Content

I believe that my work presented throughout this ePortfolio meets the standards and requirements of the university. While I’m not completely fluent nor near that level, I have grown from taking this course. It was difficult at first, because this entire course focused on speaking and listening, two of my worst skills when it comes to languages, but I’ve been able to complete two video assignments with native speakers and was able to converse with them semi-comfortably and understand what they said to me and respond appropriately. By speaking every day in class, I was finally able to feel more comfortable with sharing my own thoughts in French and with giving explanations to different words and concepts in French as well. Filling out the Can-Do Statements helped me realize visually the things that I have improved on since filling out one of those forms exactly one year prior and I was very proud to see that I could check off more boxes from the list as I got better.

Coursework

I believe the best representations of my work for this course are the videos that I have posted as well as the two TalkAbroad conversations that can be found in the links above. For the most part, I noticed that I would get less and less nervous speaking in front of the class than I used to be before. It still proves as a challenge some days, but I can manage it a little better now. Because I am a French major, this course was required but it does help me because of my ultimate goal of being a translator in the language. The skills that I’ve learned in this class have actually helped me in my leisure hours because I watch a lot of videos in French and now I have a much better ear to pick up on things that I learned. As I just stated, I’m studying to be a translator in French (and other languages as well), so the skills I learned throughout the course and my time at the university are extremely valuable to me and I will be using them every day until I’ve achieve a natural fluency.

Connections to Discipline

I took this course alongside FR 366 which is Business French so speaking in French in this course somewhat helped to have class discussions in the language in this course. It’s really difficult to say what could have aided in my learning in this course, since this course was about learning communicative strategies in order to speak better and get near fluency. This course will help me with the important aspects of learning a language such as the subtlety of the words being used as well as the actual culture of the people. Knowing even a little bit is enough to make connections with other people around the world and to broaden my own knowledge and appreciation of our diverse and wonderful world.

Self-Assessment and Reflection

The biggest frustration I had with this course was my own speaking problems, as in, I stutter a lot when I speak (even in English) and towards the end of the course, I felt that I had gotten worse with expressing myself in French when logically I should have gotten better. As of now, I’m not really certain how to fix any of these problems other than to just keep practicing like I have been doing over the past 3 years that I’ve seriously taken French courses. I hope to be able to overcome these challenges before I graduate so that my speaking skills will be at a level worthy of recognition as I enter into the job market to use my skills.