Hilary de Joux – Coordinator of French

The exciting world of Virtual Reality breaks down our classroom walls and takes Emanuel students to French speaking countries all over the world!

At first glance you may not think that Lotus, Mischa, Noa or Elke are in France in the images, but in fact they are! Lotus is negotiating the price and flavour of her crêpe and watching it being prepared in front of her, Mischa is shopping and having a look around a traditional French Pâtisserie, Noa and Elke are learning bakery vocabulary from the shopkeeper and buying a croissant. ImmerseMe is about virtually stepping into an authentic location to learn and practise French, so that when students travel to all the wonderful French speaking countries all over the world themselves, or meet French people here in Australia, they will be prepared!

ImmerseMe allows me to set tasks that consist of real-life scenarios filmed in an authentic setting (for example, a café, restaurant, classroom). The student interacts with the French speaker according to a script and can choose various options of how to reply. The voice recognition software within the program then allows the student to continue to interact in a guided way to complete a task, gradually moving away from the script to become more spontaneous and independent on their journey towards fluency. There are also follow up reading and writing activities within the software to ensure all essential skills are developed, which allows me to track their progress through the teacher dashboard and ensure I am creating an individualised program of learning for each student.

These scenarios begin with essential everyday environments such as in a bakery, shopping for clothes, ordering and paying at a restaurant or checking in to a hotel, gradually progressing to more complex language skills in Year 11 and Year 12 such having a formal job interview in a French company, the world of finance and business, discussing and debating current issues with other young people, introducing a new work colleague at the office, clearing immigration at the airport.

Students become more motivated to practise and work on improving pronunciation and fluency and they are proud of overcoming initial frustrations to enjoy their success.

The French Department now has two sets of MetaQuest 2 VR headsets to more easily use this exciting new technology in our lessons and we can’t wait to see where it takes us!.