31 Instructor’s Guide Unit 3
This unit is meant to situate the learner in one or more Francophone contexts. The Atelier RÉEL has moved from self/identity (Unit 1) to self and others in dialog (Unit 2) and now it works to help the learner better discover one or more context(s) in which the French language is used to communicate globally (Unit 3). The task is enormous and necessarily unwieldy, de-centering, if not impossible. Should instructors focus on France and hexagonal French when the majority of French speakers worldwide are not “nos ancêtres les Gaullois” nor whatever it means to be «de suche»? Indeed, what did it ever mean to be «de suche» in France, given the constant migrations over milennia to become what is today the nation-state of France? Over the years, French language education has become more inclusive of the many ways that French speaks itself in the world (not that there aren’t exclusionary practices still at work). In a decolonizing world where diversity, equity, inclusion and access for all learners is increasingly expected and where the richness and beauty of many forms of French are valued equally, it is incumbent on educators to open multiliteracies up for their students and to afford them solid tools for translanguaging. For that reason, the region(s) or country(s) that are chosen in this unit are of critical for teacher and students alike. It is incumbent on instructors to choose one or more contexts that suit not only their teaching style and expertise, but also that will engage their current students. At the moment, this third module offers two possible points of entry and engagement: (1) a focus on the Francophone world through the lens of colonization, decolonization, and neo-colonialism and (2) cinematographic representations. It would work equally well to create your own context unit that lets students explore and flesh out their understanding of French in action within a framework of your choosing: environmental, historical, economic, health, religious, artistic, musical, etc. This is an OER, collaborative etextbook: please join your efforts with ours!
If you opt to use film as your context, the film currently inserted is Une vie de chat. It was chosen at the beginning of the pandemic when students needed something ‘lighter’. In retrospect, albeit a bande animée, this is not entirely a children’s story. So many issues of policing, notions of criminals and criminality, and hetero-noramativity prevail. We did discuss them critically and students were asked to bring other cinamatographic visions to bear in a class curated “film festival.” There we got diverse, non binary perspectives and contexts and well as benefiting from crowd sourcing our viewing materials. Another teaching colleague in the OER project is usijg film like Paris, je t’aime. Yet another has suggested Persepolis. Les Ch’tis, Lupin, and a host of other films and Netflix series and environmental and historical films can be equally impactful. In years past, I’ve used court-métrages from the VCU French Film Festival to offer varying views of Francophone life (most of them are, nonetheless, white, hexagonal views).
If you choose to follow the historical roots of colonization and decolonization, you may opt to showcase just one country or region in a deep dive or you can have students individually or in groups do research and present to one another to give a more global and student-driven global view of the issue.
If you choose to engage student choice in the direction of this unit, it would be a good idea to set up a survey in Unit 0 to solicit their input, vote on it, and begin framing this unit to your purposes.
With respect to the scaffolding in Chapter 2 of this unit, what you will find here are the past and composite tenses. The intermediate level finds students still wrestling with the present tense. Yet, they need to recognize and start using the past tenses to a limited extent. We know that control of the past (passé composé and imparfait) in paragraph length discourse is the hallmark of the advanced level of proficiency. Our intermediate level students are still pretty far from that level and need a great deal of scaffolding and support. For many learners, the importance of recognizing past aspect (PC v. imperfect) is a very foreign notion. The video series from Dr. Kissling of the University of Richmond is highly instrumental in guiding them toward that understanding, even if her examples are in Spanish. In our multilimgual, multiliterate classrooms, students versed in Spanish and other languages having clear aspect in their past tense usages can be very helpful. Yet, we must remain aware of those students who really have never thought about tense and may have a hard time realizing that they do separate out present and past usages in their native languages. Bringing examples in from the L1 is not a bad idea at this juncture.
Still targeting the advanced, paragraph level of discourse, a focus on connectors is very important. They can be taught as vocabulary or as grammar. A focus on form, using a literary or historical document, or a well argued composition, can serve as a point de départ for seeing conjunctions, adverbs, and other connectors in action.
