institution: University of Puget Sound

language: French

status: Full-time, non-tenure Track

type: Course Release

title: On-Line French Placement Exam and Course Materials

duration: January - June 1999 (with follow-ups through fall 1999)

description: The primary project involves creating an on-line aptitude / placement examination for students of Elementary and Intermediate courses at UPS. The exam will be constructed with xMedia Engine and other appropriate tools. It will be primarily auto-corrective, including a scoring mechanism designed to guide the student in selecting the appropriate French course. Areas tested will include such structures and usages as:

• regular and irregular verb forms
• verb tenses - present, past-perfect and imperfect, "if" clause tense concordance, subjunctive
• articles
• personal and relative pronouns
• elementary and intermediate level vocabulary.

I will also use the unit-off time to develop more on-line materials for my Intermediate and Elementary French courses, in order to bring them up to speed with the latest multimedia technology available, concentrating on:

• questions over selected readings including textual glosses, such as from Sartre's _Les jeux sont faits_
• guided viewing of excerpts from several films viewed in classes, such as François Truffaut's _L'argent de poche_, Claude Zidi's _Les Ripoux_, and Jaco Van Dormael's _Le Huitième Jour_.
• interactive grammar (see above for topic examples) and vocabulary exercises.

outcome: The French team at UPS has discussed for several years creating and implementing such a placement exam. In the past, we have attempted to place students appropriately via face-to-face discussions, either at the annual Academic Fair during freshman orientation or during appointments with students. We have become increasingly dissatisfied with this relatively imprecise approach and would like to offer other options for students to use throughout the year or even in the summer prior to arriving on campus. Placing students at the highest appropriate level of language course is of course essential to maximizing their potential for development in the language they wish to acquire; thus, maximizing the efficiency of placement mechanisms is highly desirable.

We hope to begin using the exam in August 1999, particularly during the fall freshman orientation and registration rush. We anticipate the number of students making use of the exam to aid in self-placement assessments to be in the range of 100, based on typical enrollment figures in Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced French courses this year and in past years.

As I have yet, using WWW searches, to find such placement exams for French, I anticipate that an on-line placement exam will be particularly useful to many colleagues, especially those in the Consortium, as a placement exam or a review sheet. It would also provide a review tool for many university students of French on particular grammar points in an auto-corrective setting.

Moreover, students applying to study in France could gauge their levels more accurately to determine whichstudy-abroad site they should choose,and which particular level of their chosen program they may reasonablyplan on entering. Alumni could also test their current grammatical proficiencyon-line, for whatever need they have. The examination would thus in effect serve future, current, and former students in an interactive, non-threatening medium, providing them with an accurate assessment of their skill levels.

In addition, the more generalized materials developed for my Elementary and Intermediate French courses with the unit-off time would of course allow my students to spend more time outside of class doing written auto-corrective and/or auto-directive exercises such asthose outlined previously. This would give them the opportunity to do more written drill and exercise work on their own, sometimes in a less threatening, non-graded setting; and the end effect on actual work done inside the classroom would allow all of us to devote more time to more meaningful discussions, putting into realistic use those structures worked with in written exercise / drill formats on-line, rather than using up class time for such drill and exercise work.

Finally, the time I spend developing these projects will serve both as a means to create a base of materials with which and from which to work in my classes in the immediate future, as well as a valuable training ground for me for creating and using such multimedia technology with future course materials over the years. I also anticipate being able to offer my services as a consultant to colleagues both at UPS and indeed throughout the Consortium, both offering advice and training to help others develop their own multimedia course materials, as well as offering those materials I have developed myself for their use.

timeline:

January - 5 February 1999: Learn, set up multi-media mechanisms for various parts of placement exam. Some preliminary creation of actual questions / sections of the exam will undoubtedly occur here, in conjunction with setting up the webpage exam construct.

8 - 26 February 1999: Write actual exam in its entirety, install on webpage.

1 - 8 March 1999: Finishing touches / minor adjustments on placement exam.

1-19 March 1999: Compose / set up guided readings & exercises corresponding to them for webpage use.

22 March - 9 April 1999: Set up film excerpts / video clips, install on page; compose and install corresponding exercises.

12 - 30 April 1999: Compose and install varied grammar and vocabulary exercises.

3-7 May 1999: Finishing touches, minor adjustments to all projects.

Late August through September 1999: Make placement exam available to first group of students; assess results; report to NWLC on findings; make appropriate adjustments.

amount: Agreed-upon unit-off funding

breakdown: