Promoting orality in foreign language classrooms in innovative ways : focus on new technologies and improvisation

Details

Supervisors

Meunier, Fanny

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale, à finalité didactique

Abstract

This dissertation addresses two different innovative ways to promote orality in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom: new technologies and improvisation. It also investigates (1) how these two distinct approaches can promote orality, and (2) the impacts that new technology and improvisation have on students’ orality. To answer these questions, a three-week experiment with new technology among fourth years EFL students has been conducted. The different technologies used for this project were Quizlet, Kahoot, Flipgrid, Wooclap, and Padlet. The research procedure was divided into three main stages: a pre-implementation questionnaire, the analysis of the Flipgrid videos, and a post-implementation questionnaire. The questionnaires were mainly based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) of Davis (1989), which aims at measuring how users come to accept and use a technology according to two categories: Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease-of-Use. The two versions of the questionnaire were used to grasp how technology affected the students’ learning with one questionnaire that covered learning before the use of new technology and one that covered learning after its application. Afterwards, data was collected from the questionnaires and from the various videos that the students recorded on Flipgrid. This data was analysed to observe the progression of students’ orality thanks to the different platforms to which they were exposed. For the improvisation part, due to the coronavirus crisis, an experiment in the classroom could not be conducted. Despite the fact that it was not possible to experiment in the classroom, a guide and different strategies to put improvisation into application are proposed in this paper. The purpose of this focus is to guide and give tips and tricks to EFL teachers in want to support orality in their classrooms. Throughout other studies conducted by different researchers, different techniques of improvisation, and an example of a didactic sequence implementing improvisation, this section tries to analyse how improvisation promotes and impacts orality in the classroom. To finish, both methods – new technology and improvisation – are confronted to see how both impact students’ orality in the EFL classroom. This comparison also shows the positive outcomes of these innovative approaches to promoting orality.