Map enthusiast Eric Fischer has shared a wonderful language-mapping image via his Flickr stream. It is a map of Twitter use by language. There is some overlap in color key, so you have to deduce whether Twitter users are using…
Images Postcards from the Bowman Gray Collection at the University of North Carolina You can browse by country, name, or subject (includes photos and many caricatures as well, like the one on the left). Photos from the French site 1914-1918.fr. Texts…
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…
It was in a graduate course on advanced French grammar topics that I had an ahha! moment: one of the most simple and easy exercises to create to improve writing is to closely study and reword sentences that students have…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…