Development of students' spoken language in an online French course: Presentation of continuing doctoral research

The present paper describes continuing doctoral research which examines the development of oral language during an online French course in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF), and reflects on the possible influence of the online intervention on this development. The research is designed as a multiple-case study with 11 university students as participants of the research, each student forming a single case of the study. The pre-test post-test design was chosen in order to analyse students' spoken performance before and after the intervention, and thus to assess its development. The paper outlines the results of accuracy analysis, which indicate that language performance cannot be judged solely by one aspect of CAF: many errors identified in this research seem to be a sign of the use of more complex language; and precise and accurate language without errors does not seem to be complex or fluent. The number of phonetic errors and some replies in the interviews suggest that the online course did not place enough importance on the teaching of pronunciation. These suppositions will be tested in the next stages of the research. The paper is part of the AILA Europe special issue.