I took French 211 in Spring 2021. This course was fully online. I was initially enrolled in an in-person course, but I switched after I realized firsthand just how much more difficult it would be to hear my peers from six feet away when they were speaking another language. This class also involved the use of Zoom breakout rooms to practice speaking French with peers. This semester, we increasingly used Google Docs to collaborate and save the answers to the questions we were asked. It also ended with a speaking final, which I felt slightly more prepared for because I had done it the previous semester. I believe my French writing skills improved, my speaking skills might’ve stayed the same or improved slightly, and while my reading and listening skills stayed the same. We practiced writing and speaking the most, but I don’t believe my speaking skills improved as much because much of our practice was with peers, and sometimes we would have to revert to English in order to help one another understand before reverting back to French. My reading skills aren’t as good because the reading we used to practice in the textbook gave very little explanations of the English meaning of a word, even when it wasn’t a part of our vocabulary, so if I stumbled across an unfamiliar word that was not explained by the book I either had to look it up or guess the meaning. My listening skills are not as good because the only time we would really practice that would be by listening to our professor give instructions or read questions, and she often gave similar instructions, or on few listening sections in our homework, which you could have subtitles appear if you wished. We had listening sections on our tests, as well. My goal is to continue with French in the future, as my grandmother speaks it.
I still felt that much of this class was review. Like the previous semester, there were only a few “new” things we learned outside of some of the vocabulary. In this class we covered about five units, and each unit had about a page of vocab. Much of the things mentioned in the units, aside from the vocab, were the same things that were mentioned in French 111, even. The bonus of this is I feel like my comprehension of some of these ideas has definitely improved. This semester also did not feel as rushed at times as French 111, though I would say that some parts of it did feel slow.
This semester, we were told to write about an ancestor immigrating to the United States. The story could be made up or true. I wrote a paper about my great-grandparents immigrating from Canada to Maine. The story is partially true, but mostly made up. We were required to use a variety of different vocabulary and tenses. The paper is linked below.