By Luisa Canuto, Associate Professor of Teaching (Italian), and Brianne Orr-Álvarez, Associate Professor of Teaching (Spanish)
“The primary goal of the project is to create a template for hybrid language-learning based on principles of inclusive and equitable learning.”
The Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies (FHIS) was awarded the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) for a hybrid and multi-access course redesign project titled “Changing Course: Hybrid Opportunities for Students in French, Hispanic, and Italian Language Programs”.
Objectives
The primary goal of the project is to create a template for hybrid language-learning and implement it in select sections of beginner (100-level) and elementary (200-level) language courses across the three language programs of French, Italian, Spanish.
By structuring first- and second-year language courses for interactive hybrid learning, students will be able to develop their listening and reading skills asynchronously through extensive exposure, repetition and imitation, as well as practice their speaking and intercultural competencies through regular collaborative in-person learning activities.
The course template also aims to provide greater flexibility to students and faculty members alike, and to create additional opportunities for involving graduate Teaching Assistants in language courses by implementing weekly in-person discussions. This project will build on existing experience and materials to create a flexible and sustainable hybrid model based on principles of inclusive and equitable learning.
The direct short-term pedagogical objectives of this project include the following:
- Increase accessibility and inclusivity for students;
- Provide flexibility for students to learn at their own pace and develop their linguistic and receptive skills (grammar, listening and reading), which require more extensive individual repetition and imitation;
- Foster increased instructor interaction during in-class sessions and focused practice on the development of students’ productive (writing and speaking) and intercultural skills;
- Provide students with the opportunity of larger gains in their writing and reading skills than students in an face-to-face context, as supported by recent scholarly evidence (Thoms, 2014, 2020; Dixon, Christison, Dixon, Palmer, 2021);
- Use frequent low-stakes assessments, rapid learning checks, online discussions, collaborative projects, and summative e-portfolios to replace outdated assessment methods, and better allow students to demonstrate their learning.
Involvement
The project involves three Educational Leadership-stream faculty in the degree-granting language programs (French, Italian, and Spanish), other language experts in the unit, as well as graduate and undergraduate students in the design, execution, and implementation of the new hybrid model.
The project will also be an opportunity to collaborate with instructors and students in other units across campus and beyond, to ensure that the model is not only relevant to students in Romance Language disciplines, but to other language disciplines as well.
Background
An Online Curriculum Committee was created by FHIS to build on the pedagogical considerations, innovations, structures and materials developed during the period of remote teaching due to the pandemic. The committee surveyed 700 students and 30 faculty members on their experiences teaching and learning in online, hybrid, or in-person language courses to see what they thought about the steps the department had taken toward developing effective models for online and hybrid courses.
Students and faculty members highlighted the benefits of accessing multiple self-paced, machine-graded learning activities, particularly to focus on receptive language skills (reading, listening, pronunciation). Survey respondents also emphasized the need to enhance the social and community-building aspects of learning languages through peer-to-peer and student-instructor engagement opportunities.
Recent studies confirm the pedagogical and structural benefits of hybrid learning, suggesting that hybrid language instruction can be as effective as traditional face-to-face instruction (Dixon, Christison, Dixon, Palmer, 2021; Thoms, 2020), further strengthening the department’s resolve to pursue this project.
