Michel Fugain’s 1972 song “Une Belle Histoire” has become a classic ballad of summer vacation, travel, and youth. The musical style is pretty dated, but that only adds to the kitchy fun of the song. It also happens to use several forms of the past tense, so I created one of my signature fill-in-the-blanks...Read more »
Le Cadavre exquis is a surrealist game the group invented in the 1920s. To play, one person writes a word or sentence on a piece of paper and then folds the paper to hide his contribution and then passes it to the next player. He does the same, then passes the paper, and so...Read more »
Many instructors of French shy away from literary analysis in elementary and intermediate language classes. To be sure, discussion of literary theory can be difficult even in advanced courses. It can be daunting to aim to read texts and analyse them when even the basic verb tenses are still unclear. But it is important...Read more »
Most students will recognize the melody of “Comme d’habitude” because it is that of “My Way,” but few will know that the song made famous by Sinatra is actually a remake of the French song by Claude François. The original song shares no lyrical content with the English version: it’s a song about one...Read more »
Need a quick activity idea to get students speaking to each other? Bonus if the activity is a quick review of some grammatical terms? Enter Mad Libs, that fill-in-the-blanks game that most students will be familiar with from their childhood. Mad Libs has seen a recent comeback among adults and I’ve even spotted them...Read more »
You can use any French song to create some sort of grammar, vocabulary, or culture lesson. The song “Octobre” by Francis Cabrel lends itself particularly well to a review of the futur simple. About half of the lines of the text contain a verb in the future, and many of them are irregular. The...Read more »
Digging through some course materials that have been handed down to me, I came across Alphonse Daudet’s short story La Dernière classe. As is the case with most any short story from the 19th century, this is a great text to use to identify the common literary uses of the past tense (imparfait vs....Read more »
