Bilingual education/bilingualism

2002 Language Teaching  
Acquiring French by electronic mail. Francophonie (Rugby, UK), 23 (2001), 15-19. Modern information technology, especially email, provides an ideal tool to engage learners in genuine written activities. This article describes an experiment in which first-year university students of French were encouraged to send messages of a personal nature to their tutor in order to elicit a response. The messages were not evaluated in any way, though they were corrected. The theoretical framework, based on
more » ... e Monitor Model developed by Krashen, is discussed, including some controversial aspects.There were several positive factors arising from the exercise: once the first step had been taken, students all participated enthusiastically; the exchanges offered genuine interpersonal communication; the tutor's feedback constituted the input to which students were exposed; students were more relaxed about sending emails than doing formal writing because the focus of the activity is on meaning and they associate sending emails with chatting with friends; because they are not being evaluated they are more interested in conveying meaning and becoming good communicators in the target language. Students' feedback on the activity was very positive, showing that they enjoyed the genuinely communicative nature of it. Some drawbacks are also discussed. 02-.es [Jesus Arzamendi]). Preliminary findings of a format-based foreign language teaching method for school children in the Basque Country. Applied
doi:10.1017/s0261444801261734 fatcat:l7i5sedb5ndz7im43lk5h7fk5e