French 1, 2, and 3 during one academic year. The class consists of approximately twenty undergraduate students who may or may not have prior experience with the language. Students enrolled in French 111/112 are mostly between eighteen to twenty-five years old. In France, the students in Terminale Lroughly the equivalent of an American senior high school classrange in age from seventeen to twenty-one years. Their academic level is comparable to that of college freshmen in the United States. The French 111/112 class meets twice a week in one of the newly renovated language laboratories located on the ground floor of the Sparks building. One of these meeting times is scheduled to correspond with the time the partner class, six hours ahead in France, meets in their technology laboratory.

Getting Started

In September 1998, the Penn State students began corresponding and collaborating with thirty Terminale L students at Lycée Paul Héroult, a high school in St. Jean de Maurienne in the French Alps. Professor Jean-François Cerles and Ms. Gresso established the partnership approximately one year earlier by proposing discussion themes and collaborative projects that their students might undertake during the 1998-1999 academic year. The partnership between the two classes provided a context for authentic communicative and cultural interchange, which was facilitated by the use of computer-mediated communication technologies.

Cyber-colleagues Hélène Gresso and Jean-François Cerles in Marchonly their second face-to-face meeting in two years of working together.

E-mail Correspondence

Personal communication between individual French and American students began with e-mail exchangesasynchronous technology. E-mail is described as asynchronous because the communication occurs intermittently. The students involved in the exchange are called keypals, penpals who write to each other with keyboards instead of ink. Students are required to write a minimum number of lines (from four to fifteen, depending on their level of language proficiency) to their correspondent in the foreign language. Once that minimum is reached, they may write in their native language. They are free to choose the content of their e-mail messages, but are specifically encouraged to respond to questions posed by their keypals. Usually, students enjoy discussing their daily lives, a topic accessible even to beginners.

Few of the problems encountered with e-mail were technical in nature. The computer-to-student ratio presented the greatest difficulty for the keypal class in France. Since access by the thirty French students was limited to only two computers for the entire first semester, ensuring prompt responses to the Penn State keypals was sometimes challenging. Furthermore, the French students did not begin school until September and had two long breaks, one in the fall and one in the spring. These differences in schedule also led to delays in the e-mail exchanges. Other difficulties stemmed from the unequal number of students in each class, which prevented the ideal pairing of one Penn State keypal to one French keypal.

E-mail exchange offers a major advantage over traditional paper mail in helping students learn a foreign language and culture. Electronic correspondence reduces the time lapses introduced by the conventional postal system which tend to interrupt the flow of rapidly-paced conversations. Students confront and discuss stereotypes as they explore who they are, how they are perceived by others, and how they perceive others by establishing relationships with foreign peers based on regular e-mail exchanges. Students learn about how culture influences perspectives and behaviors. One student said, "I felt the e-mail experience with our keypals was successful in that it gave us a look at French culture through the eyes of kids our same age and how similar our views are and are not." This type of exchange permits students to see the ideas they discuss embodied in individuals. They can relate to their keypals through these ideas, linking themselves in their own society to their keypals in the society of the target country.

Interacting with young people from a different part of the country or world motivates students to consider different perspectives, offers them a personal link to the culture, and provides an active and meaningful approach to language learning. E-mail adds the benefit of conveying student questions, queries and conversations at a speed which
matches the accelerated pace of Gresso's course.

Online Magazine

In addition to the e-mail exchanges, both classes participated in the creation of a Web magazineRaison d'être. The students help to maintain the magazine which provides a forum for their writing. The Web magazine (online at http://beetle.la.psu.edu/fr111/autrenumero.htm ), is an ongoing project where both classes regularly publish their work to be read and commented on by the partner class. A server was set up in the L3 office in order to accommodate this project. The class was provided with space on the server to create a home page and store the online magazine. Classes on both sides of the Atlantic needed to be able to post and work on the Web magazine, so they received passwords and were taught the basics of Web page development using Netscape Composer.

The writings produced by both classes are organized into different sections: (1) News Briefs--the classroom news, and Francophone world news as presented by the students; (2) Reflection Pieces--a short collection of comments by students from either class with questions to make the reader think (for example, "What possessions are necessary to live?", "How do schedules in France compare to schedules in the US?"); (3) Dossier--the central feature (students recently wrote about student strikes in France); (4) Creations--a collection of class writings; and (5) Mail from Readers readers' comments. The students appear to enjoy collaborating on the magazine and to feel a sense of accomplishment by presenting their work to friends and family. They no longer write for the teacher; rather they write for each other or for a broader audience.

The technical issues behind the collaborative Web magazine mainly involve Web server availability and Web site maintenance. Since students in both classes are designated as Web editors and all members contribute to the magazine in some way, it is necessary that all have access to the server on which the Web magazine is stored. Running a locally maintained server seems to be the best option for allowing access to multiple students while at the same time restricting access to only the members of both classes. Occasional problems include delays in posting material to the Web site, as well as difficulties in transferring files to the appropriate subdirectories.

Vclass IRC Server: text-based chat

Independently of the Terminale L class, the students of French 111/112 also regularly engage in synchronous (simultaneous) electronic discussions in small groups on culturally relevant topics using the Vclass Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server, which is run by the Center for Academic Computing. The class typically uses four to six separate channels with four or five students in each channel or chatroom. Chatting in French, students have debated such topics as, "In your opinion, would it be better to work in France or in the United States?" and "Given the opportunity, would you send your child to primary and secondary level education in France?"

The use of Vclass within French 111/112 reveals several advantages for language learning. Students seem more motivated to stay on task when discussing with their peers online. Not only do they enjoy the text-based communication medium, they also tend to participate more equally in the electronic discussions than they would in face-to-face discussions in the regular classroom. Another benefit of Vclass is that transcripts of online discussions can be automatically e-mailed to the instructor. These transcripts provide a permanent, written record of the communicative interactions in which students engage, and they can be used in a variety of ways as a pedagogical follow-up to online discussion.

One technical disadvantage of the Vclass IRC Server is that access is limited to only those users inside the psu.edu domain. While the Penn State students could converse with one another via Vclass, they could not chat simultaneously with their French keypals. Therefore, when students from Penn State wanted to have real-time chat with students in France, the L3 coordinators looked into other possibilities for virtual encounters and decided on Microsoft NetMeeting.

Microsoft NetMeeting: text-based chat, audio-video conferencing

Microsoft NetMeeting enables students to engage in real-time audio-video conferencing, as well as text-based chat. The first video conference between Penn State and France took place in November, 1998. Students were excited to finally be able to see and interact with their keypalsLive! Since then, the almost weekly NetMeeting sessions have continued to sustain motivation on the part of both the Penn State students and their French keypals. Just as with the Vclass IRC Server, transcripts of the text-based chat discussions can be saved for subsequent follow-up work.

Typically, an instructor wishing to hold a conventional video conference must follow certain implementation and billing procedures with the University's Office of Telecommunications. NetMeeting however, does not entail usage fees. As Internet-based conferencing, it takes advantage of the network infrastructure already in place across campus. And the technical requirements for NetMeeting are quite simple. Any instructor who has the freeware NetMeeting client, a Webcam, a microphone, and an Internet connection may hold an audio-video conference, assuming, of course, that arrangements have been made with the class at the remote location.

Although NetMeeting makes audio-video conferencing considerably more accessible than traditional video conferencing, it is not without its drawbacks. One recurring difficulty is that Internet-based conferencing is highly susceptible to the problems of Internet congestion. The transmission quality of the video image and/or the audio signal is often unreliable, depending on the time of day. However, the text-based chat feature of NetMeeting does serve as a reliable backup in such instances. Another problem concerns the availability of Webcams in the technology classroom where French 111/112 regularly meets one day a week. A single Webcam is installed at the instructor's podium; while small groups of students engage in text-based chat with their keypals on individual machines, a smaller group of students use the Webcam at the front of the room. The designated Webcam group changes on a weekly rotational schedule. To see how students work together on NetMeeting, please see http://beetle.la.psu.edu/lara/class_pics/FR112_TL.html .

Language and Culture Come Alive

E-mail, the Web magazine, Vclass, and Microsoft NetMeeting, have enabled both the French and Penn State students to exercise their foreign language skills and approach the culture associated with the language they study at a more intimate level than would be possible in the conventional foreign language classroom.

The cultural and linguistic foundation laid by the use of these technological tools undoubtedly prepared the keypals well for the only experience more real than Web conferencing. In January four Penn State students traveled to France to meet their keypals. Gresso, who was in France visiting family, joined the students in St. Jean de Maurienne for several days. Then in March, comparisons, communication, culture, connections and communities came to vivid culmination for the entire class when Cerles and the students from Lycée Paul Héroult paid a two-week visit to their Penn State peers in State College (see the Web magazine at http://beetle.la.psu.edu/fr111/voyage/voyagecouverture.html for photos and trip details from both Penn State and Lycée Paul Héroult perspectives).

The L3-French 111/112 project at Penn State University Park is one example of how technology enriches the learning experience in today's foreign language classroom. Contemporary Internet tools provide students with a rich and authentic source of up-to-date cultural information; facilitate rapid communication between different communities of language learners around the world; give students alternatives to traditional modes of oral and written expression; and promote cultural comparisons of language, people, and countries.

For more information on the Language 3 Initiative please see the following Web site: http://www.la.psu.edu/lang3