Student Experience

Portails 2.0 Introductory French offers a contextualized learning experience and is designed to keep students engaged every step of the way.

Student Learning Progression

Portails is unique in the organization and delivery of lesson content. Each color-coded strand features a learning progression that contextualizes the learning experience for students by breaking lesson content into comprehensible, manageable portions.

Portails guides students through the active learning steps that are required to learn a new language and provides a strong foundation for communicative language development in a class setting.

Tools that Strengthen Students’ Language Skills

Speech Recognition identifies student utterances in real-time and objectively determines whether a student knows the word—increasing student awareness of pronunciation. Speech recognition provides students with immediate feedback on their pronunciation, giving them more confidence to speak in the target language during class.

Speech Recognition helps students focus their time on the words they need to learn, for more efficient study and faster learning.

Interactive pronunciation tutorials require students to engage with the material via interactive quick-checks throughout each tutorial.

Embedded in the Vocabulary Tutorials, Listen and Repeat requires students to repeat the word or expression aloud and gives feedback on the production of longer phrases.

Building Confidence and Proficiency

Students want to be able to communicate with others in their new language, to have meaningful and productive—not perfect—conversations. As a result, they need frequent and varied opportunities to engage in interpersonal communication activities in their learned language.

Portails offers a wealth of communication tools—Partner Chat, Video Virtual Chat, and the new Group Chat—that help students lower their affective filter while providing meaningful opportunities for self-expression in authentic, real-life contexts.

Comprehensive Videos Programs Build Student Confidence

The Portails video collection offers a myriad of media and video content types:

The new Roman-photo video series presents the adventures of a group of friends in Paris, France as they experience the cultural products, practices, and perspectives of the French-speaking world, as well as the highs and lows of everyday life.
Le Zapping presents authentic clips from the francophone world connected to the vocabulary and themes of the unit. These clips include TV commercials, newscasts and short films.
Flash culture videos feature two young francophone hosts sharing aspects of life related to each unit’s theme. These segments provide valuable cultural insights as well as linguistic input, while introducing students to a variety of accents and vocabulary.
Panorama culturel videos provide authentic visuals and voice-over narration for select paragraphs on every Panorama spread.

The different video inputs found in Portails provide unique accents, discourse, and points of view from of the francophone world.

Diagnostics

Student diagnostics found throughout Portails provide with opportunities to review the vocabulary or grammar in the lesson, in order to focus study time on challenging topics.

Évaluation personnelle is a self-check activity that provides students with low-stakes diagnostic opportunities for vocabulary and each grammar point.

Épreuve diagnostique is a multi-question practice test that provides students with a low-stakes opportunity for assessing their knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar points covered in each lesson.

Personalized Study Plan highlights areas where students need additional support and recommends remediation activities for completion prior to the lesson test.