Welcome to French 4H, an advanced language course designed to develop skills in understanding, speaking, reading, and writing the French language. Our culture studies for the year will focus on XXth Century France and francophonie, highlighting a different art form in each quarter: short story and poetry in the first quarter, novel and memoir in the second, theater in the third and art in the fourth.
Below, please find the following folders with documents for French 4H: Organisation (Course Standards, Syllabus, Classeur Vérification), Culture (l'Homme qui plantait des arbres, Lecture quarter 1), Verbes (Introduction & FDV, template for verb practice), Amsco Corrections (Grammar Homework Corrections), Tactics (Conversation exercises; note that each Tactics assignment has 2 pages) and Key to Written Work (a key indicating corrections to be made on written work).
One hard copy of these documents (and most others throughout the year) will be distributed in class. Any additional copies must be downloaded and printed.
Grammar homework corrections (Corrections Amsco) will not be printed and distributed. They will be posted as documents on this site (labeled like this AmCh1A-C) the day after they are due. We will go over the answers in class. If a student is absent, it is the students' responsibility to correct all Amsco assignments and seek any further explanation from the teacher during X periods, Activity periods or before/after school.
I highly recommend daily verb conjugation practice, in order to master the weekly verb quizzes and succeed on the final exam. The target tenses are the Indicative Mode (Passé Simple and the Compound Tenses) and the Subjunctive Mode (especially the present and passé composé). Many students find these online drills in Conjuguemos helpful. (The HHS Conjuguemos student code is 9822.)
Please visit my Sound Cloud site, book mark it and use it to prepare for listening and speaking activities, such as dictations, recitations, and readings. Here's the set of dictations for our first reading, l'homme qui plantait des arbres.
Here is the tv5 site with news in French. We will use this site for bi-weekly listening quiz (indicated on the syllabus as tv5). Here's the page with the videos and PDFs of Transcripts corresponding to each quiz.
Here is my homepage in Quia, which we use for the art history program in quarter 4.
For reading and listening comprehension practice, here is a site with free audio books and transcripts in French. We will consult this site for some of our readings. Feel free to explore it on your own. Here is an English language version of our first reading, l'homme qui plantait des arbres.
In quarter one, our first reading is l'homme qui plantait des arbres (attached as a PDF). Here's the video with subtitles in French. Feel free to consult English translations, such as this one. We also study the film, le Roi de coeur, which is online here in French without subtitles. For information about this film and the historical contexts in which it takes place (WWI), was released in France and was released in the US. We end the quarter with a study of various early Twentieth Century French-language poets: Apollinaire, Desnos, Tzara, Valéry, Eluard.
In the second quarter, we read the novel l'Etranger by Camus. We read several extracts from memoires about World War II, learn about the historical period Entre-deux-Guerres and study the film, Coco Avant Chanel.
In the third quarter, We read several stories from le Maghreb (formerly French North Africa), including le Rossignol de Kabylie. Here is the 1962 film version. Here is information about the author, Robles, and the historical context of the story (Guerre franco-algérienne). We will also read l'Hôte by Camus (PDF's of the reading and questions attached below).
In the fourth quarter we study XXth Century French art history and we study the theater of the absurd, in particular, Ionesco's Cantatrice Chauve. Here is an extrait of a performance on video.
At least once per quarter, students complete an oral proficiency exam. The exam which is recorded on the iPad using the SoundCloud.com app is graded using the the attached rubric.
Students in French 4H participate in the annual Poetry Recitation Contest. See the PDF below for this year's poem, its translation & link to the audio recording.
Students, if the is site is in any way incomplete, out of date, inaccessible or inadequate, please let me know immediately by email.
Amicalement,
Mme. Doyle
p.s. Note that the mid-term exam info is here.
p.p.s. Go here for the mid-term Course Evaluation online survey.