“Paul Seedhouse, professor of education and applied linguistics at Newcastle University, is the brains behind the French Digital Kitchen, a learning site that teaches its users aspects of the French language while they prepare dishes from the country.”
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This is exciting news for someone who is interested to learn French. We have discussed on some of our posted articles in this blog site that learning French is not limited in language schools only. Even the French terms “in the kitchen” can be used as ways to let learners enjoy their French language learning. Right now, news has proved through Paul Seedhouse that indeed, a learner can get in touch with French language when they get in touch with the kitchen aspect of learning.
According to Seedhouse, the core intention of the French Digital Kitchen was not really intended for French language learning on the first place. It was to help people who are suffering from dementia. He started working with the project a computer scientist named Professor Patrick Olivier who developed the innovation. As he went along, the idea turned out to become useful for foreign language learning and teaching.
He said, “We’ve now adapted his existing technology into a language-teaching kitchen of our own. It tackles the fundamental problems you have when learning a language. In a classroom you’re only rehearsing it; the kitchen means that people can learn language while they’re performing a real-world task, and also produce something tasty at the end of it. You’re learning to cook a foreign dish at the same time as learning a language.” Pretty exciting indeed, isn’t it?
Seedhouse emphasized that in learning French language, it is best learned when the learner is engaged in physical task, “performing something tangible rather than the way we traditionally think of foreign languages being taught in a classroom, where the teacher tells you how to put a sentence together.” It’s not terribly motivating for most people, he added. “It’s not something physically real. Whereas the kitchen, in effect, it’s taking task-based learning out of the classroom and into the kitchen. You’re engaging in a real-world task. That’s the innovation.”
In your own opinion, to do you think such learning method is greatly applicable for specific French language learning? Feel free to express your insights.