A Short Course in Reading French by Celia Brickman (review)

Reviews 225 Brickman, Celia. A Short Course in Reading French. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-231-15676-9. Pp. xxviii + 233. $35. The publication of this textbook is timely: Edward Stack’s Reading French is now out of print, and Karl Sandberg’s classic French for Reading has become dated in the nearly 50 years since its publication. There are a number of other options for students looking for a reading knowledge of French, but none are as user-friendly and intelligent as A Short Course in Reading French.It is important to emphasize what this textbook is not: it is not a phrasebook; it does not introduce basic “survival vocabulary”; and it provides no guidance on how to write or speak French. Its audience is students and scholars who need a basic reading knowledge of French in order to pursue research or for an advanced degree. Brickman has taken Stack’s winning combination—a clear and systematic introduction to the basics of French grammar, practical translation advice, and well-designed exercises—and updated it. The readings are well chosen: Proust’s madeleine passage provides a nice literary counterpart to Descartes’s Méditations, for example. Unlike Stack and Sandberg, however, Brickman includes readings from Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Gabrielle Roy, among others, that reflect the diversity of the French-speaking world. The textbook takes a no-nonsense approach to its subject, walking students through strategies for making sense of French texts and alerting them to common pitfalls (“Ne… Que Means Only,” a section header warns). Experienced French instructors may question some of Brickman’s choices, however. Her advice that students write out verb paradigms, for example, may not prove to be helpful to many students. My own experience is that copying material out of a textbook is often a passive, mechanical activity: the student does not need to pay attention, and therefore the information is not“encoded.”A much better strategy is to write individual subject-verb pairs on flash cards, with their translation on the opposite side. The student can then quiz himself/herself by mixing up the cards—this technique relies upon one of the most basic principles of learning: active recall strengthens memory. Some of the grammatical explanations, moreover, are misleading. It is not helpful to use “I lived there for ten years” as an example of how a French imperfect might be translated as an English simple past, since it is difficult to see how “I lived there for ten years”could be translated into French as anything but“J’y ai vécu (or‘j’y vécus’) pendant dix ans”(what matters is not the length of time, but rather our attitude toward the action as completed). Finally, it would be helpful to include some texts of the sort that graduate students are likely to encounter in their research: literature and critical theory are interesting and entertaining, but a scholarly treatment of the sociology of sport or medieval lay piety might be a more representative “real-life example.”These are quibbles, however, and students and teachers alike will find much to like in this fresh and affordable textbook. Catholic University of America Peter W. Shoemaker ...