Data Science Institute

A native of France, Stéphanie Gaillard was educated at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne where she received a B.A. in French Linguistics and an M.A. in Teaching French as a Second Language. A Fulbright Teaching Grant brought her to the US in 2008. Subsequently she enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she received her Ph.D. in French and Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education in 2014. She taught and coordinated French courses at Louisiana State University, at the École Supérieure de Commerce (ESC) in Troyes, France, and at the University of California at San Diego before coming to Brown in 2021.

At Brown, as a lecturer in the Department of French and Francophone Studies, she teaches French language courses ranging from novice (FREN 0100:  Basic French I) to intermediate-high (FREN 0500:  Reading & Writing French I). She also co-coordinates the language program and serves as supervisor and mentor of Teaching Assistants and Visiting Teaching Associates. With the help of a French Embassy Grant she has implemented a new DELF testing center at Brown University, which she now coordinates. This center provides certification for language proficiency levels in accordance with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). 

Trained as an applied linguist, Stéphanie Gaillard has a passion for teaching French as a second language and a special interest and expertise in language assessment. She is active in professional organizations, especially the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL) and the College Board’s AP Program for French Language and Culture. 

How does your research, teaching, or other work relate to data or computational science?

As a trained applied linguist and language educator, I see many connections between the beauty of teaching and learning a complex system that is human language and the large domain that data science encapsulates. Presented simply, “data” refers to “information”, and when we know how to elicit, collect, and interpret it meaningfully, we better perceive the world and understand which direction to take to achieve higher goals that will benefit our community. In our case at Brown, it helps us to become better educators. 

As a language tester, I am especially interested in the construct of language proficiency and how to guide our students – and novice teachers – in understanding its framing (in the U.S. and Europe). Additionally, teaching within the framework of multiliteracies pedagogy, in which the variety of chosen texts has an important impact on curriculum design and lesson planning creation, I am highly enthusiastic at the project of creating an interactive tool which would illustrate how language proficiency can be visualized as a multi-faceted representation (e.g., continuum/mind maps/radar chart, etc.). Creating such visuals can help tremendously any language learner to better understand how much they’ve achieved so far in their language learning journey and where they stand in terms of language proficiency. More specifically, it would tell them which communicative situation/linguistic functions they have mastered [i.e., (1) communicate minimally, (2) create with language, (3) narrate, describe and deal effectively with an unanticipated complication, (4) discuss extensively, support opinion, hypothesize and deal with topics abstractly] so that they know on which aspect(s) to focus on to improve in the most relevant situations of communication.

On a more philosophical side, I am passionate about the construct of “feedback”. Looking semantically at this word, I interpret it as follows: “feed” provides meaningful information (that will help learners to progress), and “back” (as I read it thanks to French author Stéphane Moriou) as a way to nourish in return whoever will receive the information provided. It allows the individual to grow. In other words, “feedback” – when provided properly – is a positive mechanism that allows any individual to flourish and become a better person on many different levels.