Just before the final curtain falls on the UK participation in the Erasmus programme at the end of May 23, our Language Coordinator, Jean-Michel DesJacques, was able to take part in a staff mobility exchange with two of our partners in France, AMU (Aix Marseille Université) and UVDP (Université Via Domitia in Perpignan), de la Provence au pays catalan. It went very quickly as always when you have a good time, but we’re very pleased that he’s agreed to share some of the highlights from his trip:
“First of all, as the person responsible for sending our language students abroad, it was most useful to meet colleagues in person, see the locations, campuses, getting a feel of the two cities. I am grateful to staff at both universities for their welcome, for giving up some of their precious time to show me around and for their insight on our current bilateral agreements. We concluded that we were very much attached to our respective partnerships and there was a clear determination from all sides that our valued exchanges should continue. In a way, this was the crucial part of my visit: making sure we can carry on sending students via our renewed bilateral agreements. We did talk a lot about the visa situation, its impact on the registration process and how it acts almost as a deterrent for some continental students. Et c’est bien dommage! Having said that I did meet Vincent from Perpignan who is keen on joining us in Spring 24 as part of the exchange.
More importantly, it was a golden opportunity to meet with students in a completely different environment and having a chat in a relaxed atmosphere was very precious, to me anyway. By relaxed atmosphere, I mean chatting in French at a terrasse of a nice café (with thanks to Kaye for the box of Madeleine cakes, Marcel Proust would have been proud). I am very grateful to all our students who attended courses at Aix and Perpignan for taking time to meet me, some had visiting family members, others had upcoming exams or apartment to vacate. So many thanks again.
The end of Erasmus means the end of staff mobility, too, as it is not a feature that the new Turing scheme will offer so particular hanks to Jennifer and Jo from the International Office at Stirling for making this trip possible for me.”
It seems fitting to post this article on 31 May, the final day of Erasmus for us at Stirling. Our colleagues and students have benefitted so much from the scheme over the years and we’ve been lucky enough to welcome colleagues and students from many of our partner institutions to Stirling, too. We really hope to be able to find a way to maintain these relationships over the months and years ahead and to continue to benefit from the friendships and connections we’ve all built thanks to Erasmus.
And following Emily’s thoughts a couple of months on from graduation, this next post comes from Ceinwen who is about to start the final year of her degree in French and who has been reflecting on last semester when she was an Erasmus student enrolled with one of our partner institutions in France but not able to travel over there:
‘Going into my third year during a global pandemic which caused major travel restrictions, the possibility that I would not be able to partake in my semester abroad was always in the back of my head. However, I was, and still very much am, an optimist. Of course, the reality that I wouldn’t study in France was there and when the news broke that my year wouldn’t be able to go, I was naturally a little upset, but I also understood how impossible it would have been. Despite this, I still did my semester abroad! It definitely wasn’t your blueprint Erasmus experience, but I still managed to vastly improve my French and even make some friends.
I completed an online semester (much like the online system we had at Stirling) at the University of Tours from January to early May this year. The course I did were a mix of specially-made modules for Erasmus students as well as modules from various departments at the uni itself. I went from French to English translation to French Children’s Literature and Psychology, all taught in French with fellow students from across the world. The courses themselves taught me so much about the French language, culture and even improved my time-keeping. Remembering that France is an hour ahead was surprisingly hard for the first week or so, I am so thankful I will never have to wake up for an 8am class ever again.
The module I think I got the most benefit from though was their TANDEM course. In this we got to chat to French students wanting to improve their English for an hour every week. One half in French, the other in English. I met so many students through this course and it really helped me become more confident with speaking the language as well as my cultural knowledge. I still speak to one of the girls I did this with today and even sent each other books in our target language at one point. We hope to meet once travel is safer and restrictions have been lifted more in both countries. I think a massive fear for me was missing out on meeting new people but programmes like this are so incredible not only for meeting folk but improving language skills in all areas! I am so much more comfortable using slang for example and understanding the speed at which some people speak.
I think it would have been so easy for me to become downhearted at the fact that I wasn’t going abroad like so many years before me have, but I think throwing myself into the experience anyway really helped. If I didn’t make the effort to engage with the online resources that I was so lucky to have in the first place, then there was no way that my French would improve. I am so thankful for the staff at Tours for being so understanding to the situation as well as making the courses accessible and easy to follow and for the staff at Stirling for providing work of their own too!
I’m excited to start back for the first semester of my fourth year with a new set of skills and a deeper understanding of the French language and culture. My advice for this coming year’s third years is to throw yourself into the opportunities presented to you, whether your Erasmus is in person or online. Also do not be afraid to go for it in conversation classes because the only way you’ll improve is by going straight out of your comfort zone.
At the end of the day, it wasn’t the Erasmus experience I was expecting, but the end result has definitely surprised me.’
Many thanks to Ceinwen for sending through this post. We’re sorry you didn’t get a chance to travel to Tours (we hope you will be able to in the future!) but it’s great to hear that you were able to get so much out of the experience all the same and we look forward to welcoming you back to Stirling in a few weeks!
We’re all getting ready to welcome our new students who’ll be joining us in just a few weeks, and to welcome back continuing students, but that also means saying goodbye to those who’ve just graduated and who are off to other things and other climes. It’s a busy time for them all but we’re delighted to be able to post this article by Emily, who just graduated in French and History and who has taken the time to reflect on her five years with us, before heading off to start a postgrad course in a couple of weeks:
‘It feels a wee bit strange writing this post for the French at Stirling blog, as it’s the last one I’ll write as a student at Stirling before I start a Masters at a different university. Honestly, I can’t quite believe it, it seems like last week that we were all lined up outside Pathfoot A96 for our first introductory lecture. I certainly don’t think that any of us then could have predicted how our studies would end up finishing this year with the pandemic!
Now that I’ve got the degree, I think I can admit that Stirling wasn’t initially my first choice, but in the end, it was definitely the right one. I remember coming to an open day way back in 2016 with my dad and loving the uni and its location straight away, and this only grew when I started my studies. First and second year seemed to go by in a flash, and although I maybe spent too much time going out and not enough studying, I wouldn’t change any of it for the world. During these first two years away from home, I met some of the best people who have gone on to become some of my closest friends, which I think is just as important as good grades, if not more.
That being said, after reaching the halfway mark, I decided that it would be a good idea to take a year out to work in France as an English Language Assistant to improve my French, but more importantly, to eat my body weight in cheese and croissants. I was placed in lycée in a wee village in Brittany, and even though I’m not planning on going into full-time teaching, this role taught me loads, and it really was one of the best things I’ve done in my life so far.
However, it wouldn’t be entirely honest if I painted it as all sunshine and roses. Moving to a completely new country, having to speak another language and adapt to new cultures and customs can be really hard at times, and I know I had my fair share of ups and downs along the way. Despite the difficulties however, I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending it to any current French students who get the opportunity, because you get so much more out of it than just improving your French skills. I won’t use that gap-year cliché and say that I ‘found myself’ during my year abroad, but I feel that I did quite a bit of growing up while I was away, and that I came back a more independent and understanding person. Even if you learn nothing else while away, meeting new people that you wouldn’t have met otherwise and learning to understand their perspectives is always going to be worth it.
Taking a year out really helped my French skills, but after it I was really looking forward to getting back into uni. I think that a lot of people, myself included, feel the pressure being turned up in third year with results counting towards our final degree, but now when I look back on 2019, especially with everything that’s happened in the last year, I can’t help but see it as some sort of golden age when we could actually sit together in classrooms without social distancing, when in reality it was still quite difficult! In third year we also had the opportunity to participate in an Erasmus exchange, and so I spent that spring semester at the Université de Limoges in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. It was nice to experience French education as a student instead of a teacher, and although it was cut short because of the pandemic, it was still a really fun experience.
And so, that brings me onto my final year at Stirling. I think everyone had their highs and lows during this year: not having to commute and being able to wear PJs to class was nice, but not seeing any classmates or lecturers and being stuck inside for a whole year? Not so good. Despite all of our classes and lectures being online, the staff in the language department did a really good job at trying to make the year as normal as they could for us. Hopefully we’ll eventually get an in-person graduation ceremony so we can actually see each other in real life instead of through a screen, and celebrate the fact that we made it through the toughest year of uni – during a global pandemic no less.
Over the last 5 years, the question I’ve probably been asked the most in regards to my degree is ‘what are you going to do with that?’, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s heard this. Still, I never get tired of explaining to people that actually there are so many options with a language degree, and you get a lot more from it than just a second language. It teaches you how to be confident, how to communicate effectively, and it also teaches you that making mistakes is okay!
So, what am I going to do with it? Well, the next step for me will be in September, when I’m due to start a master’s degree in publishing at Edinburgh Napier. I’ve decided to go down this route because I feel that I’ll be able to put a lot of the skills that I’ve learned through my degree into use in a career in publishing, potentially in international rights or marketing. But before all that, I’ll be working over the summer as an optical consultant and a French and History tutor!
Before I finish, I would like to take the time to thank all of the amazing lecturers that have taught and helped me over the last 5 years: Cristina Johnston, Elizabeth Ezra, Mathilde Mazau, Brigitte Depret, Jean-Michel DesJacques, Fiona Barclay, Bill Marshall,David Murphy, Fanny Lacôte, and everyone else in the Language Department who I’ve come across whether it be in an exam or just in the corridor! THANK YOU!’
Many, many thanks to Emily for such a great article and for the kind words, and we all wish you all the best for the postgrad course this coming year and for life beyond that. Keep in touch and best wishes!
And as well as responses from colleagues, the thoughts of students on the question of language uptake and what prompted them to become language learners also keep coming in, like the following post from Samantha who is currently in her final year of a BA Hons in French and Spanish:
‘I started learning Spanish after I moved house at 6 years old. I found my dad’s old Spanish vocab and grammar books from when he studied it in high school and, although I couldn’t read much of my native language at that age, it just amazed me that there were so many people out there that could speak and understand a language different from my own, so I wanted to break down that barrier and learn more because that fascinated me so much.
I had a very basic knowledge of Spanish until I went on holiday to Spain for the first time at age 10. I absolutely fell in love with the language, the culture and the country and decided to keep learning it until today. Then when French was introduced to our course in Primary 6, I could relate it to what I already knew in Spanish which, in turn, facilitated my learning and understanding of French. Around this time, a Polish girl came to my school and she couldn’t speak a word of English, so I learned some Polish and we became good friends, and I am still more or less conversational in Polish.
In high school I absolutely loved learning French, but we couldn’t learn Spanish until we were in 3rd year and I forgot quite a lot of it. I was always quite disappointed with the languages system in my high school as there was only the option to choose Spanish or French, and due to the fact that nobody in the two years below mine chose French, they had totally eliminated it from the curriculum and replaced it with Spanish, which I was really quite sad about. I then went to Uni at 16 to continue studying languages, and now I can speak Spanish, French, Italian, Polish and some German and Japanese.
I think languages are so, so important in a world as globalised as ours, and it felt so great to make friends with people that I may not have become friends with in the first place if I didn’t speak their language. We often seem to expect people to speak English when we go abroad, and I’ve witnessed first-hand British people going abroad and shouting repeatedly in English when a native of that country didn’t understand them, and it always annoyed me. So, personally, I felt like when going on holiday the natives of that country immediately had a lot more respect for me and were more open to conversing with/helping me when they found out that I could speak some of their language.
When I found out about the BBC study, I was so shocked. I think that due to language apps and online translation services as well as the expectation for people to speak English no matter their mother tongue, more and more people nowadays no longer feel the need to learn a new language. However, I think learning languages is essential for a variety of reasons, both for going on holiday or professional opportunities, as well as giving life new perspective and seeing the world in a different light through learning about other cultures and meeting people from other countries. I feel like learning a language helps bring people in this world together.’
Many, many thanks to Samantha for this great blog post and we hope you’ll continue with your current languages, and keep finding ways of picking up new ones over the coming months and years!
French at Stirling 
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