In addition to the lessons and activities I created for the classes I taught, I also had the opportunity during my year at Lille 3 to collaborate with colleagues in English and phonetics to develop several types of multimedia learning tools.

Phonetics lab

With my supervisor, Prof. Maarten Lemmens, I rewrote the second-year phonetics lab book. Building on existing activities, I created additional drills for each unit, recruited native speakers to record the new exercises, and edited the digital sound files to make the new lessons. I also retyped and reformatted the book itself, making it available electronically for the first time. The teacher’s edition of this is available here.

Virtual Cabinet

This interactive website was developed at Lyon 2 to better prepare English students to pass oral competency exams. Imagining himself as an advisor to the British Prime Minister, the student must gather information on a current controversial topic and debrief the PM. The sources of information are all oral, beginning with an authentic BBC video clip, followed by a scripted radio interview with an expert on the issue and ending with a scripted conversation between two chums in a pub. Comprehension checks follow each segment to ensure the student’s grasp of the issues, and upon successful completion of these, the student must draft a memo to the PM summarizing the facts and suggesting a course of action.

One of the developers’ goals is to keep the topics fresh and relevant. Lille 3 was given permission to try out Virtual Cabinet with our students; in return, we developed a new unit for VCab. A colleague and I were given a news clip on the issue of “Women in Construction,” and together created the radio interview, pub conversation, and corresponding comprehension exercises. Unfortunately, access to VCab is restricted to current students, so I cannot include the finished product here; however, my collaboration on this project was a valuable experience in developing multimedia language learning tools whose success I was able to observe firsthand in our students.

Additionally, to help students deal with the macro-task of writing a memo, I created a memo on memo-writing, using one of the sample issues in VCab as a model.

CAELi

Headed by Profs. Maarten Lemmens and Annick Rivens, CAELi (Computer-Assisted English at Lille) is a collection of exercises available in the CRL (Centre de ressources en langues) at Lille 3. Together with the team of phonetics and grammar professors, we developed visual stimuli to accompany drills on intonation, rhythm, and minimal pairs. I helped de-bug existing exercises and proofread and created new ones in phonetics and grammar. Less dynamic and interactive than VCab but more stimulating than the phonetics lab, CAELi exercises are ideal for more visual learners struggling with spoken language skills.