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Syllabus: Syllabus Page for French 313
Activités orales et écrites: Correlation of oral and written activities in textbook and workbook.
Required Texts and Materials:
Interaction: Textbook (Heinle and Heinle; 5th edition)
Interaction: Workbook/Lab Manual
The textbook comes with the Student CD-Rom with listening comprehension and pronunciation exercises.
Jacqueline Morton, English Grammar for Students of French (3rd Edition)
A good bilingual, French/English-English/French Dictionary: either Harrap's or Larousse. These dictionaries are available in paperback.
All books are available in the CSI Bookstore.
A note on the materials:
In addition to the required materials, you will have at your disposal in the lab the Reading Assistant and Lab Audio CD-Roms that accompany Interaction as well as the video programs. The Lab Audio CD's are for use with your Workbook. One of the attractive features of Interaction is that all the Workbook exercises come with an answer key--allowing you to work at your own pace to reinforce the vocabulary, grammar, and communicative structures for each chapter through oral/aural and written exercises. The progress you make will be directly related to the work you do with the Workbook exercises. There is a strong possibility that those exercises will somehow find their way into various quizzes and exams that you will be taking.
Policies, Requirements and Grading:
Attendance Policy:
Instructors are required by New York State law to keep an official record of class attendance. Since much of your grade is based on your in-class performance (in addition to lab work, homework, quizzes, etc.), any student absent in excess of 4 fifty-minute sessions will be assigned a grade of either WU (if the student disappears from the class) or an F (if there is work missing or performance is poor), at the discretion of the instructor.
Absences can only lower your fnal grade. There are no extra rewards for being present in class.
Lateness will be calculated accordingly: two latenesses equal one absence. No make-ups are permitted for either quizzes or homeworks. Absence from the mid-term exam requires a doctor's note. Students who are absent from the final exam who produce proper documentation (and if they are doing passing work) will receive a grade of I. Failure to adhere to the above procedures will result in a grade of F.
A Note on Required Work:
Absence from class does NOT excuse you from any work that is due or exams given on the day of your return. You should make sure that you have the phone number of at least one other person in the class so that you can find out wht was missed. You will note as well that you have my office phone and e-mail addresses. There is no excuse for coming to class and saying that you didn't know what was due!
Grading:
Homework, Lab Work, Projects: 30%
Participation/Progress: 15%
Mid-Term Exam: 20%
Final Exam: 20%
Quizzes: 15%
Student Responsibilities:
This syllabus should be considered your contract with your instructor for the course of the semester. Read all the instructions carefully as you will be held responsible for knowing what is expected of you. You should expect to come to class with your work prepared ahead of time. This means listening to the CD's, reading the textbook, doing the assigned exercises, and working on your own in the lab on areas that are giving you particular problems. You should understand at the outset that there is a lot of work that goes on outside regularly scheduled class time. Our time in class should be considered the end result of what you do outside of class. You should expect to spend a minimum of 2 hours studying for each in-class hour. That means a minimum of 8 hours per week of homework, studying, lab, etc., in order to keep up and do well. Of course, if you are having difficulty, you will need to put in extra time by studying with a partner, going for tutoring, coming to see me. The hours for French tutoring are posted outside the lab. Some of your work this semester is going to involve watching French television programs (films and news) and reporting to the class on your viewings.
Practicing your oral French is one of the best ways to improve it, and you should take every opportunity to use your French whenever you can. You should make attendance at the French Conversation Table (times to be announced in class) a part of your regular activities.
Objectives for French 313:
French 313 is an advanced intermediate language course--and all work will take place in French. While it is assumed that you have seen and begun to put into use most of the basic structures of French in a variety of authentic communicative contexts, it is not assumed that you have mastered all these structures yet. In addition, there are some new structures that you've not yet seen. That's what this course is all about. I am also assuming that you are all coming to this class with a variety of backgrounds--some of you are stronger (and remember more from your previous courses); some of you are weaker and may have forgotten some of the earlier material that you covered either in high school or in other college courses. This is not a problem! You are not in competition with one another, but with yourself. You have to make progress according to your abilities. If you're a weaker student, work with a partner who's stronger. And if you're stronger, by working with weaker students, you will find that you can articulate your own strengths and your knowledge. When you don't understand something that either a classmate or the instructor says, ask for clarification! Of course, you have to ask for clarification in French. At this level, all discussion in class will take place in the target language, and for us, that means French. The more you use it and hear it, the more at ease you will become.
This course, like all previous levels of French courses, will work on all four passive and active language skills: reading/writing, listening/speaking, but at a more sophisticated level. Each of our class hours together will be spent on honing these skills:
Grammar/Translation:Your grammar book, Interaction, will serve as a background reference text. There are some structures that have not been covered yet, and we will explore those in class together (e.g. the Discours indirect, some of the pronoms relatifs, le subjonctif, etc.). One way in which we will get at some of the more difficult grammatical structures will be through contrastive grammar and translation. While we won't be speaking English in class, we will be doing some translation exercises that will help to get you from more complex strucures in English to their French counterparts. Remember: French is not merely English with different words! There are completely different ways of expressing ideas in each of the languages, and one of our tasks this semester will be to focus on those differences. You will find that both your French and English skills will improve.
Phonetics, Listening Comprehension and Discussion: We will be working on corrective phonetics, and the relationship between spelling in French and pronunciation. In addition, there will be work, both in class and in the lab, that will help to hone your listening skills in French. Each week, all students will submit a written journal on any subject of their choosing, but that cannot include a list of stores they visited or restaurants they went to (unless, of course, they are French!). Based on journal entries, each week two students will give an oral presentation to the class about an interesting news story, a magazine article, movie or cultural information in New York or in France, etc. The whole group will discuss the topic of the presentation.
The Writing Project: Each week, part of our time will be spent working on the collective writing project done throughout the course of the semester. This is where you will put your technical grammatical skills and, more importantly, your creative skills to work--and even have some fun!. The project will allow you to strengthen your writing skills by taking you through a variety of writing situations (dialogue, description, narration, essay, etc.). The project entails the collective writing (and rewriting) of a "novel" about an apartment building and its residents in Paris. Detailed instructions and materials will be provided in class and you will have access to materials in the lab and on the Web. The final version will be a "published" version of the story with a copy for each member of the class. This exercise, aside from allowing your imagination to run free, will take you through a variety of different writing situations and give you a chance to do extensive revision of your writing since everyone will be reading the texts and suggesting changes and additions. No one will be working in isolation.
Note: All homework assignments will be given in class and posted on the blackboard at the beginning of each session. You are responsible for coming to class prepared.
Part of your time will be spent in the Modern Languages Multi-Media Lab (2S-114), where you will work on specific assignments and projects. While you can do your internet and e-mail from any computer on campus or off, there are certain materials that can be used in the lab only. One new addition we have this year is a program called Tell Me More: French. This is a program that has hundreds of exercises to practice pronunciation and listening comprehension, but it also has something new: voice recognition capabilities. You will actually be able to see on the computer screen whether or not your pronunciation matches that of the native speakers and practice continually until it does! The exercises are fun and can be done with a partner or on your own. In addition, there will be films, French TV clips, and phonetics exercises for you to look at and listen to in the lab. Most of you should already be familiar with the lab, but if there are any newcomers to the course, we will have an orientation session.