Multimedia in French 101-103

Students enrolled in French 101, 102, or 103 meet in one of Purdue's Multimedia laboratories one day per week. During laboratory sessions, students are engaged in a variety of activities which includes the use of the Paroles Interactive Multimedia CD-ROM( Magnan, Berg, Martin-Berg & Ozzello, 2002), and the Logiciel Situationnel Interactif CD-ROM (Grace & Fukada, 2000) specifically designed to complement the Paroles student textbook. Each unit of these CD-ROMs reflects material covered in the textbook, in the context of authentic footage of real life discussions and situations. They provide video clips, images, recordings, and activities that add life to the entire program. It affords the learner easy access to grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, listening comprehension, connectivity to the Web, and electronic journal writing activities.

The objective of this program is to sensitize the student to the attitudes and everyday lives of French speaking people from all walks of life. It allows the students to work on listening, speaking, and writing skills through interactive activities.

Sample unit lessons include:
Les présentations, les rapports interpersonnels, la famille et les amis, les professions, le temps, les loisirs, les études, les voyages, la nourriture, la santé.

Each lesson provides the student with a variety of activities from which to choose.

The Paroles Interactive Multimedia CD-ROM includes the following features:

• C'est comme ça: Each Ensemble contains one World Wide Web activity about facets of everyday French life.
• Comment le dire: Each Dossier has an exercise that discusses how to pronounce various sounds in French.
• Dossier menu: Each Dossier contains 2-3 dialogues called échanges with related exercises. Each échange is either a video dialogue or an audio dialogue with a related graphic.
• Compréhension orale / Mise-en-scène: Each échange has an oral comprehension exercise to let students confirm their understanding of the dialogue.
• Glossary: Alphabetically lists the vocabulary words, their definitions, and the Ensemble in which they appear.
• Grammaire: The grammaire features grammatical rules and examples.
• Ouvertures culturelles: World Wide Web research activities for French culture topics.
• Petits jeux: Highly interactive vocabulary games.

The Logiciel Situationnel Interactif CD-ROM includes the following activities which enhance the four skills:

• Sous-titre: This activity enhances listening and reading skills by asking students to "subtitle" portions of the video with short texts.
• Compréhension: This listening comprehension activity requires the student to select the correct answers to questions based on the dialogue.
• Exercice à lacunes: This activity reinforces listening and writing skills by requiring the student to complete the video script with missing words.
• Jeu de rôle: This activity, which allows for pronunciation practice and fluency development, asks the student to take a role as one of the speakers in the dialogue, record the conversation, and play it back.
• Reconstruction: In this listening activity, the student reconstructs the dialogue by viewing four video segments and putting them in the correct order.

Web activities : Paroles Web site and other Francophone Web sites

In these activities students will find engaging, colorful web sites to explore, offering them the opportunity to become more informed about the French-speaking world. In a typical activity students will investigate one or more web sites and write the results of their search on the computer screen.

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