French with Slides and Tapes

Abstract

During the 1959-60 school year a pilot program involving the extensive use of slides and tapes in teaching French at the third-grade level was put into effect at the University of Chicago Laboratory School. The program was limited to a single class and was taught by the children's regular homeroom teacher, a person who had had no previous training in teaching French and who had limited proficiency in that language. The purpose of the project was to get a rough index as to the children's reactions to slides and tapes shown over the span of an entire year; the degree to which the taped models would counteract the imperfections in the homeroom teacher's pronunciation; and the amount of achievement in comprehension and fluency that could be expected from this method as compared with what could be accomplished in a class taught by a native speaker with considerable experience in teaching French. It was felt that if the program proved reasonably successful, it might have implications for the subsequent staffing of our own and other foreignlanguage programs. During the course of the program, the work of the experimental group (taught by the homeroom teacher) was compared with the work of another group taught by a native speaker. Both groups covered the same material during the course of the year (twenty minutes a day, five days a week). The content of the material was standard for beginning courses at this age level: numbers, polite expressions, objects in the classroom, parts of the body, days of the week, months and seasons, weather, and everyday activities. The materials illustrated basic grammatical structures: declarative and interrogative statements in the negative and in the positive, the affirmative imperative, and prepositional phrases. Clauses were not illustrated. Verbs were lim-