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Course syllabus

Medium: English

Level: Beginner

Prerequisites: Good knowledge of written English – No knowledge of French required

Course materials and Recommended readings: available online

 General Description

The purpose of this course is to teach students how to gain access to materials written in French taping into the knowledge and skills they already acquired with and through English. This course is not only focusing on language, but also on cultural and historical issues, as well as on deductive and learning autonomy skills development. Incursions into other Romance languages are also offered on the program.  

 The benefits are multiple:

1. allows a relatively quick access to documents in French  and prepare the ground for any further studies of the French language;

2. Improves knowledge of English language and vocabulary;

3. Develops deductive and learning autonomy skills in learning foreign languages;

4. Opens a window to other Romance languages with French as the transfer language;

5. Increases awareness and knowledge about European cultures and languages.

 Composition

This module is divided into two distinct UNITS taught simultaneously though separately to keep the focus on a single skill at the time  1) Reading comprehension, and 2) Reading aloud (pronunciation)

Goals

a) Skill development:

Reading comprehension Unit: Students will be able to:

Linguistic skills

- identify French, Spanish and Italian written forms

- assess the level of difficulty of a text in French

- read and understand a text chosen by them using reading strategies and intercomprehensive tools developed for this course.

Deductive skills

- develop and apply deductive skills based on French and English similarities.

- apply strategies in problem solving related to reading in a foreign language.

Autonomy learning skills

- acquire a sufficient level of (reading) autonomy to be able to continue alone with online resources after the course has ended (toward self-learning).

- organize their own reading activities/tasks as taught in class 

 Reading Aloud component: (Basic French phonology)

- allows student to identify and pronounce single French words.  

 b) knowledge acquisition:

Culture:

- Students are introduced to main linguistic, historical and cultural facts about  Western Europe and more specifically about France and England relationship.

Language:

- “Unconscious knowledge of French language” acquired through English is brought to students awareness.

- Students are exposed to induced grammar of French in an intercomprehensive context.


Content and methodology

25 hours of practical tutorials directed in series:

The 1st series concentrate on knowledge and transfer process  from English to French

The 2nd series focuses on the autonomy acquisition process in reading.

 The Reading Aloud element starts as a separate activity (1hr for reading comprehension and 1/2hr for reading aloud) during the first series to finally be partially integrated to the reading comprehension element during the second series.

 A combination of methods:

- Inter-comprehension based methods developed in the EU for Related languages that are applied to the case of English and French languages, with English as the transfer language toward French. The course relies on the knowledge/skills students are already familiar with, though unaware of.

- Reading strategies such as Deductive Reasoning, Mind Mapping, Active Reading, Pre-reading Steps, Questioning …

- Translation strategies such as Literal Translation, Transposition... and Techniques specific to French to English translation exercises (passive voice, comparison...)

 Personal study: (10 hours minimum) through exercises and reading assignments.

 Assessment

Reading Comprehension: For the reading comprehension part, students should be able to interpret the main aspects of a text in French based on deductive and inter-comprehensive methods.

Reading Aloud: For the oral part, they should be able to pronounce and read aloud French words from texts studied in class.

Assessment will be carried out through the evaluation of students’ personal portfolio in which students are asked to keep their completed exercises, personal readings and translation works all through the course. A continuous submission of work is strongly recommended.

 
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