Raising awareness in university students of languages
Meta Lah
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2017.10.04.26
Abstract
Initially, the article studies the terms autonomy and raising awareness within language classes; the autonomous students are capable of taking the responsibility for his/her learning and taking a critical position on teaching processes as well as the learning contents. Raising awareness is, according to Plathner, a process of working towards a student's awareness. The second part of the article introduces the experiment carried out with the participation of students: writing a summary of each lesson. With lectures concluded, students were expected to write their own reflections on the activity, assessing the experiment. Fifty papers were handed in, 23 coming from undergraduate students and 27 were handed in by postgraduate students (the future teachers of French). The working hypothesis suggested that postgraduate students would offer more comments on learning process and teaching contents, which would reflect better awareness of the future teachers of French. The hypothesis has proven correct. In conclusion the article proposes several possible improvements for respective groups.
Key words: university students of French as a foreign language, autonomy, awareness, introspection, abstracts