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Institut de Français Language Courses
Teaching French to adults in an intensive environment where they study eight hours a day for four weeks is a very special endeavour, not to be compared with lessons in a secondary school for two hours a week over several years.
Students come from all over the world with one objective: to learn to speak French in four weeks and they expect the maximum results. Many hold high positions in private firms, international organisations or government, and as such, are quite demanding. Therefore the teaching has to be particularly effective which means it has to be rigorous and systematic with, at the core, the following ground rule: use all of a teacher’s experience, competence and knowledge of languages to know how a student thinks and how he or she perceives with his or her ears and mind the strange words and sounds we are uttering.
The key is to teach the spoken language directly and through the audio-visual structuro-global method. This is based on the oral language (spoken and heard) and places the emphasis on structures or groups of words that go together (such as in English: ‘what’s that?’, ‘what’s your name?’, ‘I can’t) with their characteristic sound, rhythm and intonation which the student absorbs as a whole and reproduces in the same way that a child learns its mother tongue, without the need to dissect or over-analyse the language.
BASIC PRINCIPLES
The other idea behind this method is that the more the student involves his/her whole being in learning, ie not only with the mind but also with the senses, the more effectively the student will learn and the longer it will be retained. This is why students often act out various lines of dialogue, imitating the French manner with gestures and intonation. Now let us return to a basic principle in a student’s learning process: a student will be able to speak insofar as he or she has understood the words, the expression, the sentence and provided that he or she has listened and listened well. Students often mix up understanding and listening, leading to problems in getting certain structures right. For example: the teacher is working on the verb avoir (to have) in a beginners’ class and making the students practise it with questions such as: “Vous avez une voiture?” “Oui, j’ai une voiture.” “Et Paul?” etc. Then he says: “Je suis né en 1960.” “J’ai 46 ans.” “Et vous, quel âge avez-vous?” The student answers, “Je suis 30 ans”, using the verb ‘to be’ instead of ‘to have’ showing he/she has understood the question but not absorbed or retained the correct verb in French. Now, before attempting to correct the student, the teacher has first to think and determine the cause of the error. In this case, he has to think of several factors:
Listening—the student has heard ‘j’ai...’ (I have...), it’s one syllable, a single sound, not easily identifiable (unlike ‘I have’ in English), and so close phonetically to just ‘je’.
The mother tongue—the student has understood that the teacher is giving his age; but has not identified the verb ‘to have’ and, thinking in English, comes out spontaneously with ‘je suis...’. Here is a case where a basic
difference between French and the mother tongue is the cause of a frequent error.
The teacher must therefore make the French construction very clear ie ‘I have 46 years of age’ (French) and not ‘I am old with 46 years’ (English). He must also break down once more ‘j’ai’ into ‘je ai’, and show the phonetic difference between ‘je’ and ‘j’ai’, have the class practise those two sounds and finally hammer at the fact that in French it is avoir for age and not être. This is a good example of the obligation for the student to listen well before understanding and for the teacher to listen to the French words with the ears and the mind of the student.
AUTOMATIC RESPONSE
Another important factor in any student making progress is his/her attitude to mistakes. The student must never feel embarrassed or afraid to make a mistake or this will inhibit him/her and prevent him/her from advancing at a good pace. This is why students are reminded that the whole process of learning is based upon making mistakes and correcting them in order to reach the next level of knowledge. Further, the teacher’s thorough correction of a mistake is very helpful and can contain valuable information, over and beyond the particular mistake.
After correcting a mistake, the teacher must ask the student to repeat the correct answer several times, with variations, so as to obtain an automatic response. This repetition must include the music and the rhythm of the answer. In this way, the sentence will be more easily absorbed, memorised and an automatic correct response will be more likely in a similar situation in the future. Thus, at all times, the student must listen intently to the teacher’s words, sounds and intonation. He/she must develop his/her ear to French sounds, to the music of an expression or a sentence and develop his/her ability to retain and memorise those sounds.
This is not always easy for certain sounds that may not exist in the student’s mother tongue, since a student’s ears are filters that have been developed and shaped in the early years to the frequencies and harmonics of his/her mother tongue. It is the teacher’s task to modify, enlarge and tune that ear to accept and become more sensitive to French sounds, especially those that are not heard well on the student’s arrival. The language laboratory work with its special exercises is another tool that greatly helps achieving that goal.
Of course, for any progress in spoken French to be tangible, all the work in the classroom and language laboratory would be short-lived and ineffective if it isn’t followed up with all manner of practice sessions. These enable a student to freely and spontaneously apply the French he/she has learned so diligently in the classroom, in real-life situations. This after all is the end goal and the students’ ultimate desire.
Jean-Pierre Rodriguez Is a senior teacher at the Institut de Français
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