23 Instructor’s Guide Unit 2

Moving from finding out and learning how to express oneself, it’s time to move toward interacting with others. This second unit focuses on everything interactional and the social and cultural morés that situate engagement with others.

Introduction

The Unit introduction provides the essential questions of the unit. In fine, it is a unit that builds on the focus on the self and identity in the first unit, to explore how does one meet, understand, and interact effectively with people from francophone cultures. It centers on interpersonal communication across many dimensions and media.

Entrée en matière

The entrée en matière starts with a discussion of what it means to communicate and gives both etymological and historical approaches to thinking about the creation and negotiation of meaning with fellow humans. It then turns attention to meeting, greeting, and pursuing connections with other people. There are several videos that demonstrate how best to engage with others and to avoid. Some of the readings suggest how and where to seek new connections. Another underscores that silence can be very provocative! These materials are just meant to stimulate thinking about coming together. For students, this whole process is fraught with difficulties in familiar, local circumstances, so it is especially important to offer skills and strategies for how to maneuver in a foreign language and culture.

This generation is heavily ‘mediated’ by their devices and apps. Part of the chapter asks them to think and act globally with technologies for meeting native speakers and improving their interpretive and interpersonal skill sets. Misunderstandings occur in the best of circumstances. Some of the videos address ways to prevent miscommunications, regardless of sociocultural milieux. It could be helpful to return to the information and links in Unit 1 addressing inclusive language. The Canadian site has well crafted materials as does the UN.

Échafaudages

The scaffolding in this unit digs down into the uses of vous v. tu. More work is offered on keeping conversations alive through pragmatics. Grammatical issues of potential use are pronominal verbs and the interrogative. Some polite usages of the conditional and the subjunctive are included. There is a lot of potentially new grammar here, so it’s best to guide learners through the morass as needs be. If they get to choose what forms and functions they need, there’s more of a possibility that they’ll do the work!

This chapterfinishes with how to say goodbye. Despite repeated calls for American students in my classes to pay attention to leave taking in French, it seems to be a hard concept to grasp that one thanks one’s conversation partner, recognizes the pleasure of meeting a new person, and then takes time to move out of the conversation. If you are using a virtual exchange with your class, this point can really be driven home in this unit (see below in the section on Talk Abroad).

Later we hope to add a section on writing letters and other forms of correspondence since it is an important part of communicational exchanges.

Curation

The Unit 2 curation asks learners to find some videos or other dialogs, conversations, or panels where people are interacting in French. To key student interest, I often ask them to choose a topic that they find fascinating and to then look for people discussing the topic live. Sometimes they get confused and just look for an interesting topic, sometimes they look for videos with people talking about conversing. Staying on top of their research is vital in this curation to keep them on topic. Then again, you may well seek other curation topics that would be more suitable: they could research and analyze dialogs in plays or movies, they could seek YouTube videos of people engaged in specific pragmatics, the possibilities are endless.

Talk Abroad

TalkAbroad 2 looks at how young people meet each other in Francophone countries, what friendship means, and what are the rules for friendship. This Google doc will help students prepare.

The partners might discuss the the reading on where to go to find friends. An interesting intercultural comparison is dating customs.

A focus might be on how to ask questions, based on the échafaudages.

Here is the Google doc with the reflections for TA2.

Jeter le pont 2 → 3

Bridges cross over various barriers and make new connections. This « pont » offers  a French version of This is America (Childish Gambino) by Zef. The third unit moves from identity (Unit 1) to dialog (Unit 2) to the contexts of communication (Unit 3).  Bridges are extremely important, as is knowing the context in which one is communicating.