Patrick Weil, a research fellow at the CNRS and also a former professor of mine, has just published an essay entitled Etre français, les quatre piliers de la nationalité (Editions de l’Aube, January 2011). Although I haven’t yet had the chance to read it, an abstract describes his conjecture that French nationality is based...Read more »
Welcome to a new semester! I’m teaching a civilization class this spring and thought I’d share some of the ideas I’m using for course material. In this post I talked about using Gallica to find primary sources, and used the example of a geography text book to demonstrate the process. As an introduction to...Read more »
One difficult aspect of teaching grammar is the disjointed impression given by a series of grammar lessons: when going over the difference between the gerond and the infinitive, for example, we tend to give students a long series of sample sentences showing when one form is used rather than the other. When talking about...Read more »
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 »
Using crossword puzzles in the classroom can run the risk of seeming too juvenile. I picked up a couple of crossword vocabulary books in Paris and admittedly, their target audience is probably around the age of ten or twelve, with cartoon illustrations and very basic topics (safari animals, going to the movies, etc.) But as...Read more »
Because of its striking cinematographic effects (black and white film, dramatic close-ups, soundtrack…) and engaging storyline, Patrice Leconte’s La fille sur le pont (1999) offers a rich source of material to analyse in an assignment on writing a compte rendu critique. We are watching the film in class, in parts, as I try to...Read more »
Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style (1947) is a useful and engaging text to use in an intermediate language or writing classes. Students at both levels seem to enjoy delving into Queneau’s project – that is, to tell the same story in 99 different ways. It is an example of “contrainte littéraire” – the technique of...Read more »
Literature from outside of metropolitan France is finding an expanding presence in undergraduate French courses, freeing students from the idea that the great works of French literature must only come from France (or Paris). The incorporation of francophone literature into survey courses has been a valuable addition to presenting the broader role of the...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 »
What student of 19th-century literature doesn’t remember the striking portrayal of the young Charles Bovary that begins Flaubert’s 1857 novel? The opening passage – which depicts the child as an awkward “nouveau” joining a class of students younger than him – is particularly illustrative of Flaubert’s specific realist endeavor to portray meaning through description....Read more »
