Digital Writing in French as a Foreign Language Handbooks: Exploring the Tasks and Challenges

Abstract

This research focuses on the teaching of French as a Foreign Language (FFL) and seeks to analyse the types of writing tasks proposed, notably those that concern digital writing, as well as the challenges encountered in a corpus of seven sets of FFL training materials published between 2010 and 2016. We attempt to respond to the following question: How are Web 2.0. technologies integrated into the writing tasks in the corpus of these handbooks? We first analyse the digital writing tasks proposed before assessing how they are integrated within actual lessons. We then evaluate the objectives of these writing tasks. The analysis of the 101 writing instructions reveals that learners are invited to carry out 88 simulated digital writing tasks (instead of “real life” and multimodal tasks). At a time when learners are living in a world of multimodal texts, authors of FFL handbooks have not yet begun to take into account available research findings relative to the relationship between literacy and digital technology to implement, within FFL classes, digital writing lessons that take all these dimensions into account.