3. Université de Savoie (University of Savoy), Languages Research Group

The University of Savoy has developed from a “University School” founded in the 19th century before the annexation of Savoy to France. It obtained full university status in 1979 and now has over 12000 students - 10% of whom are international students - 600 full-time academic staff, 1000 part-time and professional staff, and 400 technical and administrative staff. The university supports 23 research centres and offers a total of 200 academic programmes, at Licence, Masters and Doctoral levels, in five subject areas:  Languages and Literature, Law, Social Sciences, Economics and Business Management, Science and Technology.  In close proximity to both Italy and Switzerland, the University of Savoy has a strong record in international exchanges, with 40 international academic programmes leading to the award of joint diplomas. Digital learning support is provided to all students through a CSCW workspace (the cartable électronique) developed at the University and licensed to other educational institutions in the region. The university’s Institute for French Studies is responsible for providing intensive pre-sessional training in French for incoming foreign students, and for running extensive courses in French as a foreign language throughout the year. The Languages Research Group is attached to the university’s largest faculty, the Faculty of Arts, Languages and Social Sciences, and is one of the three research groups composing an interdisciplinary research centre in Languages Literature and Society.

Specific Tasks in WebCEF

The Université de Savoie will be responsible for managing the creation and collection of audio and video samples of oral language skills. They will coordinate the process in the different partner institutions and provide a database with the samples collected during the process. They will work together with the Open University to ensure that partners adhere to certain technical standards while creating their samples. The Université de Savoie will play a key role in the project, as a central contact point regarding the WebCEF samples for all partners institutions.
The Université de Savoie will also participate in providing and collecting audio and video samples of oral language skills for English and French as a foreign language. It will also take part in the community of practice and disseminate the project results in its national networks of schools and higher education institutions. 

Expertise of the institution in the field covered by the project

The Languages Research Group will be involved most closely in the linguistic and didactic areas covered by the WebCEF project: (a) foreign language education and didactics, (b) the Common European Framework and most particularly (c) modes of evaluation and assessment.

1. The Languages Research Group has extensive experience in teaching and teacher training. Within the university, there are two Masters programmes attached to the research group: one in Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching and one in Teaching French as a Foreign Language.  Outside the university, members of the group participate in the initial and in-service training of language teachers for French secondary schools. Over the past 15 years, they have also been heavily involved in traditional and multimedia materials production for language learning in secondary, higher and continuing education.
2. In French higher education, language assessment modeled on the Common European Framework is implemented through the Certificat de Compétence en Langues de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CLES). In association with the University of Grenoble, the University of Savoy was one of the pilot universities for introducing this certification in France, and is an exam centre for the CLES in English, German, Spanish and Italian. It is also responsible for authoring national test materials for CLES level 1 (= CEF B1) in Italian. Through the Institute for French Studies, the university prepares and examines foreign students for the DELF and DALF.
3. The main expertise of the Languages Research Group is in the sampling and analysis of the oral production of L2 learners. The group is currently compiling the PAROLE corpus (PARallèle, Oral, en Langue Etrangère), consisting of recorded, transcribed and annotated samples of productions from learners of French, English and Italian at various levels of proficiency. These data are complemented by a battery of tests chosen to measure other aspects of the learners’ language aptitude (vocabulary size, grammatical aptitude, oral comprehension skills, etc.)