ABSTRACT
Introduction: The
use of information and communication technologies constitutes a scientific and
didactic challenge in the integrated practice lessons of French as a foreign
language at Universidad de Sancti Spíritus (UNISS) "José Martí Pérez”.
These lessons are based on a communicative approach as a scientific method in
order to develop the linguistic abilities. However, teachers have some difficulties
for their integration because they cannot promote it by using suitable modern
strategies according the students’ needs and characteristics.
Objective: To
evaluate the integration of the linguistic abilities in French as a foreign
language by using a system of communicative-integrating activities based on
Collaboration, Autonomy, Variety and Artifacts (CAVA Framework).
Methods: the
survey, the interview and the pedagogical observation.
Results: the
design of a system of communicative-integrating activities based on the CAVA
Framework and the elaboration of procedures and indicators to evaluate it.
Conclusion: The
didactic articulation of the CAVA Framework with the proposed system of
activities constituted a novelty for Cuban higher education to achieve
meaningful learning and to favor the integration of the communicative
abilities.
Keywords:
CAVA Framework; communicative abilities;
communicative-integrating activities; ICT; integrating perspective.
______________________________
RESUMEN
Introducción: El uso de las tecnologías de
la información y las comunicaciones constituye un reto científico y didáctico
para las clases de práctica integral de francés, como lengua extranjera en la
Universidad de Sancti Spíritus “José Martí Pérez”, en las que se emplea el
enfoque comunicativo como método científico para favorecer el desarrollo de las
habilidades lingüísticas. Sin embargo, la integración de estas se dificulta
pues los profesores no logran promoverla a través de estrategias modernas
adecuadas a las necesidades y características de los estudiantes.
Objetivo: Evaluar la integración de
las habilidades lingüísticas en francés como lengua extranjera a partir del
empleo de un sistema de actividades comunicativo-integradoras basadas en la
Colaboración, la Autonomía, la Variedad y las Aplicaciones (Marco CAVA).
Métodos: la encuesta, la entrevista y
la observación pedagógica.
Resultados: el
diseño de un sistema de actividades comunicativo-integradoras sustentado en el
marco CAVA y la elaboración de procedimientos e indicadores para su evaluación.
Conclusiones: La articulación didáctica
del marco CAVA con el sistema de actividades propuesto constituyó una novedad
en la educación superior cubana para alcanzar un aprendizaje significativo y
favorecer la integración de las habilidades lingüísticas.
Palabras clave: actividades
comunicativo-integradoras; didáctica; habilidades
lingüísticas; lengua francesa
INTRODUCTION
orldwide,
the teaching process is focused on the lesson as its main form of organization.
That is why, the lesson is the way through which knowledge is mostly
transmitted and also subjects are cultivated in order to achieve their comprehensive
formation. According to Morales-Ruiz (2011), the Cuban Ministry of Education
(Mined by its Spanish acronym) defined, from a general point of view, what a
good lesson is in 2000 in the Circular 1. The criteria composing this definition
were the projection of the objectives taking into account the students’ near-by
reality, the proper approach for the ideological and political formation
according to the principles of the Cuban Revolution and, the planning, the orientation,
the carrying out and the evaluation of the students’ independent study.
Moreover, in 2004, one more criterion related to the efficient use of
television, video and informatics as teaching aids in the teaching and learning
process was included to the definition.
Therefore,
according to the proposal established by Mined in 2000 and 2004 as cited by
Morales-Ruiz (2011), if a teacher followed these criteria when planning and
teaching a lesson, the process would be most favorable and adequate to fulfill
the objectives and satisfy the necessities the students have. But, in a more
specific context: that of a foreign language, González Cancio (2009) defined
the lesson as the external organizational form of the teaching and learning
process that – having a creative, dynamic, systematic, and interactive
character – conceives, plans, leads and helps the teacher to develop the
students’ communicative competence. In this process, the students have the main
roles because they systematically practice the language based on contexts
related to their near-by reality as part of their personal experience.
Within
the curriculum of the major Bachelor of Education, Foreign Languages Specialty,
the lessons of the studied foreign languages – for the present research, French
– should have an integrated practice character. Therefore, when applying these
definitions to the lessons of French in the above-mentioned specialty, they may
be categorized as good when they become the starting point from which students
develop the necessary communicative competences to help them in their future
lives as teachers of the society. Consequently, this allows the students to
take control of their own capacities as individuals within a group and to
establish higher levels for the development of their linguistic abilities in
order to accomplish those required for each academic year by permitting the
teacher to guide their learning in other knowledge areas related to their
professional profile.
Defined
by the teachers of the Foreign Language Department at UNISS “José Martí Pérez”,
the integrated practice in a lesson of a foreign language is carrying to the
classroom the required elements to help the students learn properly by making
it fun for them. The way in which all these elements are dealt with has some
influence on the development of the basic linguistic abilities: listening,
speaking, reading and writing. Thus, the teaching and learning process develops
more dynamically and the students can improve their competences by using new
approaches that suit their individual and group interests such as the use of
information and communication technologies (ICT). Nevertheless, some tendencies
that have been inherited from previous methodologies propose that the abilities
should be treated individually or grouped according to the communicative
objectives to fulfill: listening linked to speaking and reading to writing.
Even
when the propositions of the previous methodologies are a lot easier for some
teachers, the current teaching and learning process of foreign languages
demands that the four abilities should be developed in a balanced way as
established by the Council of Europe (2001, 2018) in the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR).
That is why, a diagnosis was carried out in the lessons of French as a foreign
language and the main problem identified was that, in not many of them, the
integration of the four linguistic abilities was achieved in order to enhance
the level of the development acquired by the students. Also, teachers could not
find more suitable modern strategies taking into account the students’ needs
and characteristics as a group or as individuals.
For
the situation previously set, the objective established for the present
research is to evaluate the integration of the linguistic abilities in French
as a foreign language by using a system of communicative-integrating activities
based on the CAVA Framework.
THEORETICAL
FRAMEWORK
The
teachers of French as a foreign language should master a standard language that
allows them to properly develop their students’ linguistic abilities in order
to make them capable of fulfilling certain linguistic elements. Such elements
are required to achieve the communicative goals within a situation by making
use of the communicative competence they are supposed to develop not only as
social beings but also as foreign language teachers-to-be. In this way, having
developed these abilities in the students with an integrating approach in the
foreign language is part of the formative process and, thus, one of the most
important goals to achieve in the teaching and learning process.
The
group of teachers that works with the different subjects belonging to the
Discipline Integrated French Practice at UNISS “José Martí Pérez” recognizes
and establishes the necessity of the integration of the linguistic abilities
within the lessons of a foreign language. Therefore, in the two last academic
years of the university studies, as the students have mastered the language
properly, they should only strengthen the professional abilities to teach their
own students during the on-the-job-training practice they carry out in
different schools of the territory and also once they graduate.
While
integrating the abilities, some teachers disagree regarding the procedures to
deal with certain aspects such as grammar, the strategies used to communicate
according to the context in which communication develops, the lexicon to learn,
and the phonetic and phonological features that differentiate or make both the
foreign language and the mother tongue alike. This disagreement is caused
because some teachers do not see how useful a written text could be at a time to
teach some pronunciation or phonetic features or to make an oral presentation that
fulfills its essential requisites.
This
has happened because, in the first case, students find much easier to, for
example, listen to a recording and develop strategies to improve their own
pronunciation or their speaking abilities by repeating and imitating. On the
other hand, reading is mostly seen as a procedure to learn aspects such as a
given amount of words related to one topic, the spelling of certain words and
the grammar structures that help produce a text related to important personal
and professional aspects.
Despite
dividing the four abilities is a more convenient process for teachers to teach
and students to learn, it is certain that both the comprehension and the
production of a language do not develop as separate units. That is why, for
developing the necessary competences appropriately, a student needs to master
the receptive and productive abilities in the oral repertory as well as in the
written one.
Regarding
this topic, Nunan (1989) determines that, in order to work with the integration
of the four abilities, the teacher should design teaching materials and study
modules that favor this integration in a varied way. Moreover, in 2001, this
same author adds that the first step to achieve the established goal is to
identify the contexts and situations in which the students may need to carry
out a general communicative process. For these reasons, it is established that,
in integrated teaching, the linguistic abilities are taught and practiced in
relation to the students’ educational goals and not by the instructive context
in which the students may interact while using each ability separately.
The
pedagogical practice in the teaching and learning process of French as a
foreign language has allowed the authors to agree with Hinkel (2012) when she
recognized that working towards the integration of the four linguistic
abilities helps to augment the developing level of the students’ competences
and facilitates them the quick learning of the language by providing them also
a space for individual interaction and responsibility of their own learning and
not only a receptive character of what the teacher is offering them (Marcos
García, 2015).
In
order to achieve the proper integration of the linguistic abilities in an
ICT-mediated learning context as it was established in the definition of a good
lesson, the authors propose that the integration of ICT in the teaching and
learning is a process that is planned, contextualized, systemic, continuous and
reflexive; it is also oriented towards the transformation of the pedagogical
practice taking into account the possibilities of ICT in order to include them
harmoniously to teach and learn so as to satisfy the educative objectives. (Cabrera,
2008, as quoted by Álvarez Álvarez, Hernández Rabell, Cabrera Ramos and Herrero
Tunis, 2013).
In
relation to the foreign language teaching and learning process, ICT have been
characterized as authentic resources because teachers and students have access
to an infinity of authentic documents such as videos, journal articles, and
others (Kandeel, 2014) and because they help the users to develop new
competences (El Abboud, 2015). Kromidha and Toro (2015) say that the inclusion
of ICT is most beneficiating because they assist in the realization of
individualized tasks during the lesson and they also transform the classroom
into a contextualized environment due to the interaction and the variety of
information provided.
As
a result of the integration of ICT in this process, the autonomous learning
increases because the studied language can be used authentically and the
communication among people becomes easier and quicker, which is one the most
important aspects and one of the mostly pursued objectives while teaching and
learning a foreign language. Thus, from a teaching point of view, Bertin (2001)
both authors quoted by Kromidha and Toro (2015), define ICT, respectively, as technologies
at the service of teaching and as pedagogical tools that combine teaching materials
and pedagogical support at the same time.
In
the specific teaching and learning process context of French as a foreign
language, several authors have done research about the uses of ICT and the
advantages they offer for the teachers and for the students within the whole
process. Surguladze and Surguladze (2013) mention some of these advantages such
as the individualization of the teaching, the management of great and varied
amount of information, the complex multisensory influences they have on the different
channels for perception by means of texts, sounds, animation and videos and the
unlimited amount of tasks that may be designed in order to achieve what is
called the informatics culture and which helps the users interact properly with
such resources (Puren, 2017).
Other
characteristics that make these resources so useful for teaching and learning a
foreign language, in the present research French, are related to the necessary
special preparation of the users to work with different software applications
(Bacor, 2017) and the interactivity, the adaptability, the no-lineality for
presenting the information and the distinctiveness of design (González Pérez,
2019).
In
relation to the role of the teachers, Kandeel (2014) expresses that the way
teachers use ICT contributes to their professional development by making them
familiar with the new teaching situation in different contexts for, according
to Viñals and Cuenca (2016), the proposition of new methodological strategies
is necessary to satisfy the quality requirements of nowadays education. Also,
González Pérez, Hernández Ulloa and del Sauzal Francisco (2019) add that ICT
help teachers to explore and exploit the individual and group characteristics
of their students, to improve the already learned teaching strategies and
acquire new ones to strengthen their role as facilitators of the university
students’ autonomous and regulated learning.
Concerning
students, the use of ICT respects their individual learning rhythm and
motivates them by providing a favorable environment for their learning
(Abdel-Ouahed, 2014; Ait Kaikai, 2014) because they become direct and indirect
social interaction spaces that develop competences and permit the users of the
foreign language to communicate and interact with an intercultural linguistic
approach (Hernández Ulloa, González Pérez and Herrera Cruz, 2015). Besides,
students are provided with a continuous exchange with the other members of the
group and with the strategies to evaluate their own learning and that of the
others according to every stage of the process. Therefore, if necessary, they
can discover new strategies to manage their personal learning process and to
acquire and develop the necessary competences to communicate correctly using
the foreign language. (González Pérez, Hernández Ulloa and del Sauzal
Francisco, 2019).
Taking
into account the above stated purposes related to the potentialities of using
ICT in the teaching and learning process in a context that is mostly mediated
by such resources (Durán and Estay-Niculcar, 2016; Sandí Delgado and Cruz
Alvarado, 2016; Silva, 2017; Vargas, 2019), the authors of the present research
considered necessary to analyze the different strategies which are based on
ICT. The selected strategy was the CAVA Framework (Kambouri, Mellar and Logan,
2009) which is a linguistic framework that focuses its development on the
inclusion of ICT in the teaching and learning process of a foreign language and
it is integrated by four components, which are defined as follows:
- Collaboration:
to design tasks within the activities requiring the collaborative work of
the members of a group.
- Autonomy:
to favor the students’ independency despite being part of a group.
- Variety:
to make use of varied learning activities and a wide range of
technological resources.
- Artifacts:
to motivate the creation of new products – videos, recordings and
high-quality slideshows – that allow the students to experiment and learn
by doing.
METHODOLOGY
EMPLOYED
In
order to design the different research instruments and techniques to develop
the study, the authors took into consideration what Nunan (1989) proposed
regarding the development and the integration of the linguistic abilities
because they establish a didactic maxim for foreign language teachers. However,
only few of them have achieved these processes due to the negative influence of
external agents. Thus, this provided an integrating approach which constituted
an evaluating indicator during the research, which had two main moments during
the period selected for its development: the initial moment corresponded to the
beginning of the first term of the academic year in September 2018 (Sept./18,
for the charts) and the final moment in February 2019 (Feb./19, for the charts)
at the end of the term.
Among
the different techniques used during the research, the most important one was
the survey applied to a sample composed of 16 fifth-year Foreign Language
students at UNISS “José Martí Pérez”. Also, an in-depth interview was applied
to a selection of the surveyed students. Therefore, the triangulation of the
results obtained from these techniques allowed to characterize most of the
students as hyperactive and socially communicative, able to maintain a
conversation for a period of time and to deal with a certain number of topics
related to their near-by social and professional realities and interested in
increasing their knowledge and improving the development of their linguistic
abilities.
In
the same way, the pedagogical observation was developed in different teaching
scenarios, having as a goal to deepen on other scientific indicators of the
research such as the levels of interaction (student-student interaction and
teacher-students interaction), the treatment to the integration of the
linguistic abilities in French as a foreign language considering that the
activities developed by the class had an integrating approach. These indicators
allowed the students’ evaluation and teachers’ performances to favor the
adequate development of the communicative process. Besides, this instrument
facilitated the evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposal in accordance with
two points of view: the teachers as facilitators of the teaching and learning
process and among the students as participants in the process and as the doers
of the activities in similar conditions from suggestions, discussions,
contributions and presentations of the results of other previously-done
activities.
Taking
into account the scientific techniques used during the research, the authors
considered necessary to use a mixed approach (Hernández Sampieri, Fernández
Collado and Baptista Lucio, 2014) that began by the adequate and timely
diagnosis of the group of students and their relationships with each other,
their technological availability and their capacities for learning, as well as
the intentional selection and the proper design of the different tasks to carry
out as part of the activities inside and outside the classroom.
Other
indicators considered during the research were the contents studied as part of
the syllabus, the linguistic goals and the communicative functions to practice,
the already-developed abilities and the ones they had to develop according to
the subject syllabus, the methods and procedures to use during the process and
the methodology and indicators to evaluate the students’ performance when doing
the activities and how at ease they felt with them, which was a very important
aspect for the design of the following activities regarding the feedback
provided.
RESULTS AND
DISCUSSION
In
view of the theoretical proposals of the analyzed authors regarding the use of
ICT in the teaching and learning process of foreign languages and the results
of previous research works carried out in the same context (González Pérez,
Hernández Ulloa and del Sauzal Francisco, 2019; González Pérez, Hernández Ulloa
and Cutiño Núñez, 2019) the first result was a set of procedures to plan,
execute and control the outcomes of the application of the proposal.
These
procedures permitted that the teachers managed the adequate inclusion of the
different resources as a facilitating component of their every-day work to
teach and to achieve the learning objectives defined for the students and to
diminish some negative influences they may have such as the distraction and
loss of concentration as said by Berenguer (2015). The procedures are:
ü Identification
of the students’ technological availability: knowing what resources the
students had (cellphones, laptops, or others) allowed to establish a balanced
resource-student relation that favored the adequate development of the process
and the systematical interaction between the students and the teacher.
ü Diagnosis
of the students’ technological capacities: identifying the software the
students were capable of working with was very useful to favor the exchange
between those who mastered most of those software programs and those who did
not know anything at all about them. So, the acquisition of new capacities was possible.
ü Determination
of the ICT resources that best suited the context and the contents: according
to the content and the activities to carry out, the teachers had to define
whether to use slideshows, video and audio recordings or other types of files
to facilitate the process by having a wide variety of resources during every
lesson for the students to make use of.
ü Determination
of the ICT approach to use: the characterization of the modality to work with and
the goals to achieve by studying the subject, allowed the selection between
b-learning or e-learning or any other adequate for the students’
characteristics and needs.
ü Determination
of the way students should work: determining whether the students would have to
carry out the activities individually or in groups in order to improve their
abilities and technological capacities in a balanced way as well as their
collaboration and their autonomy.
ü Elaboration
and application of the selected ICT resources: according to the used approach
to include ICT and the way students would have to work, some activities were
designed or some other already-existing activities were changed to suit the
characteristics of the ICT-mediated context to favor the continuous knowledge
exchange of the students as the most important users of the process and the
role of the teachers as its facilitators.
ü Evaluation
and control of the impact of the ICT resources in the process: the teachers as
mediators should have identified potentialities and deficiencies of the ICT
resources used in the proposed activities and evaluated the effectiveness of
the way students worked all through them. Taking into consideration the
analysis of the obtained results, some new strategies were proposed to develop
the work and several of the previous procedures were used once again to satisfy
the deficiencies identified in the new context.
These
procedures to include ICT in the teaching and learning process permitted to take
advantage of their potentialities to achieve a progressive advance of the
students’ performance considering their motivation towards the study and the
responsibility and commitment they showed while using them to do the proposed activities.
Besides, the students should have an adequate awareness of their own personal
learning capacities to guarantee a meaningful evolution to higher levels.
Likewise,
these procedures offered a starting point for the design of the activities
proposed by the teachers in order to fully develop their students’ linguistic
abilities. Such activities were intentionally introduced in different units of
the subject syllabus which were related to topics dealing with education,
cultural aspects of different peoples around the world, technology and the environment.
These topics were a priority in the teachers’ educative and formative work with
their students regarding the near-by reality. (González Pérez, Hernández Ulloa and
del Sauzal Francisco, 2019). This was also evident during the topics selection
to deal with during the activities, the types of activities to carry out, the
procedures for the students to work and the way they presented the results
obtained from their own work.
The diagnosis carried out to the 16 fifth-year Foreign
Language students at UNISS “José Martí Pérez” permitted to gather the
information related to their technological availability because nine had
computers at home; two had access to a computer through a relative and five had
access to a computer only at the school they develop their on-the-job-training
practice or at the university.
Regarding the evolution of the competence
the students achieved in the development of the four linguistic abilities, it
is necessary to point out that, at the initial approach to the situation in
September, 2018 half of the students were competent in only two or three skills
and even in one, being mostly affected listening, writing and speaking. This
situation hindered the students’ proper development and performance, for
example, they could not distinguish between the strategies used to produce an
adequate written text from the strategies used to make and give an oral
presentation. However, this situation bettered up at the end of the term in
February, 2019 because they could differentiate the strategies previously
mentioned and acquire new ones such as the capacity for properly using the
linguistic resources that help during the interactions in order to organize the
ideas. The quantitative analysis of the development of the students’ competence
is shown in Chart 1.
Chart 1. Analysis of the evolution of
the competence in the linguistic abilities.
Source:
Authors’ Elaboration,2019.
One
potentiality identified in this moment was that, even when most of the students
had almost none reading habits, they showed little deficiencies in the
development of this ability. That is why, reading was the starting basis for
the development of the proposed activities based on the CAVA Framework, which
was evaluated as an independent factor in the process concerning its four
components: Collaboration, Autonomy, Variety and Artifacts. These four
components became evaluating indicators throughout the research because they were
visible independently and collectively following the teachers’ intentions to
guide the students towards the complete development of their potential and the
fulfillment of the goals of the subject syllabus, what is expected to be
achieved the best possible way in spite of some random limitations that might
come across the learning process.
Collaboration,
as the first component of the CAVA Framework, was really important during the research
process: the way in which every student learned a new content and shared it
with the rest of the class favored considerably the acquisition of a group of
common linguistic elements. This collaborative character of the process permitted
the teachers to use the foreign language to make collective definitions and explanations
of a new content without the necessity of exploiting the students’ mother
tongue.
An
aspect to point out in this process was that the students’ work had to be
interdependent. For that reason, the teacher had to design the different tasks
within an activity depending one from the result of another and they should be
distributed by the members of a group according to their own preferences and
capacities. At the initial stage, a minor difficulty was that students did not
fully understand the meaning of collaboration as mutual work and some grouped
by social affinity resulting in the undoing of one of the assigned tasks since it
included a specific capacity such as working with an informatics application. Thus,
collaboration was analyzed considering three classifications: high,
intermediate and low. In the last stage of the study, most of the students
grouped according to their individual capacities and abilities because they
were aware of the procedures to use in the solution of the tasks and they were
interested in developing new capacities and abilities, especially those related
to informatics. The quantitative results of this analysis are shown in the
following chart:
Chart 2. Analysis of the evolution of
the students’ collaboration
Source:
Authors’ Elaboration, 2019.
The
second component of the CAVA Framework, Autonomy, was analyzed based on two
points of view: the first one was related to how autonomous the students were
regarding the linguistic abilities, and the second was related to how autonomous
the students were in the learning process of the foreign language in
correspondence with some evaluating criteria.
Regarding
the students’ autonomy in the four linguistic abilities, the results provided
information that proved they were more autonomous in the receptive abilities. For
the evaluation, teachers had to take into account whether the students used for
the different activities resources such as printed or digital dictionaries for looking
up unknown words without analyzing them first in context, or either supporting
drafts at the moment of writing compositions or giving oral presentations, open
talks and role-plays without trusting the knowledge, strategies and capacities
they had already acquired and developed for achieving the communicative purpose.
At
the initial stage, these strategies presented serious difficulties but, at the
last there were some improvements because in oral presentations, for example,
most of the drafts included only the headlines related to the significant
aspects of the topic they would be dealing with. The quantitative analysis of
these improvements is shown in Chart 3.
Chart 3. Analysis of the evolution of
the students’ autonomy regarding the linguistic abilities
Source:
Authors’ Elaboration, 2019.
In relation to how autonomous the students were in the
learning process of the foreign language, this component was evident when every
student was able to do the assigned tasks and, therefore, according to the
establishment of several evaluating criteria for this component, teachers could
determine three levels: totally autonomous, partially autonomous and minimally
autonomous.
The criteria selected for determining what level of
autonomy of the students were the following: the development of the assigned tasks
without any help and supervision from the teachers or from the rest of the
class, the influence of the mother tongue on the foreign language, how fast
their tasks could be done and handed in, their disposition to look for new
online information to widen and support the results of their tasks or, even, to
check these results with a specialist on the topic to correct mistakes and
improve the final result, and the mastering of different structures and
elements belonging to the foreign language and to the cultural identities of
the French-speaking countries.
According to the criteria used for evaluating the
students there were some deficiencies at the initial stage of the research
because most of the students did not hand in their results on time or some also
needed extra-help from the teachers and as to the rest of the class, they were
unable to look for more information to enrich their results or to consult these
results with a specialist, hence they presented mistakes in the use of
structures and elements of French due to the ignorance of the rules for using
them or to the influence of Spanish, as their mother tongue. Yet, in the final
stage, students had improved this aspect by diminishing the previously
mentioned deficiencies. The quantitative analysis of the evolution in this
component is shown as follows:
Chart
4. Analysis of the evolution of the students’ autonomy
Source: Authors’ Elaboration,2019.
Variety, as the third component of the CAVA Framework,
proposed the analysis of many of the technological resources used during the
teaching and learning process of French as a foreign language. Initially, some
of these resources were used but there were some deficiencies as to their
methodological inclusion during the process and not all of their possibilities
were exploited.
Some examples of the improper exploitation of all the
possibilities offered by these resources were, first, the virtual classroom for
its main use in this stage was to provide the transcript of the different
lectures carried out by the teacher or the bibliography to deepen on the
contents proposed by the subject syllabus; next, the slideshows were very used
during the lectures as visual support but not all of them were in accordance
with the characteristics of an effective slideshow; and, last, the websites
were downloaded and offered to the students as another source of bibliography. Although,
these situations brought about some positive changes for the virtual classrooms,
it included different types of activities as wikis, glossaries, exercises and
tasks, for example; and, the websites were no too often downloaded but their
Internet Addresses (URLs) were provided to the students so they could visit
them. These changes are visible in Chart 5.
Chart 5. Analysis of the varied technological resources
used
Source: Authors’ Elaboration, 2019.
Artifacts, the fourth and last component of the CAVA
Framework, allowed the students to create some resources such as slideshows and
recording videos and audios by which they would be evaluated later taking into
account not only the correct use of the French language but the design, the
elaboration and the application of these resources making use of their
informatics knowledge.
At first, although they were used, the resources
presented some limitations regarding their technical quality; rarely were the students
asked to create them and the teachers never used them in their teaching
activity after they were handed-in. In the last moment, the limitations
originated from these deficiencies had been diminished in some degree, making
the students be more interested and attentive during the lessons. The analysis
of such transformations is shown in the following chart:
Chart 6. Analysis of the technological resources created
by the students
Source: Authors’ Elaboration, 2019.
During the research process, the activities carried out
with an integrating approach increased because, even when not all the
activities proposed by the teachers had such approach, most of them had it in
the final stage in comparison with the initial. This characteristic of the
activities allowed the students to differentiate between the strategies used to
make an oral activity and the others to make a written one, an aspect which
influenced positively on their performance according to the communicative objectives.
The evolution of this indicator is shown in the following chart:
Chart 7. Evolution of the activities carried out with an
integrating approach
Source: Authors’ Elaboration, 2019.
As a general overview of the analysis of the different
results obtained during the research process, it is necessary to point out the
continuous and progressive advance of the students’ performance considering
their motivation towards studying French as a foreign language, their
responsibility and their commitment while doing the activities and the
knowledge of their own learning capacities. This allowed to establish new goals
and challenges for the teaching and learning process of French to achieve
higher levels in the development of the students’ linguistic abilities and
professional competences.
CONCLUSIONS
The
use of ICT in the lesson of Integrated French Practice allowed the strengthening
of the university students’ role as the most important component of the process
and the teachers’ role as facilitators of their students’ learning and
development by continuously using the acquired knowledge. Besides, these
technologies favored the development of new competences in the students which
will be useful for their future professional lives.
The
CAVA Framework sustained the students’ autonomous and collaborative performance
taking into account the varied technological resources teachers used to favor
such development through the different artifacts students had to create, increasing
the common knowledge of the different structures and linguistic components of
French.
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