Since I haven't got the chance to join any volunteer organizations and all the day care centers I called said they don't need someone, I decided to record my experience of learning French first.
There are so many French language programs in Montreal, ranging from the ones hosted by Chinese to governmental language institutions. Different schoolmates have varied preference towards their choices as well. Most of my Chinese friends recommended several schools equipped with Chinese teachers adopting the traditional grammar-teaching-comes-first way to me. Undeniably, separating rules out of the content is the fastest way to get to know a language, and I studied English in such path. Phonetic rules are firstly taught so that even if you don't know the word, you can still pronounce it. Then grammar teaching follows. All the explanation is delivered in the mother tongue though. As a result, I achieved the awkwardly unsatisfying level of English - I don't have much trouble reading and writing, but I have difficulty in listening and speaking. Therefore, I want to try a different method this time, so I registered in a program of Dawson College where the Francophone teacher would mostly use French to teach and scaffold with English. I am not in favor of nativism, but I want to take a look at the difference between immersion classroom and the conventional classroom. So I kicked out my journey of learning French from the second class of the beginners' program. Since it's the first class, I paid extra attention to her teaching style out of educational intuitive. The teacher had a hard time dealing with students from different background: Some of them are real "zero-level" students who have never been exposed to French for even a single bit. Some of them have studied certain basic expressions and conjugates. Her instructions were firstly in French, then explained to "zero-level" students in English. Luckily, all the ten students can be paired into "expert-novice" groups. She asked groups to organize conversations upon her prompts. For example, she asked us to introduce ourselves to each other first, then introduce one's partner to the other students. The purpose of this activity is to practice personal pronoun and corresponding verb collocation (je + m'appelle, elle + s'appelle, il + s'appelle; je + parle, elle + parle, il + parle; je + suis, il + est, elle + est). With the teacher's correction, most of the students managed to use the correct verb in accordance with the pronoun, even though none of us is able to speak without hesitation. After reading about the textbook of Second Language Learning, I realized that the teacher was attempting to scaffold. However, how can we tell whether her scaffolding is efficient or not? Explicit correction is still employed largely in class. One noticeable shortcoming of her corrective feedback is that she didn't give students enough time to self-correct. One strength her teaching methods is that she tried using the same simple examples every time so that beginners would not find it hard understanding the vocabulary. Meanwhile, I think she might use more varied lexical terms to enlarge students' vocabulary in the future.
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