French Archive

My project addresses issues with composition in the second-year French language program. In response to concerns voiced in surveys by students and instructors, I designed four units and suggested lesson plans. The first provides color-coding analysis of sample essays, allowing students to visualize and parse the elements of an essay. The second unit walks the…

Speech and Thought Presentation in French Sophie Marnette, University of Oxford, Medieval French Studies Dr. Marnette will offer a brief overview of her work on Speech and Thought Presentation in French.  More particularly, it will highlight and discuss hybrid forms of reported discourse that can be found in press articles and day to day conversations.…

My colleague, Vesna Rodic, and I attended the Rocky Mountain Language Association’s 68th annual convention in Boise, Idaho from October 8 - 11.  I have been participating in the conference for several years now and, without exception, always come away reinvigorated and full of new ideas.  As a Senior Lecturer with limited university funding options,…

Recent scholarship has proposed a pedagogy of multiliteracies to frame FL curricula and instruction, and encourage critical reflection about language use through a variety of discourses and textual genres. One pedagogical framework conducive to fostering learners’ intersemiotic awareness is Global Simulation (GS)...

SLA research on foreign language pedagogy has long demonstrated that culture is essential to language learning. However, presenting culture in the language classroom poses certain problems. For learners, there is a tendency to stereotype others and to rely excessively on the teacher. For teachers, there is a tendency to transmit isolated facts without elaboration and to associate a target language with a single monolithic culture. This article...

Researchers have voiced concerns about current teaching practices regarding the effective integration of culture within the foreign language curriculum as more than an add-on (Durocher, 2007; Knutson, 2006; Kramsch, 1993; Magnan, 2008; Omaggio Hadley, 2001; Perraudin, & Porfilio, 2011; Schulz, 2007; Wilbur, 2007). This study takes an emic perpective to explore ...

The MLA Report (2007) accords considerable weight to the role of culture in a transformed approach to language education in the U.S. and outlines “one possible model” for developing transcultural understanding that involves the interpretation of the “cultural narratives” inherent ...

While history as critical discourse differs importantly from the more subjective narratives of collective memory, even historians vary in their accounts and analyses of past events. This article argues for the need to include a spectrum of voices and text types when teaching history in the context of foreign language study...

In Fall 2005, widespread riots shook France. Was Paris really burning? What actually did happen in France that fall? If the “social unrest,” as it was called was symptomatic of serious social and political issues in France, it was largely misconstrued in some American media outlets ...

The purpose of this study was to assess whether the well-documented paucity of object clitics in L2 French production reflects difficulties learners have comprehending these forms in classroom input. To this end, an aural French-English translation task was used to determine the extent ...