Teaching a Beginning French Course Through Two Different Methods

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the effects of two teaching methods: Total Physical Response (TPR), and Strategic Interaction (SI) on students' performance when acquiring French. Forty beginning French learners at the Balamand University in Lebanon were in two classes using different instructional methods. After a period of fourteen weeks, learning was assessed in two aspects: acquisition of the target language code, and interactional skills. The two language aspects were measured through four tests: the ACTFL/ETS oral interview test, the cloze test, a dictation, and a discrete-point grammar test. At the conclusion of the study, results showed that the SI group maintained stronger correlations among the four measures than did the TPR group. The SI students exhibited significant superiority over the TPR group in the oral measure at the 001 level. The SI students were able to develop two underlying competencies: interactional and linguistic, whereas the TPR learners developed only a linguistic competence. The study provides further empirical evidence to support the claim that language proficiency stems from more than a single underlying ability. The results also provide some new insights in the hope that potential benefits can be derived from whatever teaching method is followed by the foreign language instructor.