Comprehension strategies on the internet : which pedagogical approaches one can adopt to build the autonomy of ghanaian students of french as a foreign language ?
This investigation stems from observations that were made regarding students’ ability to take control of their study of French in a research aimed at integrating Internet to the teaching and learning of French. It was quite clear that students lacked the required strategies for them to take advantage of the learning opportunities available to them in the French Department. It is therefore in this vein that the Internet was identified as the multimedia capable of fostering the development of various strategies of acquiring/learning the French Language. The focus of the study was therefore on strategies that students would adopt in order to comprehend information that is available to them while browsing a French website. It sought to identify the mental processes that underlie comprehension on the Internet taking as basis researches realized in the cognitive sciences by RUBIN (1989), OXFORD (1990), O’MALLEY and CHAMOT (1990) and COHEN (1998) about strategies of learning and using a second/foreign language. From 52 second-year students doing French in four public universities in Ghana, we were able to obtain through think-aloud procedures, questionnaires and observation, quantitative and qualitative data about strategies that they adopted when browsing on authentic websites in French. The browsing tasks involved shopping for items on the Internet, booking a place on a train or in a hotel, requesting for a postal service, creating a user account on shopping sites, seeking directions about how to get to a place, among others. Browsing strategies such as looking out for clues, critical reading, trial and error, seeking help, self-motivation, forming hypothesis were identified as strategies that aid comprehension of information on the websites. The strategies helped students to guess meaning through such means as inference (in context – word context, keywords, images, interactive tools, colours, etc.), deductive and inductive reasoning, translation, analogy, transfer of knowledge and textual analysis with previous knowledge in French. Students also applied various strategies of checking meaning by using online dictionaries, online translation tools as well as search engines. Social and affective strategies such as seeking explanation from a peer and reminding oneself of goals of the tasks At the end of the study, it was quite evident that strategies adopted by students in understanding information on the website did not differ from those identified by early research in cognitive sciences. However, it is important to note how these strategies enhanced the general understanding of the French Language by students and also their autonomy in learning the language. Various suggestions were offered about the best way of developing students’ autonomous use of Internet resources in the teaching/learning environment.also helped students confirm interpretative guesses about words and phrases they encountered for the first time in French.