Savoir-faire plus: le français à I'université (review)

Rather than a second edition of Savoir-faire: An Advanced French Course(see FS, LV (2001), 289-90), this is a completely new textbook by a different author. Yet it is broadly similar in design, ethos, and methodology to its predecessor. It is aimed at first-year undergraduate students of French and is designed to fit the typical teaching structure of two or three weekly hours of classes over a 24-week year. The material seeks to instil communicative, grammatical and (inter-)cultural competence through the exploitation of a wide range of authentic written texts and recordings. Both texts and activities have been well chosen for their potential to engage the student with French and francophone culture and with matters of topical debate, for example regional languages, sustainable development and cyber-networking. Most engaging of all is the focus throughout the book on the life of an anglophone first-year undergraduate studying French in the UK and sharing a house with four francophone students; this provides a plausible context and motivation for the activities. The structure of the book, like that of its predecessor, is admirably clear. Each chapter is preceded by a full-page grid cataloguing its learning outcomes (including transferable skills) and activities, and icons are used in the body of the text to indicate the type of activity and the skills practised. The book is supplemented by CDs and MP3s (with transcripts and answers in a separate booklet) and by a website with reinforcement activities for independent study. These include comprehension quizzes, crossword puzzles, jumbled sentences to be unscrambled, and sentences for translation, with solutions and scoring on-line. Vocabulary building is particularly favoured by the topic-based reinforcement activities; grammatical coverage is rather less thorough, and this is true of the book as a whole. Although it has a helpful index of grammatical points, its treatment of important topics, such as past tenses, the subjunctive, personal and relative pronouns, is so condensed that most first-year undergraduates will have to heed the invitation to 'revise if necessary' with the aid of a reference grammar. Provided they do that, students have much to gain from this book, not least the stimulus to learn to express themselves in French on a variety of topics in a well-informed, well-structured and persuasive manner. Teachers will welcome the wealth of materials and activities, which integrate language and cultural study in a very refreshing way. It is only to be noted that by their nature these very topical materials will need to be updated in due course. The publishers will no doubt have a third edition in view.