Bienvenue!
Learning French today is an exciting opportunity to expand the horizons of your mind. Becoming an Intercultural Citizen involves learning about others, their lands, their cultures, their language. Now more than ever before we have the tools to facilitate our experience of other places and peoples: the internet, language apps, YouTube, our resources are limitless!
I invite you to join us to learn French, a language that expands the world over, spoken on every continent, with the promise that you will gain more than just linguistic facility. You will also find yourself engaging in new adventures on many, many levels. Lessons in each chapter are student-curated and tasks designed to be meaningful for students while couched in authentic communicative situations.
Objectives and Student Outcomes
This textbook is designed and organized according the standards set the by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). We will be exercising Interpersonal, Interpretive and Presentational communication to achieve a level of Novice-Mid Proficiency. The World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages include five goal areas, the “5 C’s”. Specific student learning objectives are detailed in each module of the course.
- Communication (Interpretive, Interpersonal, Presentational),
- Cultures (including examining the products, practices and perspectives of the francophone cultures),
- Connections to others,
- Comparisons with our own culture, and
- Communities of meaning.
So, bienvenue à bord et Bon Voyage!
Within the textbook and the accompanying workbook are learning exercises to practice these catagories crucial to developing proficiency in French for the Novice learner.
Your goals at the Novice level are to be able to accomplish certain activities, and say at the end of each chapter:
- I can identify the general topic and some basic information in both very familiar and everyday contexts by recognizing practiced or memorized words, phrases, and simple sentences in texts that are spoken or written.
- I can communicate in spontaneous spoken or written conversations on both very familiar and everyday topics, using a variety of practiced or memorized words, phrases, simple sentences, and questions.
- I can present information on both very familiar and everyday topics using a variety of practiced or memorized words, phrases, and simple sentences through spoken and written language.
- In my own and other cultures, I can identify products and practices to help me understand perspectives.
- I can interact at a survival level in some familiar everyday contexts.
Credits
In the spirit of share and share alike, we have liberally borrowed and adapted from multiple OER sources, including the very fine series of four lower level course texts Le Français inclusif, Gretchen Angelo’s seminal OER text Liberté, TV5 Monde’s wonderful variety of materials, and Alexa’s Learning French video series, among many others. Un très grand merci!
