French

This workshop for advanced level students (C1 and C2) offers a framework, space, and means to approach creative writing in French. In a relaxed environment, the workshop provides an opportunity to discover authors in touch with the current world, express sensitivity, and exchange ideas about French literature, particularly contemporary literature. The workshop consists of exploring various authors and genres to find one’s personal style and voice in French; story writing; cinematographic, theatrical, radio, and poetic writing. Linguistically, students develop the ability to characterize, in writing, the multiple descriptions (places, characters, emotions) contained in their productions; orally contextualize and justify the choices made in their writing; question texts and authors with delicacy and subtlety; and express feelings. The workshop provides an opportunity to reflect on one’s relationship to writing (pleasure, anxiety, necessity) as well as one’s relationship to writing in a language that is not one’s mother tongue (frustrations, freedom of expression).

Crises such as the German Occupation, the Algerian War of Independence, and the strikes and riots of May 1968 sent shock waves through French society that sooner or later found their way into literature and film. This course examines how French writers and filmmakers responded to some of the major upheavals of mid- to late 20th century France. The course explores the following questions: How do writers and filmmakers seek to remember events that many would rather forget? What is the relationship between individual and collective memory? How might writing and film give expression to crises of personal and national identity? Previous experience of literary analysis is not required but is an advantage. All texts are studied in translation.

This writing course is dedicated to the understanding of French texts and learning new French vocabulary, as well as acquiring basic grammar rules.

This course is comprised of three parts: conversation, monologue production, and discussion and monologue comprehension. The conversation section encourages students to converse and articulate ideas in French with the help of the teacher and audio text. The monologue production part of the course focuses on discerning and replicating proper French sounds. And finally, in the discussion and monologue comprehension section, students practice both French comprehension and French discussion.

This course focuses on beginning French writing. Students are expected to produce written texts using the new vocabulary and grammar structure they learned in the oral comprehension class.

This course in oral production is intended to improve engagement in conversations through the practice of pronunciation and through the expansion of vocabulary. It includes an approach to phonetics.

The second semester of first-year elementary French, covers basic grammar, sentence structures, listening comprehension and conversational skills. With "Amical 1" as the textbook, this course starts from Lesson 13 and ends at Lesson 24. Homework includes translation assignments, grammar exercises, compositions and others. There are three major unit exams and quizzes in class.

This course explores how space is navigated in the modern novel. It focuses on Kafka’s LE CHATEAU, which describes various types of places (roads, bridges, inns, walls, corridors) and disturbed perceptions of space-time, to see how literature places the modern subject in the wide world. The course considers the difference between places and spaces: physical and geographical space, private and public space, foreignness and strangeness, borders and limits, cultivated and uncultivated. It observes how a text, narrative or descriptive, constructs a space and the symbolic role it can give it.