<p>My D will be a junior next year at a public HS, with a very, very dull French teacher. Next year will be her third year of French with this teacher and it's painful--but this is the only French teacher at the school. As it stands, D would have to give up a music elective (music is her passion and will likely be her major in college) in order to keep up with French...which she needs for college. But she has an amazing voice teacher and I hate to see her lose that when the French is so bad. She's going to ask her guidance counselor if she could possibly take French online so she can continue with music at school. Do you know anyone who has done this kind of online study and if so, can you recommend a course? And do you know whether it's possible to do such a thing for credit (she'll have plenty of credit to graduate, but I mean to show a college she has had the requisite study of language.)? Thank you!</p>
<p>Can she take a college extension class or a community college class instead? Either during the school year or during the summer. The most important aspect of language study for a vocalist is her diction and that can hardly be studied effectively online.</p>
<p>Check out the website of Keystone National High School. Maybe it would be useful for your D. I found their German course very comprehensive. I don’t know how good their French course is. You can try it out. If you don’t like it, I think you can cancel it within certain time and get a full refund. Good Luck.</p>
<p>My son did Spanish online. It was great, and it was through the online campus of our public school. Out of county residents can also take the course, for a fee, although because there are several in-person meetings required that would be impractical from far away. There was a lot of listening to audio files and creating and sending audio files to be corrected involved. The teacher claimed that her online students got a lot more correction for their pronunciation than she could ever give in a class setting with 25 students.
We also arranged and paid for our own tutor once a week, and all they did was basically have an hour long conversation. Not because he was doing badly (to the contrary!), but because we wanted him to have the opportunity to see the language spoken, and get the experience of speaking in a conversational cadence.</p>
<p>One caveat:
Online study requires either a self-disciplined, self-motivated student or a parent willing to be involved in creating structure. However, if the alternative is going back into a bad teacher’s class, that might be plenty of motivation :)</p>
<p>Thanks so much everyone-- I will check with her guidance counselor and see whether the school will allow it. She’s very motivated – geomom the one your son took sounds perfect with all the participation and I’ll keep the oral piece in mind as I check out the others. (This teacher barely lets them speak, so it can’t get much worse!)</p>
<p>Just another point of consideration to the suggestion about community colleges or extension classes. Depending on the state, additional weight might come with a good grade from a community college. IIRC, in some states, schools award 4.25 or 4.50 to an A grade received in a CC course. Regardless, it would be a good question to ask even to know how a school will rank an on-line course and whether it varies depending on the group providing the on-line content.</p>
<p>My daughter did a year of French online (also because of bad French teacher in high school) through Empire State University, a distance-learning branch of the State University of NY. She got college credit and the courses were very good _ “live classrooms” for conversation, teachers all native speakers, and it was completely structured with specified log-on times twice every week. It wasn’t cheap, I think over $800 per semester not counting materials, but each semester was 4 college credits. I don’t know if non-New Yorkers pay more.</p>
<p>If she self-studied and took the French SATII that would certainly show the colleges the mastery of the material. Some colleges allow placing out of language requirements for achieving a certain SATII score – the score required depends on the college.</p>
<p>I have been struggling with commenting on this because I am fluently bilingual English/French as is my D. I think Lisa58 hit the nail on the head by suggesting your D take college level courses as they would count as credits for sure. The eLyce</p>