I was living in France in 1999-2000 when the millennium was all the rage. On the occasion of the turn of the new century (yes, a year early), I picked up a copy of a compilation CD called Les plus grandes chansons du siècle. I still have it and indeed, it has many classics, one...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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
