Course Objectives

Upon successfully completing this course, you will be able to:

  1. Listening: The student sustains understanding over long stretches of speech. The student sustains understanding on a variety of topics pertaining to different times and places; however understanding of authentic texts may still be incomplete.
  2. Speaking: The student can initiate, sustain, and close a general conversation, although errors may be evident. The student will be able to use circumlocution to compensate for limited vocabulary. Student will learn to use connected discourse, particularly for simple narration or description. The speaker will generally be understood even by natives not accustomed to dealing with speakers at this level, although repetition may still be required.
  3. Reading: The student will grasp main ideas and information from texts featuring description and narration. The student will understand authentic material such as newspaper or magazine articles upon reading them more than once.
  4. Writing: The student can take notes in some detail on familiar topics and respond in writing to personal questions. The student can write simple letters, brief synopses and paraphrases, summaries of biographical data, work, cultural and school experience. The student begins to describe and narrate in coherent paragraphs. The student's writing, though faulty, is generally comprehensible to natives used to the writing of non-native.
  5. Culture: The ACTFL standards include Culture, Connections, Comparisons and Communities as part of foreign language instruction and assessment. Within these areas, students will be able to:
    • Demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the practices and perspectives of the culture studied
    • Acquire information and recognize the distinctive viewpoints that are only available through the foreign language and its cultures
    • Demonstrate understanding of the concept of culture through comparisons of the cultures studied and their own
    • Use the language both within and beyond the school setting
    • Read, discuss and write about topics concerning the francophone cultures featured in textbooks and in target language media at the intermediate level