I spend a few months per year in France, and about a year ago I joined a newly-formed France-focussed Facebook group. The idea was to try to make new like-minded friends. The group was organising some local meetups and I went along to one in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne in Normandy.
First meetup
They were a really nice group of people. I mentioned to Dave, one of the group admins who was present at the meetup that I could offer some tech help if he ever needed it.
Little did I know where that would lead.
Dave has a great idea
A few weeks later Dave had what sounded like a brilliant idea. The Facebook group had grown past 1000 members and he suggested we organise some online meetups so those who wanted to, could practice communicating in French.
The problem was that as a group we all had different levels of French language skills, varying from none at all to fluent. Alan the head of the admin team invited me to join them as a group admin so I could help with the online French conversation groups.
I did and my first experience was super stressful. I felt like my French wasn’t good enough to chair the meetings I was put in charge of, as I could not exactly correct people who were better at French than I was.
Also – it seemed to me that trying to make people who don’t speak French well, hold conversations with others who don’t speak French well, was a cast-iron way to make everyone’s French worse.
It became clear we needed to let the fluent people talk to each other unhindered, and separately teach the beginners how to speak, read and understand spoken French. But amongst the admins, none of us were trained French teachers and our abilities of course varied.
Add to all of this that we were doing this pretty intensive task for free, none of us had the capacity to further prepare hours of interesting and informative lessons. What to do?
Ooh La Langue!
I decided I’d solve the problem with software. So OLL! was born. OLL stands for Ooh La Langue! The exclamation mark is there to remind us that we are literally surprised at how well we’ve done.
OLL! Tools started life as a group of six gamified teaching tools that we could use to teach/lead an online French class regardless of our French language skills. It proved to be quite successful and the students enjoyed the lessons.
I told my French teacher about it, and she said she’d take a look. Honestly I expected her to chuckle at my efforts. But instead once she had the software she started to use it on her students.
My French Teacher, Céline
Now please understand that Céline is French, and a qualified teacher of French who specialises in teaching native English speakers. Her previous role had been for some years, Head of the French language department in a large UK comprehensive school. She knows what she is doing.
I didn’t think she’d see a use for my software since the reason I created it was to mask what terrible French teachers me and my fellow Facebook admins (except Matthew – shout out to Matthew) were.
It was designed to give us the appearance and the results of dedicated and effective French teachers.
Céline didn’t need my stuff to make her look better. But incredibly she enjoyed using the tools. This encouraged me somewhat.
So in the last few months I have started to build them out and improve them. I hope to be able to sell the system to other French teachers if only to recoup my costs and months of work and research.
Using the system to teach others has improved my French a lot and my French cultural knowledge too, which is of course a bonus.