Communication progressive du français des affaires par Jean-Luc Penfornis (review)

PENFORNIS, JEAN-LUC. Communication progressive du français des affaires. Paris: CLE International, 2010. ISBN 978-2-09-035363-1. Pp. 154. 18,80 a. . Audio CD. ISBN 978-2-09-032275-0. 16,60 a. . Corrigés. ISBN 978-2-09-035364-8. 8,10 a. This engaging and easy-to-use textbook for intermediate-level students could make for a lively course. With forty lessons dedicated to oral skills and thirty-four to written skills, it covers all the areas that a business professional would encounter in daily life. For instance, students are asked to contact a client by phone and make an appointment. They will book a trip to France, choose a rental car, and go to the hotel before heading for a restaurant. The following day, they will go to a business meeting, participate in a toast, all before giving a presentation at a seminar. Life for business people in France seems idyllic. Of course, it is never that easy and the book covers potential mishaps: one gets the wrong phone number, the correspondent is never there, the flight is delayed, luggage is lost, the meeting is postponed if not canceled, the hotel room is substandard, the restaurant bill is excessive, and when finally the meeting takes place, all the participants disagree with each other. If you think this is all bad enough and want to leave France right away, things will turn for the worse after lesson fifty. The market share of your company is falling, forcing you to look for another job, and you end up as a telemarketer. Orders get canceled, and deliveries are late at best. When you believe you have reached the bottom, you learn that your bank charged you twice, a fire started in your warehouse, and you have a car accident. In the last lesson, you end up writing a complaint letter to your insurance company, which refuses to cover all the damages. On a positive note, there are no lessons about strikes or lawsuits. Things do not have to be that awful, however. With seventy-four lessons, the teacher has more than enough materials to design a syllabus that will answer all the needs of the students. Each lesson is presented on two pages. On the left page, there is a short dialogue one can listen to on a CD, or a series of E-mails, followed by phrases and expressions that can be used in context. On the right page, there are three to four activities. The first one asks, as an objective, to understand and analyze the information provided in the dialogs, discourses, or E-mails on the first page. The others follow a task-based approach. They encourage students to exchange information, explore an issue, solve a problem, or defend an argument. Ultimately, students will have to produce a dialog or write an E-mail similar to the one introducing the lesson. The teacher can connect different lessons to reach well-defined goals or objectives. She could choose only the lessons where business life in France is always simple and pleasant, or pick ones presenting issues and thus concentrate on problem-solving skills. It would certainly bring a new pragmatic dimension to the traditional French composition THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 86, No. 1, October 2012 Printed in U.S.A. REVIEWS Methods and Materials edited by Sarah Jourdain 166 and conversation course or reinforce oral and writing skills in a follow-up course to French for Business. With his new textbook, Penfornis opens the door to many possibilities. University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Stéphane Pillet WOOD, ALLEN G., ed. Global Business Languages: Challenges and Critical Junctures. Vol. 15. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2010. ISBN 1-932739-21-3. Pp. 175. It is still unclear to scholars what it means to teach foreign language “for business.” This was true even before the triple storm currently threatening French in America: the crisis in the humanities, the mass closing of French programs nationally, and the growing austerities facing education at large. University French departments still adopt “business French” curricula with delicate ambivalence, often viewing them as competing with literature or linguistics. Yet le français...