The Place of School Excursions in Foreign Language Courses in Secondary Education

Abstract

The present master thesis focuses on excursions organized in the context of language courses, and more particularly, aims at examining their place in language learning and teaching in secondary education in the French-speaking part of Belgium. Many authors have pointed out that they are very beneficial to language learning from a linguistic, cultural and motivational standpoint. However, as Simons (2018–2019) and Sercu (2006) observe, most of the time those excursions are not fully integrated into the language course. This research serves two major objectives. First of all, it investigates whether language teachers integrate those out-of-class activities into the course. In addition, this study takes into consideration students’ perceptions of excursions, it aims to see whether students believe that taking part in a one-day excursion is useful to language learning, and whether they think that this type of outing is more beneficial from a cultural standpoint than from a linguistic one. In order to meet both objectives, an online survey for language teachers was conducted and nine one-day excursions were observed. The results indicate that most teachers do not involve students in the organization of the trip, but that the trip is somehow prepared and exploited in the classroom. Regarding students’ perceptions, the findings show that students believe that one-day excursions are useful to language learning but that they are more culturally than linguistically beneficial.