Subsidiary Research Question 4: What are students’ overall evaluations of using a

In terms of whether or not Linguee enhanced the students’ learning, this study examined confidence, motivation, strategies, and enjoyment as factors. Out of these, the students reported on the questionnaire that Linguee helped them the most with developing learning strategies. This is a positive finding, since learning strategies can help foster language awareness (Péguret, 2014), and because using learning strategies is also a non-linguistic goal advocated for by the Ontario FSL curriculum (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2013b, 2014).

Motivation to write in French also increased, but only very slightly on average. However, Demetra during her interview asserted that she “kinda got frustrated and felt like unmotivated to use [Linguee]” when the dictionary section was not present for some word and phrase searches.

This comment confirmed her questionnaire response, in which she stated that Linguee did not increase her motivation to write in French. Demetra was also the only student interviewed that expressed this feeling of frustration and a lack of motivation. This is important to note, because it is clear that motivation is a key factor in French immersion and language learning in general (MacIntyre et al., 2011). Another notable finding was the students’ awareness of collocations. This item was deleted from the questionnaire to increase the internal consistency, but I

nevertheless deemed it worth discussing, because the students overwhelmingly reported that using Linguee increased their collocational awareness (M = 5.06 out of 6). This further confirms the natural connection between concordancers and formulaic sequences, which is an area that further research could explore.

The students invariably used multiple tools to verify each other. Both Natalya and Demetra made extensive use of Word Reference to verify Linguee, while Denzel used Reverso for the same purpose.

Some students (n = 4) also did not think that Linguee was more helpful than a dictionary. Denzel was one of these students who expressed this view strongly on the questionnaire.

Paradoxically, during the interview he gave the opposite view, saying “Linguee is more resourceful than just a dictionary.” Upon following up with him on this contradiction, he had some trouble remembering, but eventually commented,

You can depend on [a dictionary], since it’s already been written to have every

translation, and then Linguee you aren’t as sure…I feel like with um a dictionary, you can like jump back and forth and kinda use itself to help, like if you’re having an issue with it, but Linguee you kinda have to come knowing a little bit of something, and I don’t

know what that something is or what I would even call it, but I feel like you have to come to Linguee knowing like something in terms of what you’re looking for.

Denzel thus seems to find a dictionary to be generally more reliable, because it is established as a trustworthy source that has a definition for every word. Referring to Linguee, he also

commented, “Either I can find what I’m looking for perfectly or I feel very lost; there’s no in- between.”

Overall, the students assessed Linguee as a positive resource for French writing. How- ever, each of the three interviewed students favoured different websites. Natalya seemed to pre- fer using Linguee. However, Denzel commented, “I recommend [Reverso] to everybody whose phone I see has Google Translate on it. I’m like, ‘delete that’ (laugh).” Denzel preferred Reverso over Linguee because it had similar functionality to Linguee, yet had additional features, includ- ing conjugation, synonyms, and grammar. In a similar manner, Demetra explained, “I would pre- fer Word Reference over Linguee, because they have like the conjoint like words, like this word can go with this word, but Linguee is just—sometimes they don’t have that, and sometimes they do.” Her main reason seems to lie in her perception that Linguee is not as consistent as Word Reference. However, Demetra explained that it was still possible to find many different catego- ries of words on Linguee, like “chunk of words” and “common ‘expression idiomatique.’”

The students all recognized that various websites had different strengths and weaknesses, with Natalya and Denzel recognizing Linguee’s utility for formulaic sequences, while Demetra concluded that Word Reference was more useful for this. Denzel commented that Linguee was “better than most translations apps I’ve used because of how it handles um like the right way to say the saying in French, like how someone’ll say it instead of just like a direct translation.” Here

Denzel demonstrates a concern for using words accurately (the “right way”), as well as an aware- ness that language cannot be translated verbatim, but that the L2 often has different forms that are completely different from the L1. He elaborates further, “When I wanna go for a one-off phrase or idiom or just one of those things, then I would go for Linguee first.” He also mentions, “[Linguee is] the one you pick when you want idioms.’” He also described his strategy for trans- lating sentences on Linguee: “I found myself often taking a sentence…and turning it into like meaning chunks…instead of translating it as a whole.” This demonstrates that he was using his analytical skills to break the sentence down into formulaic sequences, which he could then search.