French (I) -- New Version

Author: Department of French, Beijing Foreign Studies University
Publisher:
Publishing Time: Not available
Features: This book retains the original principles, format, and system of writing: it emphasizes fundamental language training, enabling beginners to build a solid foundation in both basic French knowledge and skills. The book aims to address the specific difficulties encountered by Chinese students when learning French, through repeated practice, helping them develop preliminary oral and written, particularly oral, expression 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 a week, plus additional activities such as reviews, quizzes, and exams. The entire content is suitable for two semesters of first-year study. The main task of the pronunciation tutorial is to conduct phoneme and intonation training. Within certain sentence structures, students learn pronunciation through connected speech, with emphasis on intonation training, as well as phoneme exercises. The book includes a significant number of phoneme contrast exercises tailored to the pronunciation difficulties of Chinese students, such as aspirated and unaspirated consonants, rounded vowels, and consonant clusters. Under the principle of prioritizing listening and speaking, the tutorial also focuses on cultivating students' ability to master pronunciation rules, reading, and spelling, while introducing some basic grammar. The basic tutorial continues to adhere to the principle of prioritizing listening and speaking while promoting comprehensive development in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. 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, there are a few folk songs and short poems from France. 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 present subjunctive is introduced earlier in Book 2, and the simple past tense is removed and will be covered in Book 3. The texts have been significantly revised, with Book entirely updated. The content of the texts has been enriched with knowledge 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 more abundant language materials and contexts for using language. When writing the texts, special attention has been paid to using appropriate expressions based on different situations and the social status of the communicative partners. For example, in generally informal 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 so that students can handle various linguistic contexts correctly. After each text, a "Expressions" section has been added to systematically organize and expand various expressions related to the topic. Comprehensive oral and written expression exercises have been added to each lesson's exercises.