How platforms can change curricular engineering: a case in point 

By Bernard Moro 

This is another example staging the Grenoble Town Planning College. Today, during their first and second years the students there get 40 hours a year in language courses. In their third —and last— year, because they are on fulltime placement from September through to February, either some place in France or abroad, they cannot attend any course, let alone language courses, until they return to university. So they are offered only some 20 hours of language lessons on an optional basis, which obviously they don't attend, first because they are overloaded with work in preparation for the exam, second, because the college, historically uninterested in languages anyway, does not require them to take a language exam. "We can't ask them to do this when they haven't spoken or written a word of English for 6 months", the rationale goes. The resulting paradox is that the final phase of their training, when they most need to demonstrate valid language skills as they start job-seeking, is the time they are least capable of doing it.

This is when we came in with the idea of using a collaborative platform to solve this curricular engineering problem. We will now comment on the diagram below, which sums up the project we submitted:

 

In the first year nothing is changed, the traditional face-to-face format prevails and students are given an overall grade in English.

Throughout their second year, they are granted access to the platform, getting used to using the tool. Most writing practice takes place out there, in the form of free forums, tutored writing, projects, etc. (click for details). At the end of the 40 hours of English, they get an overall mark.

In their third year they have the same tutor as in the second year. While in training placement during the first semester, they are required to access the platform on a regular basis, attend the forum in English and post at least one contribution a week. Students are offered a private exchange area —a virtual office as it were— where they can communicate with their distant teacher who gives, corrects, discusses and grades written assignments. This for the tutor is the equivalent of 20 face-to-face teaching hours. In other words, the platform serves two purposes; one being to keep contact —albeit in non-native language— with their fellow-students; another to tremendously improve their English through writing. These students will get to produce more writing than they would in any other type of setup. And because we are dealing here mostly with asynchronous communication, both the tutor and the tutored are free to work day or night, morning or evening.

Once the placement is over and they get back to university for the second semester, students revert to the face-to-face setup, still with the same teacher that has known them from the beginning of their second year. Obviously during the 20 hours left, without discarding writing altogether, oral competence will hold center stage. Now the grading at the end of this third year does make sense, and those freshly-knighted professionals should now be able to handle a job interview in the target language, which is what language teaching at university boils down to.

In other words, thanks to this platform tool, we are in a position to:

Incidentally, but that is not directly our aim as language teachers, this would also prepare those students to use an instrument that is increasingly popular in the business environment. 

Somber conclusions
 Four months after the initial proposal, the College management has shown no interest in the project, and no reply whatsoever has ever been sent to my mail covering the proposal. This only confirms the observations I have conducted over my three years of working with the French University, namely, that it has little, if any, language policy, despite the so-called European perspective, and even less IT-based language teaching policy.