Katherine Watson
Coastline Community College, Fountain Valley, CA, USA

Learning communities form quite naturally when interests are shared among individual learners who find that their goals are the same. As Zane Tarence (2002) noted, new (electronic) technologies that are currently being exploited for educational purposes can at once focus on the individual learner and individualize instruction, enriching student learning by personalizing it. Coastline Community College online learners of French found that their grammatical and vocabulary skills improved as they absorbed subject matter online that was written in their target language about topics that were of interest to them; free-ranging communications in electronic live chat sessions and on bulletin boards enabled them to form learning communities based on shared interests. Students and faculty found that diverse and provocative materials have increased "time on task", and extraordinary leaps in fluency development have been the result. Students remarked that after chat sessions or assignment hyperlink surfing, "I am thinking in French"; new cerebral pathways forged by online activity produce new vocabulary, sentence structure, and even a revised Weltanschauung.

Twenty-first century educators find themselves in an ironic bind. On the one hand, the institutions in which they work have developed into machines, exactly what cultural historians such as Mumford and Roszak defined as the technological marvels epitomizing modernity; these machines asphyxiate the individual student at the same time they isolate him, even as they make him into an efficient commodity, a disciplined social resource prepared to produce some profit. On the other hand, schools are "…struggling to adapt to an intellectual, social and cultural transformation that has begun to emerge during the last thirty or forty years" (Miller, 2000), recognizing that threats to one country’s ecology are menaces to us all and that "globalization" implies a new mentality beyond a simple understanding of socioeconomic shifts. The irony places the educator at a philosophical, if not a psychological, crossroads: How are individual learners’ varying skills and talents to be fostered, even as learning communities are spawned that can encourage mutual understanding?

It is clear, almost by definition, that learning communities form quite naturally when interests are shared among individual learners who find that their goals are the same. And, as Zane Tarence (2002), among others, has noted, new (electronic) technologies that are currently being exploited for educational purposes can at once focus on the individual learner and individualize instruction, enriching student learning by personalizing it. At the same time this individual- single-person-oriented system is generated, "cooperative community lifelong learning" (Miller, 2000) must be recognized as a necessary basis for social and cultural renewal, reclaiming the organic qualities of learning, stimulating the development of new concepts and new goals.

Coastline Community College online learners of French found that their grammatical and vocabulary skills improved as they absorbed subject matter online that was written in their target language about topics that were of interest to them. They discovered that learning a new language entails not only grammatical skills and vocabulary building, but also a context for those skills, a cultural and linguistic milieu for communication. Indeed, online language learning might be said to epitomize the aforementioned irony of post-modern learning: Individual students use individual computer connections to connect to virtual communities to share information and learn from one another in a timeless, "boundary-less" space.

Coastline Community College has been offering online studies in French language and culture since late 1992; at least a dozen students have remained with the College continuously since that date, while another "new" 12 to 18 join them during each new semester. The goals of all the three courses that have been offered over the decade have been the same: To improve reading and writing fluency while developing sophistication about socioeconomic, ethical, and cultural concerns presented to them from francophone countries’ various points of view. Most of the students have commenced their studies with a minimum of "low intermediate" French language proficiency, as defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency guidelines. Thus, learners enter the courses already "able to understand main ideas and facts", materials directed to the "widest possible audience" in French. All of them have entered with at least "low intermediate" writing skills as well, "Able to meet limited practical writing needs and to create statements or questions within the scope of limited language experience" though often simply recombining learned vocabulary. Skills in speaking and listening are neither tested nor categorized in association with these courses, since improvement in those proficiencies is irrelevant to course goals.

All materials for the three electronically based courses offered at Coastline are accessible exclusively online. That is, no written textbook, no photocopies, no concrete magazine or news items are required. In fact, the student who misses certain news or information articles delivered through cyberspace may not ever have a chance to see them unless one of his colleagues is able to share a saved document.

Online documents and links conceived by native francophones in francophone institutions serve as course reference material; instructor-produced "critical thinking" questions comprise the coursework (for examples, cf. the questions clickable at items 1-4 on the page: http://dl.ccc.cccd.edu/classes/internet/french198/liendevoirs.htm). In addition, an electronic bulletin board offers an area for discussion of topics ranging from travel, dining, dance, and the arts to politics, human rights, and even domestic animals; students are encouraged to submit at least two entries to the discussion during any given term. Electronic "live chat" is available 24 hours a day; two four-hour sessions a week are held with the instructor present, and random "alternative" sessions are encouraged. And finally, new "hot links" are offered at least once a week for further analysis
(cf.: http://dl.ccc.cccd.edu/classes/internet/french198/weeklysites.htm); these range from the fun and/or humorous to the profound, and nearly all are sourced in francophone countries.

Students in Coastline’s online French courses have invariably made progress. Indeed, more than two thirds of those who have completed the courses during the ten years of they have been offered have achieved at least "high" proficiency in reading and writing, according to the ACTFL guidelines. "Advanced high" reading proficiency indicates that learners are able to follow essential points of written discourse, understand "parts of texts which are conceptually abstract and linguistically complex, and/or texts which treat unfamiliar topics and situations"; more than 40% of Coastline’s onliners have attained this kind of skill. In writing, it appears that all of the students who have spent at least 200 hours total online have achieved "advanced" proficiency, and more than 10% of them have attained the highest, "superior" level described: "able to express self effectively in most formal and informal writing on practical, social, and professional topics…Good control of a full range of structures…a wide general vocabulary allow(s) the writer to hypothesize or present arguments…logical ordering is strongly evident."

With course materials available to them only in their target language, Coastline’s online learners of French are immersed in their new mode of expression. They are not only invited, but required, to express themselves in French; they may re-do assignments and/or submit drafts. Indeed, improvement occurs most quickly among those who submit the same assignment three or four times; vocabulary becomes richer, syntax more varied, and transformations more apparent. Since these students are mostly adults who have already earned college degrees, they have learned how to learn; they are organized and motivated, and they know how to use time; they recognize and use the keys to success.

As Brewster and Fager (2000) have noted, "the link between engagement and achievement (is) obvious" and "students who are not motivated to engage in learning are unlikely to succeed." The corollary to the latter statement is, of course, that students who are motivated are quite likely to succeed; Coastline’s onliners’ motivation is apparent from their attentive work and their sheer persistence; many of them report "spending way more time on this little two-unit class than (they do) on all the others combined". Brewster and Fager add that engagement leads to the best success when both instructor and learner believe that success is possible; this self-fulfilling prophecy is a common psychological phenomenon "based on the understanding that each person is uniquely gifted, that (people) construct their own knowledge, and that learning is a natural, continuous, social process that results from engagement with the world" (Brewster and Fager, 2000). Coastline onliners are given fresh, up-to-date materials that are as new as the ‘Net and as opportune as diverse time zones can be. Indeed, as the millennium arrived 31 December, 1999, into 1 January, 2000, Coastline’s onliners shot links to one another from around the world as they chatted together live, watching midnight arrive in Belgium and France, Tahiti, Switzerland, Africa, and Canada. When President G.W. Bush spoke of the State of the Union in 2003, Coastline’s chatters could hear a live broadcast from http://www.radio-canada.ca interpreted into French and commented upon thereafter.

Jaudeau (2002) points out that maximizing the use of provocative, timely, and comprehensible online-delivered materials is essential in an online course. She adds that this may require some degree of individualization, finding out what interests whom and what kinds of links should be delivered to whom, when, and how. Although this kind of individualization may seem to be dauntingly time-consuming, it need not be; chat rooms and bulletin boards permit learners to reveal their proclivities and share links without instructor probing. Since all students are required to write in French, even if their French may be tentative or sprinkled with "franglais", they do not know how truly "fluent" each other are; thus, they are forced to think in French and to improve.

Coastline’s onliners have used chat and bulletin board areas to advise one another about travel (cf. one student’s list of travel sites made available to all at: http://bizarrerie0.tripod.com/francozone/id5.html), about "les distractions et les divertissements", including theatre, film, and music, and they have even shared sports and science sites. In doing this, they find shared interests and form mini-study groups, learning online together in French. Their "time on task" increases, and they explore areas of interest together, interacting, creating, communicating, and questioning one another, not to mention their materials and their instructor.

When learners begin to think in their target language, they are taking advantage of new cerebral pathways; indeed, it has been said that the process of learning online builds new routes through the cerebrum as well. "We are not re-defining intelligence; we are re-creating it", Jennifer James (2002) has said. "Technology concentrates energy…technology develops new neural pathways." Given that adults learn in a manner different from that which is common among children, preferring autonomy and self-direction, relevance and practicality to unquestioned acceptance of masses of data, and given that humans learn secondary languages in ways and even in cerebral areas different from those that characterize their mother tongues, it is reasonable to suspect that adults who learn a new mode of expression online might be at the leading edge of what James cites as essential to our new era of "the steepest learning change in history" (James, 2002). That is, since it is commonly accepted among linguists that children "learn" new languages more quickly than do their adult counterparts because those children are more willing/eager to use the new language in all situations, rather than simply in class, and since the online environment provides older learners with questions and situations encountered in their daily activities, adult onliners will naturally learn the vernacular necessary to communicate in social situations in the secondary tongue, at the same time they are learning technical skills critical to their cultural integration into the twenty-first century. Moreover, it is this very integration into new cultural/linguistic milieu that facilitates the birth of learning communities; adults’ tendency to connect current learning experiences to a knowledge/experience base enables them to seek social relationships, developing their own interest-based study or communication groups. The full cerebral stimulation provided by ‘Net-delivered material motivates them, as they realize that it facilitates their retention of data. Thus, with the visuospatial and somatosensory areas of the right cerebral hemisphere stimulated by computerized colors and images, trying to synthesize masses of incoming data, and with the left hemisphere busily engaging itself in linguistic activity, not to mention rationality and analysis, the adult "virtual" language student will necessarily find himself more fully engaged in his learning online than he might be in a time-bound, place-bound classroom. Further research into cerebral activity online and into "brain compatible" learning systems might enable adults to expedite their acquisition of new linguistic skills, to become more proficient in a broader array of language areas. It is apparent that progress such as that which characterizes Coastline’s online learners of French must have a cerebral effect, involving a rich multidimensional information space as well as a rich cerebral space. As Gazzaniga (1999) remarks, "Understanding how the former maps onto the latter is a question that should keep researchers occupied into the next century and beyond."

TCC 2003 Online Conference
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