2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Designing and experimenting environment-adaptive pedagogical material for tenses in French as a Foreign Language.
| Project/Area Number |
18K12452
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| Research Institution | Okayama University |
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Principal Investigator |
RENOUD LOIC 岡山大学, 社会文化科学研究科, 特任准教授 (50807964)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2018-04-01 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | FFL / Material development / Tenses / Multimodal analysis |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Three types of results were obtained this year: 1) exploitation of data, 2) literature reviews and 3) disclosure of the designed material. 1) In a first paper, I analyzed grammatical presentations of the French ‘go’ future and the simple future in endolingual and exolingual French as a Foreign Language textbooks, showing why they tend to be inadequate. In a second, larger paper (submitted), I analyzed video data collected in February 2020 in my institution for the experimentation of the material (conceived within the framework of this project) for these same 2 tenses. The first finding is that the material allows learners to create criteria for effectively choosing the tense according to the situation. The second is the observation by serendipity that learners reuse the conceptual resources available in the material (common anchoring in the present with the ‘go’ future, relative exclusion of the interlocutor with the simple future) by adapting them to their discourse and actions. 2) For future work, I conducted a literature review of approaches to tenses in applied cognitive linguistics. For the work mentioned above, a review of multimodal approaches for analyzing how learners interact with pedagogical artifacts was achieved. 3) Parts of the designed material was presented in a short article: point in time, frequency, timespan, lexical aspect, ‘come-from’ past vs present perfect, ‘go’ future vs simple future, past tenses. For the ‘come-from’ past, it is the observer's construction of the present moment that seems to induce immediate anteriority (ongoing analysis).
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
Overall, there is a delay in the analysis of the data. There are various reasons for this. Experimental data of sufficient quality, sometimes very good, have been obtained. That is the case for the discrimination between the periphrastic future ('go' future) vs. simple future (see column above) and for the opposition between 'j’ai pu' vs. 'je pouvais' (for past capacity). But only the data for testing the material on the two future tenses was exploited. The delay comes from the choice I made to privilege one aspect rather than another. This project has several aspects, which concern linguistics or applied linguistics. If work is done on one aspect, the effect on the other is not immediate. Besides, shortcomings in the design of the material led me to come back to it. Some parts were reworked for two notions: the opposition between activity and accomplishment (lexical aspect), and the opposition between immediate anteriority ('come-from' past) and present perfect. This material has been used in the classroom with interesting results, but there is no data. On the other hand, as indicated, the analysis of the theoretical implications of the material for the opposition between immediate anteriority and present perfect has yielded results that will be exploitable. Another factor which causes the delay is the analysis as an activity itself. Identifying key episodes, transcribing them, gaining a detailed understanding of what is being played out and putting the analysis into written form took longer than planned.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
This final year will be devoted as planned to data analysis. From the data obtained for the experimentation of the material for the ‘go’ future / simple future distinction and between ‘j’ai pu’ and ‘je pouvais’ (provisional choice), I plan to extend a research perspective that appeared during the first analysis. From this perspective, I can show that, during the task, the material is used by learners as a kind of extension of their thinking process. My intention is to conduct detailed analyses of interactions with the material to show how concepts latent in the material are imported into the flow of discourse. One goal is to describe how learners map the material to the environment represented in the task. This environment is in fact the small fictional world surrounding the short dialogue of the task. What does this mapping consist of? Two international conference papers that were postponed last year are also planned in August (MATSDA, Malaysia) and September (UCO, France), both online. For the second, I will specifically address the issue of mediation. The material designed in the framework of this project indeed consists of mediation tools in the Vygotskian sense of the term: the material conveys concepts that learners use for problem solving. In addition to continuing the analysis, I am also envisaging a theorezation of implementation, based on a retrospective reflection on the 4 data collections made in 2018 and 2019. The phase of presenting the material is crucial, yet it is a topic that is little addressed in the literature.
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| Causes of Carryover |
The two conference papers I had planned for 2020 were cancelled (corona cancellations): MATSDA - Universiti Sains (Malaysia) International Conference, 10th-11th August and Universite Catholique de l'Ouest (France), Colloque International - Mediation(s) et mediatisation(s) en classe de langue, 27th-28th September. In agreement with my administration, I used part of the travel expenses to buy books. However, only 58.5% of the whole amount for FY3 were used.
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