Courses Taught

Beginner French is composed of the first two courses of French (semester 1 and 2). In this course, students begin to develop and use basic communicative skills in French in order to expand their knowledge about the ideas, customs, and belief systems of the French-speaking peoples of the world.

This is one of the courses that I have taught the most at the University of Arizona and Florida State University.

Intermediate French is the third semester of French. In this course, students learn to interact with their classmates and with native speakers of French in interpersonal contexts, to interpret with increasing accuracy and sophistication oral and written texts on a variety of topics, and to present with increasing accuracy and confidence the results of their study and reflection. This course differs in what one generally associates with language learning like passive memorization of grammar rules and vocabulary lists, with lots of tricky exceptions, and minor focus on meaningful content.

I taught this class (4th semester of French) at the University of Arizona. With a colleague of mine, we redesigned the whole curriculum, focusing on authentic materials.

This course is organized around the 5 World-Readiness Standards of ACTFL: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities. This course weaves together these five standards into classwork, assignments, and assessments, in which students will communicate with their peers, connect and compare different Francophone cultures with their own, and participate in discussion in our own francophone community in the classroom. The units are designed to help students communicate directly with Francophone speakers and learn marketable skills like applying for a job in French. The use of authentic resources (newspaper articles, movies, radio, songs, and poems) will encourage them to learn to make meaning, reflect, and reproduce language.

The French-Speaking World is a Tier I, General Education course that I taught multiple times at the University of Arizona. This course examines the presence of the French language on a global level. It considers the development of the French-speaking world from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. In this course, students study thirteen countries that used to be colonized by France or Belgium, therefore became Francophone.

This course was taught online and in English during a summer session.

This course focuses upon key expressions of existentialism and the absurd in French literature of the twentieth century, particularly in texts of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Samuel Beckett. In this course, we look at the literary and philosophical antecedents of this movement, at the sociopolitical crises and intellectual ferment that helped produce these revolutionary writings, at the evolution of existentialism and the absurd during and after World War II, and at related artistic and cultural manifestations of the era such as Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, and avant-garde music.

This course was taught online and in English during a summer session.

This course was taught in France as part of the exchange study program “Arizona in Paris” with the University of Arizona.

This course asks students to demonstrate their ability to read and write at the advanced level by providing cohesive and grammatically correct written summaries of their day; by reading a full-length piece of fiction and by writing three compositions. This course can be assimilated to a creative writing class.

This course was taught in France as part of the exchange study program “Arizona in Paris” with the University of Arizona.

In this course students cultivate their ability to understand and speak French correctly and authentically (intelligible to a Francophone speaker). This course focuses on oral language learning through the analysis of films, newspaper articles or magazine. Emphasis on this course is on developing student’s ability to speak French and improving pronunciation, rather than on the interpretation of films.