Collaborative learning and ICT use in French for specific purposes classes

Abstract

In recent decades, telecollaboration has become more frequent in different teaching contexts, with regular publication of studies on this type of practice [1]. Based on the interaction, mediated by digital communication tools, between students from different geographical, cultural and/or linguistic contexts, telecollaboration favours sharing, dialogue and debate, contributing to the consolidation of linguistic, cultural and digital competences and, therefore, being a pedagogical option increasingly valued in the context of foreign language teaching-learning [2]. This paper describes a collaborative learning experiment developed (from October 2020 to January 2021) between two French for Specific Purposes (FOS) classes (25 students), from two undergraduate courses taught in Portuguese higher education institutions. This project, which took place in the first semester of 2020/2021, aimed, above all, to interact with FOS students from different scientific areas (Office Management and Business Communication (OMBC) and Tourism and Cultural Management (TCM)), thus favouring interdisciplinarity. This article, based on data collected through a questionnaire applied to participants in January 2021, presents some digital tools that students used to accomplish the work and describes the technical and soft skills developed by the participants. The technological solutions that students preferred to communicate and share information were WhatsApp, Zoom and MSTeams. Web pages of companies, airlines and accommodation/restaurant service providers were the most used sources of information by the students. For French text validation, students refer to Linguee and GoogleTranslator as the most relevant. The soft skills that were mentioned by the respondents as being the most developed were "tolerance", "resilience" and "autonomy".