Assessment of my performance as a lecturer

While lecturing French at the university, I tried to put into practice the features I believed are important for second language acquisition, namely dynamic assessment. As all projects in place were not appropriate to support teaching and assessment at the same time, I couldn’t interact with the students as I wanted in order to (a) create the context for their zone of proximal development and (b) interpret their zone.

One project involved the writing of activities students had to perform on their own to learn French. They had to evaluate their language learning process and report the difficulties they encountered and the benefits they had while doing their activities. The task was called “le bilan”. To help students, I asked them to create a document in Google Apps and to share it with me. Each week, they had to write a report of their activities and each week I had a look at their performance, making feedback by inserting comments in their online documents. The feedback was reviewed by the students and marked as resolved when taken care of. I enjoyed doing this task, as I felt I was really helping students with their own difficulties, whether it was a surface level feedback or not.

From the module evaluation I got from the students at the end of the semester, I know that some of them enjoyed the activities. To the question “What elements of the course did you find most interesting?“, some of them replied:

-Enjoyed doing the bilan, learning something new on my own every week.

-Enjoyed working with GoogleDocs. Great to get feedback from lecturer that way.

-Bilan – Weekly help from Sylvie using Google Docs.

-I like the assistance I received. Like the bilan etc.

During this semester, I interacted with students as much as possible in order for them to have the opportunity to speak in French. With one class of 18 students and another class of 32 students, interactions were not always an easy task. But in general terms, students were pleased with the level of interactions especially in the small class. One student, however, was not happy with this and complained to the hierarchy that I made him/her participate and talk too much in class. S/he also complained about the fact that I was talking in French. Hello?? What did you expect? To the question “Were you satisfied with the delivery method and style of the lecturer?“, I mostly got positive replies except for one, which we all know whom it is from :

-All in French was good though we could have done with more grammar.

-Yes I found she was patient and didn’t ignore problems or questions I had with the work.

-Yes I liked how she only ever spoke in French

-At the beginning I found it hard to approach the lecturer but not now I am satisfied with the delivery method

-Yes but perhaps a little more English could be used

I actually was surprised to read that some students were asking for more grammar and English during the class. To the question “How did you feel about the amount of French used in the classroom?“, they were mostly satisfied:

-I liked that French was constantly spoken. I think it has made my own French improve a lot.

-It is good we speak mostly French in the class.

-Not great because didn’t understand half of the stuff she says, NO WORD OF ENGLISH!

-I loved the amount of French used , I found it made things easier to learn, as everything was done through French.

-Scary! But I know it’s helpful.

Only one student made a comment about the class size, “too big” s/he said,  and only two students appreciated the fact that I gave them their feedback and grades very quickly. To the question “How did you find the evaluation of this module?“, they said:

-Fair and it was good that we got our grades quickly.

-Sometimes points weren’t very easily given, but the test results were very fast.

I do believe that giving feedback too long after a test does not help students, and that to be effective, feedback needs to be given promptly. Overall, and despite the fact that two evaluations over the 35 I received were a bit harsh (I suppose we can’t please everybody), I am happy to have had the opportunity to read (in an anonymous way) that most of the students appreciated what I did to help them learn French during winter 2011.