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Studying Le Ballon rouge with false beginners.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

False beginners--students who take beginning classes but who are not true beginners--populate both first- and second-year university foreign language classes, posing a unique challenge to their teachers. This problem is especially acute in French programs, in which the numbers of students enrolled are often insufficient to create special classes for them. This article describes a text and an approach that invite students from different language-learning backgrounds to collaborate to improve their reading and writing skills in French.

Introduction

The placement of new college students into foreign language courses in an effective and efficient manner is "one of the primary challenges faced by large-scale university foreign language programs" (Bernhart, Rivera and Kamil 356). Because of this difficulty, university French teachers frequently encounter in their second-year classes students who have taken one to three (sometimes even four) years of the language in high school. But these students' skills are not always adequate to place out of second year classes by examination, and there are not enough of them to fill a class on their own. However, these students' knowledge of vocabulary, their familiarity with grammatical structures, and their ability to understand the written word surpass the skills and knowledge of their classmates who have just completed their first year of French. The instructor is faced with the challenge of 1) finding a text that meets the needs of both groups of students; and 2) structuring the class to maximize the advantage of the one group without jeopardizing the chances of success of the other group. Studying an authentic French text collaboratively provides a solution to this problem.

Selecting the text

Teaching literature in the foreign language is frequently left to the third year. Second year textbooks typically contain excepts of literary works side by side with non-literary works that are accompanied by exercises designed to help students learn to read. Such texts are organized by grammatical function or by theme, and the excerpts are selected to complement them. As stated in the instructor's guide to Quant a Moi, an intermediate French program, many such programs "concentrate primarily on grammar, with reading, writing, and speaking activities relegated to a subordinate position" (IG7). The resulting isolation of skills is unfortunate. Reading,...

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