Speaking Activities on Padlet as a Part of an Online Course in French Phonetics Designed for Serbian-Speaking Students

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to present our experience in organizing speaking activities on Padlet as a part of online French phonetics exercises during the summer semester of 2020/21 at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad. The proposed activities on Padlet (oral presentation on a favorite Francophone song, destination, and film) were primarily aimed at determining possible phonetic-phonological and morpho-phonological students’ mistakes in their oral presentation. The collected audio-corpus was analyzed using the perceptive and descriptive methods, where the teacher, after carefully listening to all the recordings, singled out the most common phonetic-phonological errors, which he/she would then point out to each student individually via electronic correspondence (in the form of a text and, if necessary, audio comments), followed by a unified analysis of the common mistakes and exercises based on the principle of the articulatory method of phonetic correction in synchronous online classes on Zoom. The analysis of the collected audio-corpus and the pedagogical implications of the obtained results are shown on the example of the typology of the most frequently observed mistakes in the production of nasal vowels (/ɑ͂/, /ɛ̃/, /ɔ͂/). Our paper also presents the results of a qualitative research conducted among students on the use of Padlet for the above purposes, in which they spoke positively about this digital tool and gave us useful feedback that will help us in our future work.

Keywords

• online teaching
• padlet
• french phonetics
• nasal vowels
• french as a foreign language