Week 8 & 9: Activity 2 — Source Audio for Educational Use

French Self-Taught: Episode 8

Learning Outcome: Students will be able to use some basic daily expressions in French — greetings and express agreement and disagreement.

I found this audio collection on Internet Archive by Searching” licenseurl: http*publicdomain* AND french” and selecting the Media Type as audio. The collection—French Self-Taught—is a free language-learning resource developed by Librivox. I downloaded episode 8 for the learning outcome for this activity. In the recording, the French expression is followed by the English explanation, supporting students’ self-learning. It can be used in class and distributed to students so they can review it after class.

Relating to this week’s reading, it might be the ideal instructional audio considering the four design principles (Carter, 2012). This audio is an informational format containing no long and difficult sentences that require much short-term memory. In other words, it is easy to follow and understand. Although it does not have music at the beginning of the audio that influences the mood of the learner (p. 57), it does a good job in terms of continuity, avoiding unnecessary silences and hesitations that would distract learners’ attention.

I might need to cut it into shorter length as the original audio is comparatively long when used in class. Dividing it by specific categories and adding some music at the beginning and end would make it more suitable for French language learners.

https://archive.org/details/french_self_taught_1011_librivox/frenchselftaught_08_thimm.mp3

Read about how to search creative commons files:

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360018359991-Search-A-Basic-Guide

References

Carter, C. W. (2012, October 26). Instructional audio guidelines: Four design principles to consider for every instructional audio design effort. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice to Improve Learning, 56(6), 54–58. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-012-0615-z