Setting the scene for liminality: non-francophone French second language teachers' experience of process drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Non-francophone teachers of French as a second or additional language (FSL) often struggle with overwhelming oral anxiety, consequent low self-confidence, and workplace marginalisation. Core French or Basic French teachers, in particular, and their subjects have been undervalued (Carr, 2007; Lapkin, McFarlane, & Vandergrift, 2006; Richards, 2002). Moreover, recent national FSL research points to challenges in the areas of teacher attrition, lack of methodological and /or linguistic preparation, and lack of professional development opportunities in the FSL context (Karsenti, 2008; Salvatori, 2007). In this dissertation, I present the findings of my qualitative research study, which examined the conditions and experiences of non-francophone FSL teachers in Manitoba. To do so, I looked at the teachers' relationship with French and how French oral competency and oral language communicative confidence are intertwined to foster the teachers' sense of agency. The theoretical orientations underpinning this study draw from socio-constructivism (Bruner, 1985, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978), Feminist Standpoint theory (De Vault, 1999; Lather, 1991), Bakhtinian dialogism (Vitanova, 2005), and Institutional Ethnography (Smith, 1987, 2005). The lens I used to understand and interpret the voices and self-perceptions of the teachers is Process Drama, delivered in the form of professional development workshops. Process Drama (Heathcote, 1991) consists of thematically based improvisations, which are used to explore a topic and, at the same time, to invite self-exploration. It possesses unique characteristics, and has been successfully used in the second and foreign language classroom (Dicks & Le Blanc, 2009; Kao & O'Neill, 1998; Liu, 2002; Marshke, 2005). My particular focus, however, was on the Manitoba FSL teacher as a student, rather than as a teacher of language. Findings from this study indicate reduced oral anxiety as related to French language competency, reduced “performance
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".