Peer Review

Bonjour de France

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Reviewed:: Apr 25, 2003 by World Languages

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: Bonjour de France is an online "magazine" published by Azurlingua, a language
school located in Nice, France. It offers a broad range of exercises, games,
readings, tutorials and class activities for novice to advanced learners. It is
divided in ten (10) sections: "Comprehension", "Grammaire", "Vocabulaire",
"Pedagogie", "Expressions idiomatiques", "Francais des Affaires", "Mises en
Situation","Nouvelles du Monde","Decouverte","Jeux". Some sections contain
several topics along with exercises and tests at four levels:
"debutant","elementaire", "intermediaire" and "avance".

Some other features of Bonjour de France include a discussion forum for students
and teachers, a mailing list and a search engine. There are also two contests,
one for an adolescent and another for a teacher, that make winners eligible for
educational trips.
Type of Material:: Self-correcting exercises, games, grammar tutorials, audio files and readings.
Templates of activities and assignments for FSL teachers. Discussion forums for
students and teachers.
Recommended Uses:: The various components of Bonjour de France will complement in-class instruction
and/or help self-paced and regular students review before tests or before the
semester. Teachers may use Bonjour de France as an assessment tool before and
after they study a chapter. The self-correcting comprehension exercises will
particularly be appreciated sice they provide tools to practice and test both
listening and reading skills.
Teachers can use the site to find new communicative and collaborative
activities. They can also share their own exercises and activities through the
forum and through material contribution.
Technical Requirements:: 1. Users will need to download and install RealOne player (formerly Real Player)
to take full advantage of the site's exercises.
2. Mac users will find that some of the first developed exercises were optimized
for Netscape and have not been updated for Explorer. The most recent ones work
well with both browsers, even with Safari.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: For the student:Learn French grammar and spelling, develop vocabulary, practice
reading and listening comprehension ; develop cultural awareness and knowledge
of certain French regions and cities.
For the teacher: Learn new pedagogical approaches to teaching French in the
sections "Pedagogie", "Mises en Situation " and in the "Outils pour la classe"
section of Comprehension.
Target Student Population:: Second language learners from novice to advanced. Student teachers who seek new
ideas to incorporate in their teaching.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: None: the exercises are progressive from beginning to elementary, intermediate
and advanced levels.

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:: Bonjour de France contains a wealth of graded exercises that cover the most
commonly taught structures of the French language as well as those that require
more practice from the learners, such as past tense conjugations, use and form
of articles and pronouns, articles and prepositions with place names, etc. The
listening and reading comprehension exercises are based on culturally rich, up
to date texts that address contemporary issues, explain the significance of
traditions, places or objects, give biographies of literary figures, inform
the readers about historical facts (e.g. Zola's "J'accuse".)
The most recent texts come with high-quality audio files. The pace of these
audio materials are adjusted to the level chosen by the user, it is slow at the
beginning and elementary levels and is closer to the native pace at the
intermediate and advanced levels.

The "magazine" format suggests the fact that Bonjour de France will always be
updated with each successive "issue". As magazines do, Bonjour de France invites
its readers to collaborate by contributing exercises and activities for
possible inclusion in future issues. This contribution feature gives Bonjour de
France the potential of becoming a substantive repository of French learning
materials.

Teachers will appreciate the clever art work throughout, used in many places to
illustrate vocabulary. For example, the section on "Expressions idiomatiques"
could be easily projected in the classroom for a quick lesson on expressions
that are new to FSL learners.

BdF makes excellent use of external resources such as the gorgeous restaurant
site from Nice in the "Mise en situation" section. Here students plan a trip to
Nice and visit the restaurant "Chez Astoux". The web site has mouth-watering
images of seafood that can be very profitably used in a classroom restaurant
lesson.
Concerns:: 1. Although the texts and the exercises have been carefully proofread one may
still find a few typos, grammatical mistakes or mispelled words.
2. In the vocabulary game that consists of changing letters in a series of
horizontal alignments, sometimes more than one solution is possible but the
database will recognize only the one it includes.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:: Bonjour de France is designed to be used by both students and teachers.
Students may refer to it to review and practice and receive immediate feedback
on their performance in reading and listening as well as in grammar, spelling
and vocabulary. Teachers will find numerous templates for group and individual
assignments in the sections "Grammaire", "Mises en situation" and "Pedagogie" .
The first two folders contain detailed instructions ("outils pour la classe") on
how to present some points of grammar or suggest topics for group activities
along with useful links to research and complete these topics. These assignments
integrate all skills and require active use of vocabulary and grammatical
structures. The "Pedagogie" section offers additional templates for in class
activities. The "Mises en situation" offer inventive activities that can be
exploited in groups, pairs or individually. For example, the module entitled
"Pendre la cremaillere" has the students take on roles in a French housewarming
dinner. Someone plays the role of host and plans the dinner, while others are
guests who search real external web sites for appropriate housewarming gifts.
The external sites are well-chosen and graphically interesting. In the process,
the students learn cultural information as well as the grammar that is
apropriate to the situation.
"Francais des affaires" presents a basic, self-contained lesson on the
job-seeking process from searching the want ads to the interview process.
Concerns:: In the "Mise en situation" entitled "Le mariage", students access a real singles
site. While there is a notice to teachers on the site to remind students not
to provide real information about themselves on the Internet, some faculty may
decide to adapt this exercise to omit the contact with the site.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:: Bonjour de France has a clear design and provides ample instructions on the
tasks, their goals and other useful hints. The forums contain recent postings
and seem to be adequately moderated. Posts are on-topic and appropriate. In the
game section, players can see the most recent players'scores, which included
very recent scores at the time of this review.
Concerns:: 1. The website needs to be standardized and optimized for the most commonly used
browsers. At the moment the layers of its development show, some older
materials working only with Netscape while newer ones are optimized for
Explorer. To use all the materials one has to switch from one browser to
another. This may be a disincentive to some users.

2. The correct help application's name for audio files - RealOne Player - should
be entered in each page where the readers are told to download RealPlayer 7 and
sometimes RealPlayer 8, and the link should take users directly to the page
where they can download the application.

3. As Bonjour de France grows in its content, it may become difficult to find
some of its rich resources. For example, under "Decouvertes" one finds virtual
tours of Nice and Brest and then the somewhat different category of "Gastronomie
et recettes." It would be nice to have some cross-referencing of related
resources in the various sections of Bonjour de France, so there will be a
variety of ways to find its different treasures.
The same is true in the "Nouvellles du monde" section, which includes DELF/DALF
samples in the first two entries and then a virtual tour of Lisbon. All three
have in common their location outside of France, but the third entry is very
different from the first two.

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