What benefits will my class get from using the IRC Français software?
The interactions between students using this software have been shown to be much more involved and useful. Preliminary research has shown that classroom interactions are generally one-on-one in nature, whereas IRC Français seems to encourage interactions directly between students without intervention by the teacher. Because of this, we have observed much more involvement and enthusiastic use of the foreign language, which is beneficial to the student. The discussions have proven to no longer be dominated by only the professor and one or two confident students, but instead there has been much more even participation noted in the online conversations. These are early results and were still conducting the research to find out precisely how students are benefiting from the software.
