Intro: Course Overview

Description

This course is offered through the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences to help students meet the language proficiency requirement established by many departments as part of the Master's or Doctoral degree program. Starting from the most basic principles of the French language, students will learn the essential structures and vocabulary of the language that will allow them to read French texts for their research. 

Objectives 

• Mastery of the basics of French grammar: le Français fondamental
• Ability to command a vocabulary of at least 1,000 words (and hopefully more)
• Practice in reading progressively longer and more challenging texts
• Demonstration of the ability to read accurately and with good overall comprehension a scholary article of moderate length, by the end of the summer.

Book

This summer we will be using Karl Sandberg's French for Reading, which includes grammatical presentations, exercises (with an answer key), self-tests, an extensive bilingual glossary, and short reading passages.

Other materials

Especially after the first weeks of the semester, students will want to have access to a good bilingual dictionary. Among the available bilingual dictionaries, the larger Collins dictionaries (aka, Harper Collins or Collins Robert) or the Oxford Hachette are probably the best. But excellent online dictionaries are also available and often very convenient to use. For example: the Oxford Foreign Language Dictionaries accessible through the O'Neill Library databases and the Larousse French & English Dictionary app available for users of iPhones and iPads (not free, but inexpensive and powerful). There is also an inexpensive Collins for the Kindle but I have not used it so I can't so how good it is.