Se donner le mot : trousse pédagogique (review)

The title of this multimedia learning package is an example of what the package is about: French idiomatic expressions whose meanings do not boil down to their component words. Se donner le mot translates unpredictably as 'pass the word on,' and passing some words on to French learners is what this collection of software and support tools aims to do. However, the words are not single items but 40 colourful expressions, from être dans de beaux draps ('to be in nice sheets,' or in a fix) to au bout du rouleau ('at the end of your roll,' or out of money), that every French speaker knows and learners of French apparently need to know.

The coherence, quality, and variety of this didacticiel answer the complaint of many French teachers that e-materials for learning French are typically unprincipled, short, and hard to integrate into a sequence. Se donner's learning principles are well thought out, and the package provides a comprehensive set of integrated lessons (or supplements) that could run over a year, or even two.

Each expression is introduced through a humorous two-minute video skit performed by Québec actors Christopher Hall and Pierre Verville. Within the sustained metaphor of a vaudeville cinema, each skit revolves around an idiomatic expression. The expression recurs at least seven times in what I would call a video concordance. Its imagistic potential is exploited mnemonically (in Accorder ses violons, Hall plays an air violin against an accompaniment of exaggerated violin music). Learners watch the skit, grasp the global meaning, identify the recurring expression, infer its particular meaning, and only at the end meet a definition (accorder ses violins signifie se mettre d'accord, '"tune their violins" means come to an understanding'). Learners then reinvest their knowledge of the expression in up to 46 practice and transfer activities, in the classroom (with teaching suggestions and photocopiable grids) or at home (on the Web, at www.sedonnerlemot.tv). Finally, learners use the expression in a structured role-play with themselves as the actors.

How does all this look to a French teacher? I lent my copy of Se donner to a teacher for a judgement, and to my positive impressions she added that it is rare to find Canadian materials of this quality for teaching French and that the Anglophone origins of Hall would be a motivator for her particular learners. However, she also noted that the package is not really meant for beginners. Indeed, it is true that we do not know much about the intended audience for this material, except that they are "over 14 years old and interested in French."

Some mini-research shows that the teacher has a point. Vocabprofil analysis (www.lextutor.ca/vp/fr/) traces 41 of Se donner's 97 content words to well beyond the most common 3,000 families of French. However, the sequence starts with higher-frequency items such as pain ('bread'), langue ('tongue'), feu ('fire'), and emploi ('job') and only gradually moves toward âne ('ass'), crochet ('crochet hook'), sabler ('to sand' or 'to sandblast'), and rate ('spleen'). A teacher can probably pick and choose for most levels.

A critique from applied linguists may be harder to beat, that while idiomatic expressions are fun for (English) teachers, they are not necessarily useful for learners (O'keefe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007, p. 80). Idioms tend to be extremely low in frequency and to be built on non-generative grammars (permitting by and large but forbidding *it is raining a cat and a dog). By running Se donner's 40 expressions through a Google search, I learned that some are more frequent than others (381,000 hits for avoir la langue de bois, 'to have a wooden tongue' or speak incomprehensibly, down to 0 for avoir le physique d'emploi, 'be suited to the job'). So maybe colour trumps need in some of the selections.

The problem of idiomatic English grammars, on the other hand, does not seem to translate...