The French LearnLab Course
(Prepared for PSLC Advisory Board visit, May 2007)
Christopher M. Jones,
Teaching Professor of French and Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Modern
Languages, CMU
PSLC French Course Committee Leader
Office: Baker Hall 367, 412-268-5065, E-Mail: cjones@andrew.cmu.edu
URL: http://ml.hss.cmu.edu/FacPages/cjones/
I. Project Plan Abstract:
Elementary French I & II Online are being developed as part of the Open Learning
Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon. The PSLC collaboration is augmenting the course’s
capabilities and supporting research-related activities. It has enhanced the planned course
development in significant ways by allowing French Online to be offered at the
University of Pittsburgh starting in the fall 2005 semester. As part of this effort, Heather
Allen, the applied linguist in charge of French language instruction at the University of
Pittsburgh, joined the course development team in the summer of 2005. Dr. Allen has
since taken a position at the University of Miami, but her replacement Brett Wells has
enthusiastically taken over her role. Funding from the PSLC is allowing faster
implementation, completion of instrumentation, incorporation of multimedia, and
deployment at the University of Pittsburgh as well as the establishment of a French
course committee which oversees and guides studies within the French LearnLab.
II. Achievements: (updated March 2007):
(1) Course development milestones (Open Learning Initiative /PSLC funding):
The French Online/French LearnLab represents a complete redesign of an existing
French Online course. Below is a list of new course highlights.
1. Content authoring for Elementary French 1 Online is now complete. 125 video
scenes were shot in Nantes in June of 2005 and 2006 and have been edited and
compressed for web delivery.
2. A gated progression through categories of interactive activities;
3. Mastery charting by category (vocabulary, grammar, communicative
competence, phonetics). Specialized software this function has been completed
and will be integrated into the course starting in the Summer of 2007.
4. Cultural study and “synthetic activities” involving creative language use.
5. Ten interactive tutor templates have been completed in collaboration with OLI
and PSLC programmers. More than a thousand exercises employing these
templates have been integrated into first and second semester courses. All of
these exercises log to the DataShop for potential use by PSLC researchers.
6. Specialized software for testing which allows for multiple media integration and
mixed machine and human correction has been developed and integrated into
both semesters of the course.
7. Both first and second semesters of the new French Online are being offered at
Pitt and CMU. Additional sites are being actively recruited.
8. Logging in the French Learnlab is being upgraded to include all media use. This
technology will likely migrate to the Chinese and Physics Learnlab courses as
well.
(2) French Course Committee
 The French Course Committee has met twenty times since project inception. A selected
list of topics under discussion at these meeting follows.
o Updates from study leaders
o Initial and continuing feedback to authors of new project plans
o Course design updates
o IRB and anonymization issues
o Course instrumentation requirements
o Issues in second language acquisition theory
o Course content description updates
o Establishment of mixed public/private wiki under committee control
o Research agenda for the French LearnLab and its relationship to Center
and Cluster theory
o Site and Advisory Board visit preparation
o Study type definition (in-vivo, pull-out, lab)
o Instructor / student motivation for study participation
o Collection of non-computer-based data
o PSLC organizational and communication issues
 Experiments currently completed or underway in the French LearnLab include:
o Erica Michaels (Psychology-CMU) has completed some preliminary
studies on working memory and its potential importance for language
acquisition;
o Amy Ogan (Human-Computer Interaction-CMU) has collected two data
sets with a total of 45 students using guided viewing of clips from feature
films to study the acquisition of intercultural competence within the
context of a foreign-language class. Her ongoing work will expand on this
project by looking at increasing the effectiveness of discussion board
posting in the context of cultural study.
o Amy Ogan, Erin Walker, and Ruth Wiley have independently piloted with
9 students a new tutor built with the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools
targeting the ability of learners to make correct judgments between
imperfect and passé composé tenses - a classic teaching problem in
French. This will be piloted in Spring of 2007 within the LearnLab, on
students with varying levels of ability from two French courses.
o Brian MacWhinney (Psychology-CMU) has collected two data sets on
the transfer of skills from dictation practice. Initial conclusions indicate
that specific vocabulary acquisition (spelling) is not significant, but that
a more generalized sound-to-character mapping ability (comprehending
required grammatical knowledge) may be augmented.
o
o
o
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An additional study on the acquisition of cues to French grammatical
gender is in its second round of data collection in Spring 2007. 19 students
at CMU and Pitt completed 4 practice sessions, mastering 20 rules of
grammatical gender assignment. Pilot results show an improvement in cue
generalization to unfamiliar words after extensive rule practice. Further
analysis, which is ongoing, will be based on tutor performance and posttest measures and their relationships to rule validity, cue conflicts, word
cognate status, response latency, number of practice trials and other wordand learner-level variables.
Natasha Tokowicz and Tamar Degani have conducted one study of Robust
Vocabulary Learning in French, that involved testing of both classroom/
on-line French learners (tested across two semesters and at both Pitt and
CMU), and a group of laboratory learners who did not have any prior
exposure to French. The aim of the study was to evaluate several
vocabulary training methods. In particular, we taught French vocabulary
in association to pictures in unusual orientations (condition of interest) and
in association to pictures in normal orientations, English words, and to a
combination of both English words and pictures in unusual orientations
(one presentation of each). In past research, learning vocabulary in
association to pictures in unusual orientations was superior to learning
vocabulary in association to pictures in usual orientations or to English
words, when tested using recall of the new-language vocabulary. The
probable benefit to learners is enhanced memory for the instructed
vocabulary. Preliminary analyses of the laboratory data suggest that the
unusual orientation condition is beneficial for recognition memory when it
is preceded by one word trial, possibly because this condition makes it
easier to resolve the object denoted by the picture..
Carolyn Rosé is leading a team developing synthetic dialogue functions
for chat-like practice as an outgrowth of the Tutalk project, and will be
piloting with French students in 2007.
Nel de Jong (post-doc) is investigating transfer of grammatical knowledge
from comprehension to production skills as a result of syntactic priming.
She ran a pilot study 2006. In Fall 2006, she developed new software for
the project, which can record audio over the internet. Data collection for
the present lab-based pull-out studies started in March 2007, and is
expected to be completed in the fall. By mid April, 8 students are expected
to have completed both studies (40 participant hours total).
Mariya Pachman from New Mexico State has proposed a reordering of
instruction within the French LearnLab to investigate the importance of
shortening the time between the presentation-practice-production cycle.
(3) Planned activities Summer/ Fall 2007:;
 Continued offering of French 1 & 2
 Complete media use logging upgrades for Fall 2007 use.
 Refinement and deploy of testing and mastery software throughout French Online
 Development of additional course sites
(4) Publications and presentations related to French Online and the LearnLab
Jones, C., Siskin, M. “Building the New French Online: The Challenges of Shared
Infrastructure,” CALICO (Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium),
May 2007, Texas State University, San Marcos.
Jones, C. “French Online and the Open Learning Initiative”, Kentucky Foreign Language
Conference, April 2007, Lexington, Kentucky.
Jones, C. Allen, H., Tardio, T. , Wu, S-M. “Language Online: The Evolution of Web-Delivered
Instruction,” Presentation at ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign
Languages), Nashville, November 2006.
Ogan, A., Aleven, V., Jones, C. (2006) Culture in the Classroom: Challenges for
Assessment in Ill-Defined Domains. In the Workshop Proceedings on Ill-Defined
Domains at the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems,
2006.
Ogan, A., Jones, C., Aleven, V. Focusing attention on critical moments: evaluation of a
system for teaching intercultural competence. Presented at European Computer
Assisted Language Learning 2006.
Jones, C., Queuniet, S. “French Online and the French LearnLab: Instruction and Research,”
EuroCall, Granada, Spain, September, 2006.
Allen, H., Jones. C. “French Online and the Open Learning Initiative,” Digital Stream,
Monterrey, California. March 2006.
Ogan, A., Jones, C., Aleven, V. (2005) Improving Intercultural Competence by
Predicting in French Film. In Richards, G. (Ed.), Proceedings of World
Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher
Education 2005. Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
Jones, C. Allen, H., Queuniet, S. “Communicative Video for French Online,” Robert
Henderson Language Media Center Multimedia Showcase. September 2005.