“French is a part of me”

It’s a sunny Friday afternoon and we’re edging closer and closer to the summer which seems like a good time to introduce you to another of our undergraduate students. Many of our students in French at Stirling join us having studied French until the end of their secondary school studies but we also welcome students onto our Beginners’ stream every year, students who have either never studied any French before or who have perhaps done 1 or 2 years but who usually haven’t studied it for a few years at least. For these students, the first two semesters focus on intensive language learning (alongside whatever other subjects they are studying), then in 3^rd semester they begin to study French and Francophone cultures while continuing to build their language skills and confidence, and they merge with our Advanced stream from Semester 4 onwards. Today’s post is by Valeriia who has just finished the first 2 semesters in our Beginners’ stream:

“Bonjour tout le monde! My name is Valeriia, and I just completed my first year at the University of Stirling. I’m pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in International Management Studies with European Languages and Society. Let me tell you, choosing this programme has been the best decision of my life. In my 20 years, I have experienced many changes, just like everyone else. Among these changes, foreign languages have played a significant role. I first discovered French when I was in 5th grade. It caught the attention of my teachers, who noticed my interest in French culture and recommended that I start learning the language. Subsequently, I enrolled in an academic lyceum where I delved deep into English and French, participating in various Olympiads and scientific competitions throughout Ukraine. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, and I thought nothing could disrupt this harmony. However, German unexpectedly entered my life, diverting all my efforts and time to this new language. Consequently, I began to forget French since, as they say, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”

In 2022, I made the decision to study at a university in Scotland. I had no doubt that Stirling was the perfect choice for me. When I discovered that the university offered the opportunity to study French and even spend a semester in a French-speaking country, I felt a rush of excitement. I once again fell in love with the French language, even after a long break. The native French-speaking teachers provide incredible assistance and support, whilst the university campus and the entire community continuously inspire and motivate me to strive for new knowledge. It’s almost like having a piece of France in Scotland. I’m extremely glad that the University of Stirling offers language learning opportunities for beginners, those looking to refresh their skills, and those who already have a strong foundation. But is there a limit? Personally, I strongly believe that perfection knows no bounds.

You know, they say that knowing at least one foreign language becomes second nature. If you were to ask me what the nature of the French language is, I would tell you that it varies for everyone. For some, it’s the language of love, for others, it’s the world of cinema, and for some, it’s the pages of timeless French classics or the pleasure of gastronomy. For me, it encompasses all of these aspects. In a nutshell, it is life itself. You come to realise that a foreign language is so is so intricately woven into your life that it becomes a part of who you are. So, French is a part of me.

Through personal experience, I have come to understand that even when life takes unexpected turns, it is important to hold onto what you love and what gives you strength. I look forward to the upcoming years as a student and rejoice in my progress and the progress of my ‘camarades’. We, like all students, have a lot of work ahead of us, with so much more to learn about the French language and culture. However, at the University of Stirling, we are never alone. In unity, there is strength!”

Many, many thanks to Valeriia for this great blog post and we hope the summer will offer many opportunities for you to continue to build your language skills so you’re ready for the language and culture combination that awaits in the autumn!

And we’re back!

Le blog est de retour! It has been an incredibly busy couple of months for students and staff at Stirling and we are already a few weeks on from the end of our teaching semester so, firstly, well done to all our students for all the hard work over this spring. There’s lots of news for us to share and, although the teaching is over for this academic year, life remains busy for us all but we hope you’ll bear with us as we catch up with overdue blog posts and bring you up to speed with everything that’s been happening and lots of what lies ahead in French at Stirling (and beyond!).

To get the ball rolling once again, it’s fantastic to be able to start with a post from our former student Scott who graduated with a BA Hons in French and Spanish. Scott’s post is particularly timely against the backdrop of the presidential elections that have taken place in Turkey this past week. Confused as to what the connections might be with French at Stirling? Read on…

‘Herkese merhaba! Nearly two years since leaving Stirling and, almost like a rite de passage for French Studies’ students, I was asked (quite a while-ago now) to write a blog piece about my destinations following graduation. I did my undergraduate at Stirling in French and Spanish from 2016 to 2021. Although I was studying French and Spanish, I was always interested in the Middle East and what the Middle East is/was; as the saying goes, Middle of what, East of where?

A country that I was always interested in was Turkey – a good example of the East/West question depending on who you ask. I had been there a few times on holiday and had heard about Orhan Pamuk, but I hadn’t really done much reading into the history of the country or the language and culture. It wasn’t until I was on my British Council year – which should have been used to improve my French rather than being on first-name basis with the bakers in the nearest boulangerie to my flat–, that I began to study Turkish language and culture. Before I knew it, I was dead-set on doing something Turkey-related after finishing my degree at Stirling; it was either further study or finding work in Turkey in some kind of capacity. Luckily for me, Turkish studies was offered as a two-year Master’s degree in the UK; the only issue being, moving from relatively cheap Stirling to incredibly expensive London was quite the shock. Lockdown helped for the first year, I was able to stay at home then I completed a three-month term at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul last summer. Then, I did the London thing; saw the sights, rode the subway, and paid an exorbitant price for oh-so-fashionable city coffee. I’m now back in Scotland getting ready to hand in my end-of-year essays, and preparing for my dissertation.

One of the many things I liked about the studies at Stirling was the breadth of literature we read. I particularly enjoyed Didier Daeninckx’s Cannibale, Hygiène de l’assassin by Amélie Nothomb and Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de suif – which I still return to now and again for how good it is. And, even though I did my French dissertation on film studies, I really enjoyed the close-reading of texts and the ways in which literature had so many different layers of meaning to what you initially read on the page – something you can see very clearly in Boule de suif. It was this interest in literature that I’ve been able to develop in my Master’s through the works of Ottoman writers from the mid-nineteenth-century who, similar to de Maupassant, wrote about the changing world and peoples’ relationships to one another, even though it’s written in a language that no one speaks or writes in anymore – unless you meet a diehard Ottomanist. And, if the stars align, I can take what I’ve been working on mixed with what I learned at Stirling and use it for a PhD programme – hopefully somewhere across the pond.

I initially thought that what I was involved in was far removed from all things French at Stirling but that’s just not the case. After picking up Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Avrupa’da bir Cevelan (A Jaunt in Europe) and Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası (The Carriage Affair) – two authors I’m currently working on, who write pages upon pages of French written in the Ottoman-Arabic script  –, I’m back in the deep-end, flicking through French Grammar in Context trying to refresh my memory of French tenses and what subject and object clauses are – something that still plagues me in Turkish. Or if it’s not French grammar I’m reading up on, it’s French literary and cultural theory which, currently, is almost completely incomprehensible to me – but we march on.

Funnily enough, there is quite an interesting history of the use of French language and French culture in Turkish. Just under one-hundred years ago, then president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, using similar policies to those of my favourite Académie, wanted to shake-up the Turkish language by removing many Arabic and Persian loanwords and instead create new Turkic words mixed with Western language. So, in Turkish, if I ever forget the word for suburb, truck, or screen I can just use banliyö, kamyon, and ekran respectively. And apparently, if you squint your eyes a little, the word for school (okul) in Turkish comes from the French école – but no one really knows.’

Many, many thanks to Scott, firstly for his patience as it has taken rather longer than we’d have hoped to get this post online, but primarily just for this excellent article that does so much to show the wide range of avenues that open up to our students after their degrees involving French at Stirling. We look forward to reading more about Scott’s progress over the years ahead and will keep our fingers firmly crossed for the PhD applications!

More news and updates to follow… À bientôt!

French at Stirling: “Go for it!”

Following on from Amy’s tales of Study Abroad in Aix and elsewhere in the spring, time to round off the week with another profile of one of our Year 1 students, just starting out on their time with us at Stirling:

“Bonjour! I’m Tom, currently in my first year studying French at Stirling. As my photo shows, leaving school was something I did a while ago now. Going to university to study French has been a dream of mine for a long time, and I’ve recently been lucky enough to see it come true. 

I’ve been fascinated by France for years. Its people, culture, countryside, and history are so close to ours, and yet so different. Although I’ve enjoyed lots of trips, many holidays and even a honeymoon there, it still felt as though I was only scratching the surface of France and the French. The next step for me was to take away language as a barrier to understanding and engaging more, and a university degree seemed like the best way of doing that.

When I started looking around at where to go, being able to commute from home in Falkirk was vital, so that narrowed it to the five universities across central Scotland that offer degrees in French. Visiting each of the campuses, speaking with the tutors and looking into the details of the various courses made it an easy decision to come to Stirling. 

The focus of the course at Stirling is on the today’s French-speaking world, and the university delivers that as a modern, outward-looking institution. The university has also invested a lot of money recently in campus facilities, and it shows. Campus Central is a great facility, with places to sit, eat and study, and with easy access from there to the library, lecture theatres and seminar rooms. Nowhere on campus is more than a 10-minute walk away.

The campus itself is gorgeous, and there is no other learning environment like it in Scotland. This photo was one I sent to my work colleagues during the first week of the semester and having views like this when you’re taking a quick break from your studies is wonderful and really adds to the experience.

So, six weeks in, what is it actually like? Fantastic! 

The range of module options available means that there is something for everyone. In addition to French, I’m studying modules in Politics and Religion in first year, and all three courses are excellent, with great material and really engaged tutors. In French, the formal split between language and culture studies works very well, adding a great additional dimension to the course. We’ve just completed an analysis of a French movie, which was a lot easier than it sounds, and next week we’re starting on a short French novel. The approach to language teaching works really well, with seminars building on top of independent learning.

I was concerned that my big gap between school and university would be a problem, but the university’s Student Learning Services has really helped take those concerns away. They deliver a huge range of support to students, from online courses in study skills and essay writing, to 1-2-1 sessions offering direct support on specific topics.

My advice to anyone leaving school and thinking about a degree in French? Come and have a look at Stirling. It’s a great place to learn.

And, for anyone like me, for whom leaving school was a long time ago and is thinking about going to university? If my last six weeks in Stirling are anything to go by, you should go for it! You will not be disappointed.”

Many, many thanks to Tom for sending through this great post and we’re really pleased your first semester has got off to such a positive start! We’ll look forward to catching up with you over the course of the semesters ahead.

End of semester round-up

There has been lots going on across French at Stirling these past few months, as you’ll have gathered from recent posts. Before the blog goes quiet for a couple of weeks of annual leave, we wanted to just bring you up-to-speed with a couple of pieces of news…

Congratulations to Fiona Barclay who was awarded £100K AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement for a project called ‘Remembering Empire’ that aims to reach new audiences with the findings of the earlier project on ‘Narratives and Representations of the French Settlers of Algeria.’ The project will run for 12 months from 1 July and we’ll be posting more about it once it’s fully up and running.

Elizabeth Ezra, meanwhile, was recently interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed about her book Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film (Edinburgh University Press; co-edited with Catherine Wheatley). The interview is available here on BBC Sounds (the discussion with Elizabeth begins at 18:20).

Over the next few weeks, Cristina Johnston and Aedín ní Loingsigh will be working on the final stages of a paperback edition of Lilian Thuram’s La Pensée blanche that they co-translated with David Murphy last year. Cristina and Aedín gave a joint paper on their experience of collaborative translation and questions of who translates whom as part of Stirling’s Centre for Interpreting, Translation and Intercultural Studies research seminars a couple of months ago.

And last week, Cristina Johnston delivered a training session on Feedback and Assessment in Higher Education for doctoral students. The session was part of a series of workshops on Learning and Teaching that is jointly organised by Pallavi Joshi and Jordan McCullough on behalf of the British and Irish subject associations for French Studies, ASMCF and ADEFFI.

More to follow soon, not least by way of a catch-up on Nina Parish’s recent research trips to Armenia and Poland… Busy times all round!

Languages Week Scotland: Reading in other languages

This week is Languages Week Scotland which gives an opportunity to celebrate the signed and spoken languages used and learned across Scotland. We have decided to mark it on the blog by posting an article every day about a wide range of the language learning experiences of our students, friends and colleagues. To start us off, meet Iiris who is in the second year of her degree in International Politics and French at Stirling:

“Studying languages has pretty much always guided my study path and is how I ended up here in Stirling from my hometown of Turku, Finland. It all started with beginning to study English when I was ten. I absolutely hated it and made a point out of not participating or studying for it. It dawned on me that I was learning English even without trying, and the classes would go a lot faster if I just stuck my hand up. After that, I quickly began enjoying English, and when I picked up Swedish and Spanish a few years later, languages became my favourite subject. Instead of high school, I applied to the International Baccalaureate to be able to study in English and wanted to continue to do so at University. I chose Stirling because of being able to study politics and French as equals, which isn’t a given elsewhere. It has been really great, and I’m on track to becoming a polyglot soon, which is really important to me as an aspiring diplomat!

Every time I study a new language, I always just throw myself off the deep end and start reading books I can hardly understand. At first, it’s frustrating and takes a while to get used to, especially if you don’t know the plot or the characters from before. But after a while it becomes tolerable, and usually, after a hundred pages you recognize most of the words. At the end of the book, you know plenty of new words, new phrases and you improved your reading. So it’s definitely worth it, but how to get motivated enough to read a book you don’t understand? 

The first trick is always choosing a book you like! When I was first learning English, I frequented the Fiction in English shelf at the library and chose whatever sounded interesting. I really liked adventure, so I went for books like Young Sherlock or Artemis Fowl. Afterward, I went back to English class and confused my teacher by using words like bloody hell and ambivalent – but I definitely also learned more appropriate and useful words, and quickly aced English class.

Another trick is to have a translator app or a dictionary nearby. When help is near, you don’t get frustrated as quickly. You can download Google Translator on your phone, and then use the camera to scan and translate words and phrases you don’t understand. For this Spring’s Contemporary French and Cultures Course, we were assigned Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images and Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Demain, and I wanted to get a head start and read them over Christmas. These two were the hardest novels I had ever read in French. Kiffe Kiffe Demain uses plenty of slang, and Les Belles Images is challenging to understand even for a fluent speaker. But using the Google scanner got me through tough sentences, and I was able to finish both novels in two weeks. 

I try to boost my learning by making a vocabulary of the words used in a novel. Authors often use similar phrases and writing patterns throughout their texts, which is also why after a hundred pages you already understand the author so much better. When reading Kiffe Kiffe Demain, I initially started by scanning almost entire pages to make sense of what I was reading. After a while, I didn’t need to check at all.

Another trick is to read a book you already love, but in the language that you’re trying to learn. The other national language of Finland is Swedish and I’m currently stuck in a limbo between advanced and fluent. I don’t get much practice in Scotland since I don’t have Swedish friends, but I try to fix that when I vacation in Finland by reading familiar books in Swedish. The Moomin are everywhere in Finland, and I used to read the books watch the series in Finnish a lot. Now, I read them in Swedish, and it’s great because I can deduce the meaning by context and I already know what is going to happen. Most importantly, I know the book is good, so I never get bored.

I take the same technique and use it when watching movies! I choose a movie in the language I want to learn and then choose the same language subtitles. If I want to understand the movie, I’m going to have to read – and quick. This helps your reading but also listening because you can try to listen to the movie and glance at the subtitles for support if you need it. Netflix is full of good French content like Lupin and Les Intouchables you can watch.

First and foremost, my motivation is just to improve my language skills, and reading foreign books does just that. One of my favourite books is Les Misérables, but I am not at a point where I can read it in French yet. But if I keep reading books in French, I will be soon!  Reading is such a good way to learn new vocabulary and phrases without having to repeat a single word to yourself over and over again. You also learn a broader vocabulary beyond what you learn in class, and you too can confuse your teacher by using étourdissante instead of jolie.”

Some fantastic language learning advice from Iiris and a great blog post – thank you very much! As the week goes on, we’ll be posting about everything from teaching exchanges to language assistantships via language ambassadors and much else besides. And since Iiris has mentioned the novel here, we might even post something about the reading group on Les Belles Images Aedín ní Loingsigh is running for our Year 2 students. Bonne lecture et bonne semaine!

The politics of Cannes from the grey Scottish countryside…

We’re about a month away from the new academic year starting at Stirling, from getting to know a new intake of students across our Beginners and Advanced streams and from being able to welcome back our continuing students across a wide range of programmes. Ordinarily, students coming back into their final year, in particular, would be returning with tales of a semester spent on Study Abroad. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of them, Study Abroad was conducted online this past year so travel has been minimal but they have all still been working away on their independent research projects while they’ve been away. Students like Morgan, for example, who is about to start the final year of her Languages and International Politics degree and who sent through this great post about her experiences in the Spring:

‘My study abroad semester this year was certainly not how I ever pictured it to be. Part of me still does not believe that I completed my full study abroad semester from the walls of my childhood bedroom. While it did not turn out the way I had hoped, it was still an interesting experience from which I learnt a lot.

As my university was in the south east of France, this is the area that my project focused on. Different things came to my mind when I thought about this region, but one of the stand-out events has to be the Cannes Film Festival. My independent research project focused on the Cannes Festival, in particular its relationship with politics and political events. It was a rather odd topic choice for me as I have never been particularly interested in films or film festivals. In the end though, this was one of the reasons that I chose this topic. It was an area about which I had limited knowledge so I used this opportunity to learn more about Cannes.

Once I knew that I wanted to write about the film festival, as an International Politics student it was an obvious choice for me to focus on its political side. At first, I was worried that I would struggle to find sources on this topic but the more books and articles I read, the more information I discovered. I certainly never expected to be doing research about a fancy location in Southern France from the grey Scottish countryside, but I would say that I enjoyed the experience of learning more about the festival as well as some important political events.

Pairing the two topics together ended up being really interesting and allowed me to understand both national and international political events through a new lens. While I wouldn’t exactly say that I love film now, my interest in them has definitely increased thanks to my project.’

Many thanks to Morgan for having sent through this great post (and apologies for not having got round to adding it to the blog much sooner!) and we’re looking forward to welcoming you back to Stirling in a few weeks!

A little bit of Art Brut…

At the end of the last blog post, our colleague Nina Parish mentioned that she’d been catching up with the series Lupin over the past few weeks. She’s not the only one of us in French at Stirling to be trying to catch up with things French and Francophone beyond the University. For me (Cristina Johnston, usually the person responsible for the bits at the start and end of our blog posts, and sometimes the bits in between), there’s been a little bit of time to catch up with some French and Francophone films I’d missed and there may well be an article on that to follow but, in the meantime, for Aedín ní Loingsigh, first on the agenda was a chance to see an exhibition she’d been very much hoping to get to:

‘Those of you who use the learning resources on the French at Stirling Canvas pages will know that the module image is from a 1961 print by Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) called Nez carotte. Staff in Stirling have long admired his work and his efforts to ensure proper recognition for what he termed Art Brut (art made outside the formal academic contexts of fine art). The Pompidou Centre in Paris has just been given a donation of 900 works of Art Brut. But with trips to be Paris being complicated, to say the least, a recent visit to London meant I was able to visit  the Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty exhibition being held at the Barbican Centre. It didn’t disappoint.

To move through the different rooms displaying 1945 graffiti-inspired lithographs he produced to illustrate the Les Murs poems of Eugène Guillevic, his experimental portraits of literary and artistic personalities in Paris, his paintings of women, his disarming collages made from butterfly wings, his landscapes and the astonishingly original Coucou Bazar and Hourloupe works is to enter an endlessly creative mind. To its credit, the exhibition doesn’t shirk from some of the anti-Semitic statements Dubuffet made in private. In the end, I think the Barbican Exhibition is well worth seeing if you can. Alongside Dubuffet’s own work, a small selection from his Art Brut collection as well as wonderful rarely seen filmed interviews genuinely does justice to his singular view of life and art: ‘L’art doit toujours un peu faire rire et un peu faire peur. Tout sauf ennuyer.’’

And on that excellent note, many thanks to Aedín for this post. The blog will be on a break for the next couple of weeks but will be back at the end of July! In the meantime, bonnes vacances!

Semester Abroad – Killing time? Me too!

This past year has been particularly challenging for our Year 3 students. In most cases, they would ordinarily have spent their Autumn semester preparing for Study Abroad and then their Spring semester away at one of our partner institutions. This year was very different and, while our Study Abroad Advisors (Jean-Michel DesJacques for French and Jose Ferreira-Cayuela for Spanish) did a fantastic job matching students up with our usual partners, the changing conditions over the course of the Spring meant that the shape and form of their online contact with those partners varied quite a bit. The one thing that united all of the students on their Semester Abroad, though, was that they were all also working on independent research projects for us at Stirling throughout the semester. That’s a standard part of our Semester Abroad and the topics this year were as varied as usual, from Simone de Beauvoir to representations of activist movements onscreen and much else in between.

Anyway, we thought it would be good to get some perspectives on this unconventional Semester Abroad from the students who’ve actually been involved and we’re delighted to be able to post the first of these articles by Pauline, who has just completed Year 3 on her International Politics and Languages degree:

‘Studying on the beach on the Côte d’Azur, hanging out with friends and practising my French at the same time, learning more about the French culture and lifestyle first-hand. That‘s how I thought my semester would go. Well, it did not. Due to Covid and ever-changing restrictions in France concerning classes and in-person teaching, I was not able to go to SciencesPo Menton for my semester abroad. However, Menton was not lost. Online classes were still on and allowed me to experience a part of French teaching from afar. This was no real replacement for the adventure on the French Riviera I had hoped for, but it was better than nothing. So, I made the most of it and tried to do my best in classes alongside my French classmates. To be honest, I did not do very well. The topics were complex, assignments were usually based on personal opinions and the way SciencesPo is organised was unbearably chaotic and spontaneous for my strictly-structured ‘German brain.’ My favourite class was my C1 French class, since it was one of the few opportunities I got to practise my French. Although it was on a Wednesday at 7am, I did not miss it once, especially since it was tailored specifically to international students.

One major difference that distinguished Semester 6 from my previous Uni years was the workload. Rather than spending my time organising friends and hobbies around my daily studying, the latter was not very present. There was not much preparation needed for the classes I attended and because I did not have to bring back grades from my classes, the motivation to throw myself into assignments was lacking. So, I threw myself into the assignment that did count, namely the individual research project I had to complete for Stirling.

The work I put into my project could be seen as excessive. I spent most of my time this semester on research for a 2250-word paper. That probably sounds like a bad thing, but it was my way to kill time. It was easy to get into it, too, because I enjoyed learning more about my topic and perfecting phrasing, vocabulary and critical thinking. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about police brutality in France. I study International Politics together with French, so the political touch was a must for me. My supervisor, Aedín ní Loingsigh, recommended different articles and sources I could focus on. Among these was also a film by Ladj Ly called Les Misérables. Sounds familiar? I thought so too. I made the connection to the Victor Hugo novel, searched for police brutality and was guided smoothly to my research question: “La représentation de la police dans Les Misérables de Victor Hugo et dans Les Misérables de Ladj Ly.”

One struggle I encountered right to the end was the length of my project. The effort I put it would have been better placed in a dissertation than a 2250-word project, which resulted in 5000 to 6000 words at one point in the process. I was too enthusiastic. I had read so much, I had too much to say. Cutting down my arguments was probably the hardest part. It hurts when you have remove sentences in French that you’re really proud of because they sound so good and you used such fancy vocabulary. But I did it and I was proud of the work I submitted in the end.

Other than focusing all my academic energy on my project, I spent most of my semester 6 recharging and reenergising, climbing Scottish mountains and going for walks. And as good as that felt, I am more than ready for a semester where the thought of how to kill my time will never cross my mind.

Although my Semester 6 experience was not quite the one I had planned, it is still one I appreciate. The little insight I got into the French education system only inspired me to put studying in a francophone country on my bucket list for the future.’

Many, many thanks to Pauline for starting this series of reflections on Semester Abroad and for this honest account of the semester. We hope you have a great Summer and we look forward to being able to welcome you back to Stirling in the new academic year!

Congratulations!

Many, many congratulations to our PhD student Fraser McQueen who passed his viva yesterday. Fraser’s thesis (“Race, Religion, and Communities of Friendship: Contemporary French Islamophobia in Literature and Film”) was supervised by Fiona Barclay, Nadia Kiwan (at Aberdeen University) and Cristina Johnston (as well as by David Murphy, in the early stages of the research). We look forward to celebrating with you soon, Fraser!

And if you want to read more of Fraser’s work, you can check out his articles in The Conversation here or his most recent article in Modern and Contemporary France on Christophe Guilluy and Michel Houellebecq here.

The challenges of online university life: buddy sessions, group chats and language learning

The first blog article of the Spring and this seems like a good point to introduce another of our current Year 1 students, Cerys, who started her BA Hons in Psychology and a European Language at Stirling in September:

‘I think I speak for all first-year university students when I say that spending all of my time in university sat in front of a computer in my own home was not exactly how I imagined it. Remote learning has been a challenge over the past 2 semesters; however, it has also carried a lot of new experiences that I view as positive.

The idea of my first year of university being completely online was not ideal. Already being alone in lockdown was bad, but the environment that is meant to be the place you meet some of your greatest friends being transferred to completely online felt even worse. Attending classes was strange, as normally it would be an opportunity for discussion about all the interesting things we had learned about during lectures. Instead, everyone sat with their mics muted, cameras off and usually only typed in chat when called upon. Before, I would have thought that the most nerve-wracking thing about university was being in a real-life class with all of these strangers, but it was soon made clear to me that speaking to a blank screen over a BigBlueButton call was far more intimidating. Another aspect that I feel was missing in the first semester was the aspect of comfortable jokes and comments that would be made in the classroom. Oddly, learning online felt far more formal as we never really got the chance to get to know our classmates or lecturers outside of the classroom setting.

Of course, all of these anxieties were present for students and lecturers alike. Despite all of the uncomfortable silences in classes and inability to put a name to a face, I found an immense amount of support from the lecturers. From having trouble understanding a grammar point to all assignments set in the first semester, all members of the French faculty replied quickly to emails and offered all the help they could with any problems students had.

Going into the second semester, a number of changes had been made which I’m really feeling the benefits of now. To remove the barrier of the computer screen, lecturers encourage us to have our webcams on with them which definitely helps in creating a sense of community during class time. To further this sense of community, students are also encouraged to share their answers or ideas over their microphone as opposed to the chat box. Before, I would have felt awkward speaking over the mic but after getting to know many of my classmates through a group chat (which I think everyone would agree has been our saving grace throughout most of the semesters), I quite enjoy speaking over the mic as it takes up less time during class and allows for more of a natural conversation to be held. Nearing the end of semester 2, a lot of the problems that arose during our first semester have been smoothed out now to make it feel more like you are actually interacting with other people. I think that in these circumstances, students should take advantage of the opportunities to turn their camera on and speak over the mic if they are comfortable because it makes the experience of learning remotely far less lonely. The lecturers also try to give us opportunities to interact with our classmates that are less formal, like through our weekly buddy conversations we conduct to practice speaking in French or the Teams screening of Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles.

Of course, nothing could ever replicate the experience of attending university in person, but I think after spending a year of learning and teaching online the experience is a lot more enjoyable now as people are more familiar with what is expected of them. It’s also quite interesting to be the first group of Stirling University students who have not yet set foot on campus for a lecture. I look forward to the time when myself and other students can all meet in person, as I think especially when learning a language so much of the learning takes place through oral communication and listening that cannot fully be captured online.’

Many, many thanks to Cerys for this fantastic and very honest blog post – we’re really pleased that it’s feeling like 2^nd semester is more enjoyable and going more smoothly, and we’re all looking forward to welcoming students (back) onto campus as soon as we can!