Paris, France - Course Descriptions - Superior French

Course Information

Contact Hours and Credits

Availability

Full Description

This superior French course helps students perfect their language ability.  Ten hours per week are devoted to grammar, verb conjugation, spelling, vocabulary, approach to literary texts, written and spoken expression.  The texts used in this course have been developed by the faculty at the Sorbonne and all reading materials are focused on French culture.  This is the same for conversation topics as well.  There will be regular evaluation of work and progress, as well as a final exam (written and oral). This class is suitable for students with little or no previous French instruction.

Audience

This class is aimed at non-French-speaking young adults and adults who had already taken FLE courses of 400 hours or so and who wish to follow up the superior studies in France, to live and/or work in France.

Format

Cours Pratique/French Language: 120 hours (2 hours per day from Monday through Friday)
Phonetic class: 27 hours (1 hour per day from Monday through Friday every other week)
These classes prepare to the CCFS French Language Diploma/Certificate.

Goals

The training aims at enabling the learners to acquire a fluency and efficiency in elementary level of communication in French, to enable the learner to understand and to express themselves, orally and written, in daily life situations.

The training is centered upon:

• Oral and written comprehension of long and complex texts (concrete or abstract topics from miscellaneous sources) and the capacity to summarize them in a logical way.
• Oral and writing communication in complex situations concerning all fields of life and society: expressing one's opinion on miscellaneous topics, identification and mastering of affective, allusive and humoristic styles as well as implicit significations, the use of the language in a clear and accurate manner in social or professional relations while adapting to the addressee with efficiency.
• The improvement of writing and oral production with the mastering of elaborated grammatical structures and argumentative techniques.
• The learning of a wide vocabulary repertoire and the use of periphrasis in case of loopholes.
• The literary corpus familiarizes the students with a range of great texts and initiate them to the reading and critical analysis.

 Teaching Approach

Communicative approach centered on the improvement of the language structures. The grammatical axe is favored to develop the four skills.

Overall Assessment

• Continuous assessment 20%: tests in class (grammar questions, dictations, written and oral exercises, written and oral comprehension)
• Final exam 80%:

1. Written part 40%: grammar questions (20%), written comprehension (10%), written expression (10%)
2. Oral part 40%: individual oral test (10%), detailed comprehension on an oral document (10%) and a phonetic grade (continuous assessment 20%)

 Teaching Materials

• Handbook as one chooses (Activités pour le cadre européen commun de reference C1- C2/ Clé international suggéré)
• Authentic documents (sound, visual and writings)
• Eight to ten texts extracted from the "Anthologie de literature française" (Belin), four texts would be used for the individual final oral exam
• Four literary texts on a biannual theme for the individual final oral exam
• Literary history: chronology of major literary events, author biographies
• Exercises book (advised: 350 exercises Niveau supérieur II, Hachette) and exercises created by the professor
• Books about grammar and stylistic
• Phonetic improvement elaborated by applied linguistics (linguistique appliqué) teachers

Communicative Goals (oral and writing skills)

• Describe and comment fluently social behaviors
• Explaining ideas and one's point of view clearly in a well-constructed speech and without any hesitation (showing the mastering of structures and connectives)
• Emphasize the information
• Criticizing and judging
• To be able to mobilize/call up the attention of the audience, to flashback and rephrase if necessary
• Analyzing and comparing literary texts or press articles: appreciate the style
• Summarize and analyze in an argumentative way: comparing the different argumentative styles
• Writing elaborated texts in an efficient style with a logical structure in order to emphasize the main points
• Make synthesis of texts (critical speech and enhansive speech)
• Analyze texts (on semantic, sociologic and cultural plans with the differentiation of explicit and implicit meanings)
• Argue (shaping the arguments) and deduce.
• Introduction of a literary analysis: situate the texts in a socio-historical context and comment them.

Activities linked to those targets:

Oral

• Spontaneous and directed exercises: presentations, oral answers to questions
• Interaction: conversation, debates, role plays
• Comprehension: documents read by the teacher and/or the student (poems, literary texts, press articles), or listening comprehension (authentic audio documents or extracted from any handbook)
• Dictations

Oral Assessment 

• Exercises and interaction: quality of participation and exercises (understanding the instructions, global skills, appropriate vocabulary, phonetic correction). Checking of the fluency, fullness of the vocabulary, the use of the shunning strategies, and coherency of the speech.
• Comprehension: checking on the global comprehension or a detailed sonorous document according to lexical targets (discovery, recognizing, hypothesis on the meaning), linguistics (structural spotting), socio-cultural (language levels, civilization), strategies (taking notes, arguing acknowledgement), stylistic.

Writing

• Exercises: written exercises (appropriation of grammatical points and reusing of the thematic vocabulary while taking in account the synonymy, antonymy, homonymy, paronymy and the shaping of words), rewriting, transposition, essays, commentary, work plan/project, letters/mails, summaries, synthesis notes.
• Blank exercises, reusing exercises, questions- answers, substitution exercises 
• Comprehension: work on authentic or semi-authentic documents read in group or individually,
• Exercises of written comprehension from the textbook (Multiple questions and answers to fully write)
• Exercises of literal meaning comprehension from a textbook (multiple choices exercises to write) semantic study of literary vocabulary texts, synthesis of knowledge.

Written Assessment

• Exercises: checking of the comprehension of the instructions, spelling and morphosyntaxic correction global skills, coherency (integration of secondary arguments, justifying and adapted examples), relevance of the vocabulary.
• Comprehension: checking of the comprehension (global and/or detailed) and the interpretation of the document's information and analysis and critics.

Grammar

• Reviewing of nouns

   

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