Le creuset des savoirs: cours de rhétorique et de composition by Brian Arganbright (review)

If you are looking for a textbook to expand your reading selections and help students develop their writing skills, then I highly recommend this text. It can be used at the university, and also with upper-level classes in high school. While it has more than enough material to stand alone, it could be a supplement to your current syllabus. The book has six chapters with five units in each. These units include two "Lecture," or primary texts, and then two "Stylistique," or secondary texts. The readings are designed to be done outside of class and include comprehension questions. Each unit then has a section called"En classe"which includes activities designed to be done with partners or small groups in a class setting, such as organizers to improve writing, exercises for pronunciation, questions for conversation, vocabulary enrichment, and more. The final unit of each chapter is a "Cours de synthèse," which includes exercises that bring the readings and other exercises together. There are many exercises given, and teachers would be able to use as many or as few as they like in order to help their students improve in areas of weakness. In addition to those chapters, there are three "Atelier d'écriture" to work on specific styles of writing: "Dissertation," "Essai," and "Récit". These also include reading selections, but focus directly on producing a certain type of text. The production of these written texts is broken into smaller steps to help students focus on quality production. Another component to the text is on the website: <frenchgram.org>. Here students can find practice interactive exercises related to the verbs, grammar, and vocabulary in each unit of the textbook. Expected in the summer of 2018 is a tab that will review French grammar in general. I tested chapter 5 with my seniors in French 4. I chose this chapter as the two main texts related to our unit theme of "Peace and War." My students found the texts to be of reasonable length, and the "En classe" exercises were helpful to guide their discussions of the text and lead them toward producing a written assignment. The different organizers were a good start to developing an idea orally and in writing. Their only negative comment was that the book is in black and white. However, images of and additional information about the authors and texts are easily found online and could become a student assignment or class presentation. We also tried the website exercises. The "Anagrammes" activity turned into quite a competition among the students! They said that they are used to more bells and whistles in a website, but that the exercises themselves were helpful and easy to understand. Overall, my students and I liked this book. The texts are engaging and offer different viewpoints of the subject they discuss. The activities are wellorganized, and the skills practiced in them can be learned and transferred to other tasks. I am interested in seeing the French grammar review section of the website.