Voyage dans l'écriture/Journey in Writing (.5 unit)

This French composition course features a creative approach to process writing. Learners, in groups of two or three, select a genre, a mini-novel, skits or epistolary novel, and construct a story with embedded grammatical, rhetorical, and stylistic constraints. User-friendly instructive tools intended to stimulate creativity and facilitate language accuracy are readily available on the instructor's website. There, learners have access to a panoply of descriptive and narrative excerpts featuring various genres, moods, and registers. They also find pedagogically relevant reference works such as lexical and semantic webs, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammatical descriptions, and literary, historical and Francophone civilization links. This carefully orchestrated course is a natural environment for 'scaffolding' and 'noticing' the gap between the language they experience from the various sources of input and their own output. It also aims at targeting 'avoidance' and 'overuse' strategies that often immobilize learners' language development and creativity.

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Level Three is for students who have had significant previous instruction in French and who are already able to function independently in full immersion. Typically, students at this level demonstrate textual/writing ability beyond the sentence level. The individual components of the program are designed to complement one another, and all include intensive study of the language. Students will also arrive at a broader appreciation of French and Francophone cultures and literatures. N.B. All four courses are required.

The four course segments share the following common objectives:

* Develop aural/oral proficiency through use of video and audio-based media, theater, movies, songs, and TV programs. Students will be invited to express themselves in real-life conversations and through drama activities. Emphasis will be placed on pronunciation, intonation and sentence rhythm;

* Integrate the characteristics of non-verbal language into communication in French (gesture, posture, facial expression, voice inflection, etc.);

* Review selected grammatical structures in close coordination with topics and activities taught in class;

* Provide a broad introduction to French and Francophone culture and literature through the study of articles from the press, plays, short stories, poems, and excerpts from novels.