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FOR six years, Hofstra University students majoring or minoring in French have been required to speak for twenty to twenty-five minutes per week with a person whose French is flawless and whose background includes extensive recent stays in France. The results have been most encouraging. Teachers and students alike agree that this program is in great part responsible for a marked improvement in the students' fluency, confidence, and performance in communicating in French. Some even ascribe to it our increasing enrollment. Indeed, it may be one of the reasons for the hundred percent employment record of our former students, most of whom use their French on the job in banks, export-import houses, shipping companies, airlines, the United Nations, and, more recently, investment firms. I should mention, though, that these students are also trained in business as either minors or majors. Incidentally, we still train teachers who find jobs.
The individualized practice sessions with native-level speakers (known on our campus as the Native Aide Program) carry a half credit per semester; they may be taken for up to three years, for a maximum of three credits, and are graded on a pass/fail basis.
The format of the instruction is left to the discretion of the aide and the student. The goal in all cases is to get the student to the level of liberated conversation—to achieve fluency.
We identify four problematic areas: vocabulary, structure, pronunciation and rhythm, and comprehension. Each aide devises a plan of instruction for each student at the onset of the semester. Good record keeping from semester to semester provides the aide with a progress profile of each student, so that initial diagnosis is not necessary each semester. Thus, a vocabulary problem may be remedied with intensive work with the Bonnell and Sedwick Conversation in French and ultimately with work in magazine and newspaper articles. For problems of pronunciation, we assign pertinent tapes of the Valdman Drillbook of French Pronunciation and the Varney Pleasants Phonetic French Dictionary . 1 For defective sentence structure, we practice with connectives, that is, prepositions and conjunctions, as well as with brief pattern drills. For grammar problems, we prescribe review of a few points at a time. It is important, however, not to overwhelm the student with remedial work. Problems are carefully selected during each session and brought to the student's attention as areas that will be stressed in the following session. At no point should students be made to feel so self-conscious that they will be unable to speak. Aides must be mindful that a steady conversational outpour is essential for comprehension.
Obviously, the proper selection of personnel is crucial. The aide, if not a native, must speak exactly like one and must have spent considerable time in France recently, so that the student's experience will be as authentic as possible—the student must be able to feel that he or she is holding a conversation totally in French with a French-speaking person . The aide must show patience and not constantly supply the student with answers. Native aides have a strong tendency to “do the speaking,” but they must remain conscious that their aim is to develop the student's conversational skills. Since students are not allowed to enroll in this course until they have completed four semesters' work in the language, they can already speak enough French so that we can absolutely prohibit the use of English. At this point most of our instructors could not speak English if they wanted to, and those who can speak English rarely allow the student to know that they can.
Before one can institute the program, locale, personnel, and scales of payment for the instructors must be decided, course descriptions must be formulated if credit is to be assigned, and policies on grading and scheduling must be established.
The locale should be as conducive to conversation as possible. Empty classrooms are a poor choice because their associations inhibit the student. We use private offices, cubicles in the reading center, library meeting rooms, and secluded sections of the language laboratory. The emphasis is on privacy, which reinforces the individualized aspect of the experience. Since a portable cassette recorder is the only tool the instructor needs for diagnosis, the choice of locale is open. Still, the place should have an atmosphere of work: cafeterias or other public places are undesirable because they lack privacy (intruders come by to say hello and never leave) and because the student constantly overhears English conversations.
Finding personnel has been our most difficult problem. Our university will only allow us to hire nonteaching personnel from our student body. Consequently it seems to be easier to find French native speakers than to find American-born people with native-speaker ability who have lived in France long enough to be familiar with French culture. If you find such an American aide, so much the better. If you do not, you must find French native speakers around you. If you have graduate assistants on campus, you may not need to look farther. If not, a call to your dean of students, the head of your EFL program, or the foreign-student office can usually turn up a few persons willing and able to work. If they are full-time university students who are foreign nationals equipped with student visas, they may work within your university as student aides. Of course, you should check with the immigration bureau to make sure that you do not violate any laws. Obviously, if your prospective aide is not a student, he or she must have the proper visa to be allowed to work. If your university allows you to hire from outside the institution, call your local Alliance Française chapter or a French firm in your neighborhood. From them you can probably obtain the names of qualified Americans or of French natives you might approach. Whatever your source, you need not hire more than one person to pilot your program.
The selection of personnel may also depend on whether or not your program is credit-bearing. If it is, your curriculum committee may require aides to have certain degrees. It is better to avoid having such restrictions imposed, for they too will limit your sources for personnel. It should be made clear that aides are hired for a specific qualification—their native ability to speak the language—and for a specific task. We have found that persons with the French baccalauréat are amply prepared.
Although our program now bears a half credit per semester, during its first two years it carried none. We found absolutely no difficulty in requiring our majors and minors to take the program. Recognizing its validity, they were eager to have their weekly allotment of time with “the native student aide.” Such a noncredit arrangement is far easier at the onset, and I would recommend it.
As for a formula of payment, I was able to hire a student aide for $2.50 per hour in 1974. The amount has now been raised to $3.50 per hour. When we were able to offer credit for the program, the aide qualified for the rank of adjunct instructor and could thus be paid considerably more. I use the rate of ten hours of work per week as equivalent to teaching three semester hours of course work. Thus, one of our present native aides works twenty hours per week for the same amount as one of our part-time adjunct classroom instructors who teaches six hours. Another aide, who has been assigned ten students, is paid for a credit and a half.
As for the course description, I offer the following example:
INDIVIDUALIZED FRENCH
AURAL-ORAL DEVELOPMENT
Development of skills in listening and speaking on a one-to-one basis with a native or bilingual speaker. Diagnosis of each problem at the onset of the course and assignment of phonetic exercises in the language laboratory. Prerequisite: French 4 [fourth semester], or equivalent. Student must be either a registered French major or minor or be taking a French course above level 4 concurrently.
NOTE : may not be used to satisfy the language requirement; course may be repeated, but a maximum of 3 s.h. of this course may be applied toward the B.A. degree.
The maximum number of credit hours allowable and the limitation regarding the language requirement were added to my original description by Hofstra's curriculum committee.
Grading, as I mentioned earlier, is done on a pass/fail basis. We feel that this system allows the student to relax and concentrate on self-improvement rather than on competing for an A. Moreover, since each student is competing against his or her own deficiencies, and because the level of proficiency varies to such a degree, universal a priori criteria are impossible to establish. The aide evaluates the student after two weeks, and we compare this recorded diagnosis with one made at the end of the term. To ensure progress, we do not tolerate absenteeism. A student who cuts twice is dismissed with a grade of No Credit.
In scheduling students, we use the following procedure. The student aide in my office who now handles this job prepares a master table of available twenty-five-minute segments. During the second week of classes, when all student program changes are terminated, the aide circulates the master table, first to the senior classes and then to the others, so that students may select their time slots. Each student also indicates second-choice time segments that would be acceptable if schedule changes prove necessary. Students who cannot find a segment on the master table see the aide, who then rearranges the schedule so that each person has a period of private instruction. There is always a temptation to schedule two students per session, but I have always forbidden this practice, for it defeats the purpose of the program. It is better to turn a student away than to compromise the program.
Because of the considerable amount of preparation necessary before the native aide meets with the first student, the task may appear formidable at first, but six years of success amply proves to us that the project is worth every bit of effort we have put into it. It has made our students more fluent, more confident, and more able to benefit from their other French courses, so that the rewards are multiplied.
In the fall of 1980, we launched the second stage of our Native Aide Program: each of our third- and fourth-semester students will converse with a native aide for ten minutes every week. We look forward to similar success not only in student performance but also in the recruitment of majors and minors.
The author is Chairman of the Department of French at Hofstra University.
1 Peter Bonnell and Frank Sedwick, Conversation in French, Points of Departure (New York: Van Nostrand, 1976); Albert Valdman, Robert J. Salazar, and Marie Antoinette Charbonneaux, A Drillbook of French Pronunciation (New York: Harper, 1970); Jeanne Varney Pleasants, Phonetic French Dictionary (Great Neck, N.Y.: Goldsmith's Music Shop, 1959).
© 1981 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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