CHAPTER 3. This study 45 bridge the gap between research and classroom practice and to generate implications for actual classroom teaching practices. High ecological validity can only be obtained by examining and targeting actual teaching programs which are used in actual schools with actual students in actual classrooms, and which consist of numerous multi-faceted activities, planned and unplanned, in response to the need of students. In other words, a nal challenge in this study was trying to overcome the apparent incompatibility of ensuring high ecological validity of the study while at the same time ensuring experimental control. METHODOLOGICAL DESIGN AND SET-UP is dissertation consists of a number of sub studies that all collectively aim to shed light on the long-term e ects of two types of CLT practices of French in the Netherlands: a weaker SB method and a strong DUB approach. Even though each sub study has its own unique underlying methodology, we here present a general overview of the participants, the two teaching methods, and the types of tests that formed the basis of the current investigation. PARTICIPANTS Participants were 17- to 18-year-old students in ve cohorts in their nal year at a Dutch secondary school in the north of the Netherlands. All participants had a high scholastic aptitude, as they had been selected for the Dutch VWO (pre-university education). e rst two cohorts consisted of 55 students in total, who had all started secondary school in either 2009 or 2010 and had followed a traditional SB L2 French teaching program in all six years. ey took their nal exams in 2015 and 2016, a er six years of their pre-university secondary schooling. e other three cohorts consisted of 78 students in total, who had all started to learn L2 French in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and had followed a DUB L2 French teaching program throughout their six years of secondary school. ey took their nal exams in 2017, 2018 and 2019. As in the Netherlands speakers are rarely exposed to French in their everyday lives, and students were unlikely to have had any relevant exposure before starting French in secondary school, a pretest was not carried out, as all students were absolute novice learners. During the six-year program, too, they were unlikely to be exposed to French outside of class (except for their homework assignments) and extramural exposure was not taken into account. In other words, the student cohorts were similar in their starting level, hours of French classes as well as outof-class exposure, with the main di erence being their method of language instruction. Table 4 below details the di erent cohorts that formed the basis of our investigation. It should be noted that the teacher (who was also the researcher) was kept constant across all cohorts and conditions.
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