II. Curation                     

In this section, you learn about curations and curating. Curating is a 21st century skill. Given the flood of information online, we all need to know how jump in and out of the flow in such as way that we don’t get swept away, rather that we manage to find, manipulate and create information in both professional and private settings. Learning how to manage information in languages other than English is a highly marketable skill. Curating is a suite of activities whereby the curator seeks information about a given topic, learns about the topic from multiple readings, selects some of the most salient sites and sounds, and assembles a narrative around these artifacts, sharing it with others so that they learn from you. In this section, the class will be learning about curation in general but also learn learning about it in French, noting the ‘French way’ to curate by studying examples from the French speaking world.

These are the steps to take to learn how to curate effectively in French (and in English!) :

1.  Create your rampages.us site if you don’t have one already. Join the French curations rampage: https://rampages.us/french2atvcu).Read one or more curations on curation, learning the vocabulary and discourse surrounding this field in French.
2. Work through a module  on curations here:  http://fren425frenchmedia.pbworks.com/w/page/50964301/Ce%20que%20c’est%20que%20la%20curation
3. Learn about curating for this course here: https://rampages.us/french2atvcu/?page_id=1946
4. Try out curation by seeking at least 10 sites, at least half of which are from a Francophone country, that will help you fill in one of the gaps you noted in Section I.1 as you worked on your LFO. Write up your summaries of at least 6 (at least 3 in French), how each selected site promotes your learning, and why/how in particular these sites will help you improve your French. Post your curation on rampages under the category FREN202f2018, with tags: curation0, yourname.
5. Learn how to peer edit so you can help and be helped in class on your curation narrative. See here 🙁https://coerll.utexas.edu/methods/modules/writing/04/editing.php & https://coerll.utexas.edu/methods/pdf/wr/writing-feedback-codes.pdf )
6. Revise your curation in rampages based on peer editing the professor’s feedback.
7. Evaluate the class curations on the rampages site:https://rampages.us/french2atvcu/?page_id=1946.

III. Teletandem & other online intercultural exchange forms

Teletandem language learning, a.k.a, online intercultural exchange (OIE) or telecollaboration is a 21st century learning affordance for second language acquisition. It works by connecting two people wanting to learn the other’s native language. So, for example, an American student who wants to learn French partners with someone from Belgium, Canada or Mali. In their online meeting (via Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Adobe Connect), of 30 minutes, they discuss a given topic or two for 15 minutes in each language: French and English. In some instances, the topics are the same; in others, each person has a specific one. The exchange experience may be organized by the learners’ schools or people may seek out a site like the Mixxer, where one signs up by language and level for exchanges with learners of the native language.  Another version, although not really ‘tandem’, is a paid service (like TalkAbroad, iTalki, etc.) in which the language learner works with an online ‘tutor’ who has been hired to work on given topics with the learner entirely in the target language, French in our case.

For tandem learning to work well and for you to get the most from the experience, there are a few communicative functions you’ll need to master as well as some preparation before each session. First of all, take note of which country your partner comes from and learn a bit about the country, the inhabitants, and some of the cultural products, practices and perspectives.  In more general terms, you should review how people in French speaking countries greet each other, for example (France, Canada, Mali).

For Belgian partners in fall 2018, we’ll be exchanging with École Professionnel de Hautes Études Commerciales (EPHEC) students. They have a site on genial.ly that will help coordinate our work with them: https://view.genial.ly/5b2bdc55e0c5ed42eb354b9e/ukusephec-language-tandem. There will be 3 “missions” (a very French notion about task-based learning):

1. Mission 1: Getting to know one another
2. Mission 2: Cultural probing
3. Mission 3: Professional work

So why do this? It may seem to some people that English is enough. So many people worldwide are learning it, so why learn their languages? The first is that those people who are monolingual, speak only English for example, are limited in their ability to think, act and communicate. They are most certainly not ready to participate broadly in the global 21st century. The second is that a bilingual person has two ways to see a situation, figure out a problem, choose a response.  The third is that languages surround us, not only globally, but in our own neighborhoods, here is the USA!