French First Year

Author: Department of French, Beijing Foreign Studies University
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2003-02-01
Features: This book retains its original principles, format, and system: it emphasizes fundamental language training, ensuring beginners build a solid foundation in both basic French knowledge and skills. The book aims to address the specific difficulties Chinese students face when learning French, enabling them to develop preliminary oral and written expression through repeated practice, with a particular focus on oral skills.
Books 1 and 2 include an eight-lesson pronunciation tutorial and a twenty-six-lesson basic tutorial. Based on the typical class schedules in higher education institutions, each lesson in the pronunciation tutorial takes about half a week, while each lesson in the basic tutorial takes about one week, supplemented by review, quizzes, and exams. The entire content is suitable for two semesters of first-year studies. The primary task of the pronunciation tutorial is to conduct phoneme and intonation training. Within specific sentence structures, students learn pronunciation through connected speech, with emphasis on intonation training and phoneme exercises. The book includes a substantial number of phoneme contrast exercises tailored to the pronunciation challenges faced by Chinese students, such as distinguishing between voiceless and voiced consonants, rounded vowels, and consonant clusters. Under the principle of prioritizing listening and speaking, the tutorial also focuses on teaching students to master pronunciation rules, reading, spelling, and introduces basic grammar.
The basic tutorial continues to adhere to the principle of prioritizing listening and speaking while promoting comprehensive development in all four language skills. Each lesson is divided into sections such as text, vocabulary list, expressions, text notes, grammar, exercises, and reading materials. At the end of the book, a small selection of French folk songs and short poems is included.
Books 1 and 2 have undergone the following revisions: The pronunciation tutorial, which previously occupied too much time, has been reduced from twelve lessons to eight. The grammar focus in the basic tutorial remains largely unchanged, except that the subjunctive present tense has been introduced earlier in Book 2, while the simple past tense has been removed and will be covered in Book 3. The texts have been significantly revised, with Book 1 entirely updated. The content now includes more information about French society and culture. To facilitate listening and speaking training and develop communicative competence, the texts are primarily dialogues, with an increased number of texts per lesson to provide richer language materials and contexts for use. When writing the texts, special attention has been paid to using appropriate expressions based on different situations and the social roles of the communicants. For example, in more casual settings, the book uses rising intonation questions with inverted word order instead of formal subject-verb inversion questions to avoid stiffness. In teaching, however, sufficient practice should be provided on inversion questions to ensure students can handle various linguistic contexts correctly.
A new section titled "Expressions" has been added after each text, systematically organizing and expanding various expressions related to the topic. Comprehensive oral and written expression exercises have been added to each lesson's practice.