Innovation in Language Learning

The current study started at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year with a new 10^th grade class who studied French as their second modern language (L2 according to the Romanian curriculum) in a high school in Ilfov county.  The initial assessment highlighted the students’ competences in oral expression were mostly at the A1.1 level according to the CEFRL, their motivation and involvement were low, and they were reluctant to speaking in French. In order to improve the students’ acquisition a single group pre-post intervention was designed that aimed at using: applications as real-life communication contexts to develop oral expression; gamification as a framework to give meaning to the class integration of multiple applications; games to maintain the level of student involvement. Evaluation grids and progress tests were applied every month in order to assess the speaking competences. Also observation grids and questionnaires monitored the students’ involvement and motivation. After three months, the results were already positive: students’ speaking competences improved, and their motivation and involvement increased. As the results showed, at the end of the school year, their speaking competences in French improved, to the A2.2 level. The observation grids showed that their motivation increased from the beginning and then was almost constant during the school year. The final questionnaire results showed that the students considered the learning had been more meaningful and funnier.