This semester, my job consists of teaching a phonetics class to all the first-year (L1) students in the Langues Étrangères Appliquées (LEA - applied foreign languages) department. LEA students select a language pair to study and every pair includes English. The other languages are Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese. So I have all the L1s in the department. All 350 of them.
In the fall semester, they all take 1 hour per week of a "practical work" lab class in the language lab. It's your pretty basic headphone + recording, listen + repeat class to work on pronunciation. All the lessons are already fixed and prepared for me, I just have to "administer" them to the students. I hand out the lesson for the week, tell them to put on their headphones and press play on the computer. And I do this 21 times each week.
I work Monday-Thursday and have five groups every day and six on Mondays. The group sizes are about 15 students but I have one absurdly huge group of 29 and another big one of 23 or so. So every week, each group does the same lesson. And I get to listen to it 21 times. It's exhausting.
Fortunately nearly all the students are friendly and respectful. And most of them seem to be giving good effort to their spoken English. The range of ability is really quite staggering, from almost fluent-sounding students to others who struggle to put together a very basic sentence.
So far, though, so good. And after this week, I get a week off for the Toussaint holiday! Gotta love France!
I share a little office with two other lecteurs and with a Ph.D. student.
Here's the lab where I have all but one of my classes. It's nice, new and big (too big!) but the layout is rather awkward.
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