Comme on dit, a comprehensive first-year French textbook program, engages students in the learning process from day one using an inductive methodology centered on guided observation and rule discovery. Together with students' communicative needs and an analysis of their most pervasive transfer errors from English, the everyday speech patterns of 100 native speakers--culled from 150 hours of unscripted recordings--form the linguistic backbone of the method. Using a workbook format, students examine, compare, and contrast this wide variety of authentic discourse to discover both individual and shared language use and cultural perspectives. Additionally, students systematically and progressively acquire the fundamental sounds and rhythmic patterns of spoken French, which leads them to develop solid pronunciation and conversational fluency as well as notable listening comprehension skills. To aid instructors in effectively implementing this distinctive approach, the Teacher's Edition textbook comes with answers for all activities, plus teaching notes in the margins and extensive ancillary resources online. By the end of one academic year, students with no prior French instruction can expect to achieve Intermediate-Mid to Intermediate-High proficiency on the ACTFL scale.
Features of Comme on dit:
- Emphasis on providing students with the tools and skills to help them communicate early on about topics relevant to them and their daily lives- Equal focus on all four major skill areas--reading, writing, listening, and speaking--and on the establishment of a solid grammatical and lexical foundation- Over 1,000 audio and video files, giving students ample material to practice listening to French as it is spoken by native speakers- Over 250 snippets of written authentic discourse, ranging from book titles to proverbs- Teacher's Edition textbook with answers for all activities, plus teaching notes in the margins- Extensive ancillary instructor's resources, including an instructor's manual, quizzes, sample midterm and final exams, available at CommeOnDitTextbook.com
About the Author: Claude Grangier is a senior lecturer and the French Language Coordinator at the University of Chicago. With an academic background in philosophy, she has devoted over forty years to teaching French as a foreign language, researching foreign language teaching methodology, and developing language learning materials.Nadine O'Connor Di Vito is a senior lecturer and former director of Romance Language Programs at the University of Chicago. Specializing in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, she has developed and analyzed several corpora of French spoken discourse. She is the author of Patterns Across Spoken and Written French: Empirical Research on the Interaction Among Forms, Functions, and Genres as well as numerous articles in sociolinguistics and foreign language teaching and acquisition.
