LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

French urban space: The city in French literature

Charlie Mansfield - 27 June 2008

French Urban Space helps you read and study the Paris novels of the nineteenth century. Its key aims are to improve your reading strategies for French literature. The activities show you how to generate essay questions, develop arguments and create your own original material for writing papers. You can work through the whole package over a semester whilst reading the French novels of the nineteenth century, guided by your lecturer.

These online materials are a set of resources that encourage undergraduates to engage with area studies through French language and through French literary studies. The materials developed do not simply use web technologies to add interactivity to the learning objects (LOs) but also equip humanities students with an introductory understanding of the emerging technologies of mark-up for handling digital texts in the Web 2.0 era of The Semantic Web.

OpenLearn modern languages courses

- 12 September 2007

The Open University has published several online language learning material on its OpenLearn website. The French module 'En ville' will suit absolute beginners while 'Bien dans sa peau' will suit those with some previous knowledge. The Spanish modules are available for beginners ('Espacios públicos'), upper intermediate ('La historia piedra a piedra'), and advanced ('Perspectivas porteñas' and 'Con mis propias manos'). The German materials include a unit at upper intermediate level about family life in Germany ('Lebensumstaende'), and at advanced level about regions and political structures ('Regionen, Traditionen und Geschichte').

French: A mobile-learning resource for "The Book in Middle French"

- 27 February 2006

This development project was to design an introductory set of electronic exercises for Year 2 undergraduates approaching medieval literature for the first time. The reusable learning objects provide a phenomenological approach to the material existence of the book as it appeared in the early 1400s in France. The aim of the objects is to communicate the state of book- and script technologies at that time. The resource pack contains interactive exercises for use on the mobile smart-phone or PDA.

French: Language resources

Pascal Venier - 15 November 2004

A gateway to French learning resources, produced by the School of Modern Languages, University of Salford. It contains links which include Contemporary Society, Culture and Business French.

French: RealFrench.net

Chris Dawson - 12 March 2004

The realfrench.net website is a collection of free online French-teaching resources developed by the Department of Languages and the Department of Information and Communications, MMU. It includes a large number of interactive vocabulary games, grammar notes and interactive exercises, links, Internet worksheets and messageboards.

Language Testing: Dialang: Diagnostic Tests for Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish

Dialang - 13 January 2004

DIALANG offers validated tests of different language skills, together with a range of feedback and expert advice on how to improve your skills. It also offers scientifically validated self-assessment activities and allows users to determine their language level, strengths and weaknesses as well as to increase their awareness of current skills and of what it means to know a language. It has been developed by more than 20 major European institutions, with the backing of the European Commission and is based on the Council of Europe's "Common European Framework of reference", which has become established throughout Europe as the most widely recognized frame of reference in the field of language learning.

Authorware: The GISMO Project (Guildhall Interactive Software for Multimedia Online)

Steve Cushion - 1 May 2003

A selection of teaching materials produced by The Department of Humanities, Arts and Languages at London Metropolitan University using the authoring program developed within the department that allows language teachers to prepare their own audio-enhanced websites containing a variety of interactive exercises. Any educational institution is welcome to use this material. The software combines the ability to edit your own text and then to record someone reading it, all using the same program. The sound and text are then automatically integrated and a web page containing the exercises is generated.

French: E-pack (sample)

Cecile Tschirhart - 20 March 2003

These materials represent a sample of the interactive online exercises developed at London Metropolitan University for beginners in French. The exercises combine sound, image and text in a single activity and provide instant feedback. They cover the main language learning skills of listening, reading, writing and grammar and involve a variety of activities, such as matching, reordering and games.

French: Reading French 2000

Brian Gill - 11 March 2003

A web-based independent learning course for French for students at the University of Calgary but freely accessible to anyone who wishes to study the course autonomously and online.

French grammar question bank

- 26 September 2002

This bank of over 1,000 questions was created using Question Mark Perception. It was aimed at first year Undergraduate students of French. The grammar topics covered include possessive adjectives, partitive articles, demonstrative adjectives and pronouns, relative pronouns, direct and indirect object pronouns and verb tenses. Question types are either Selection (student chooses correct item from drop-down list) or Fill in Blanks. All questions have minimum feedback of correct answer; many have differentiated feedback and marking. The questions have been drawn mainly from GramEx French or devised using the Astcovea French concordancer. The bank can be used by institutions running Question Mark Perception to create diagnostic, formative or summative tests.

French: Listening comprehension - Club Méditerranée - transcription exercise

- 26 September 2002

This is an audio transcription exercise aimed at first year Undergraduate French students. The recording gives information on the holiday firm Club Méditerranée and the kind of clients it attracts. There are buttons on screen which the user can click at any time to hear the whole recording or a short section of it. The user is advised to begin by listening to the whole recording at least once without trying to type anything, and then to listen section by section, typing what they s/he has heard. The user is allowed 3 attempts at each section, after which the work is checked for mistakes and automatically marked. The "Show Answer" button brings up the correct response and allows the user to proceed without scoring any points. During the course of the exercise the full correct transcript is compiled on the right of the screen. This exercise was created using Authorware. Provided the resources are in the same folder, double clicking the file '3clubmed' should launch the programme.

French: for beginners and general French grammar

- 26 September 2002

Interactive exercises for French created using 'Interactive Language Learning Authorware' designed by Steve Cushion, Guildhall University. The materials come in two files (A and B) which are compressed files that can be self-extracted by clicking on them. The programs run using a web browser and can be started by clicking on the 'home' icon.

Phonetics: for Students of Modern Languages

- 25 September 2002

An introductory phonetics course for students of French, German and Spanish

French: Online language resources for intermediate/advanced learners

- 25 September 2002

The French language exercises available on this site consists of sentences for translation, grammar and vocabulary exercises which were originally designed for students on a second year French language course at the University of Portsmouth. They contain grammar difficulties and a variety of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions drawn from articles studied in class. They enabled students to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. The external links are grouped by the following categories: Grammaire, Dictionnaires/Glossaires, Traduction and Liens Utiles.

French: Corpus of spoken French

- 25 September 2002

Ce corpus contient les transcriptions de 95 entretiens, de longueurs variées, enregistrés sur le vif dans le Lot, le Minervois, à Paris et en Bretagne. Les thèmes de discussion comprennent une gamme de fonctions linguistiques différentes: transfert d'informations sur une région, instructions, narrations, argumentations sur les relations familiales, le racisme, la politique ou linformatisation de la société. Les thèmes de conversation ont émergé des centres d'intérêt des locuteurs. Les locuteurs, dont 45 hommes et 50 femmes, sont âgés de 7 à 88 ans et incluent un éventail de niveaux d'education. Le Résumé des entretiens détaille sous forme de table les donnes démographiques, sociologiques et contextuelles (identité, longueur en minutes, sexe, âge et niveau déduction) de chaque entretien/locuteur.

French: Difficultés de la langue française

- 25 September 2002

This 2-semester grammar course is essentially geared towards English Learners of French and is intended to improve students' writing skills. Its main aim is to improve writing accuracy at noun phrase and sentence level; nevertheless, it also aims to strengthen students writing techniques and text-production/text-transformation skills through a review of linguistic processes of pronominalisation. It originated from the observation (i.e. via several error analyses conducted between 1997 and 1999) that foreign learners of French recurrently make particular mistakes when they write and that this is often due to a lack of grammatical knowledge. Thus, it is hypothesised that these mistakes can be avoided thanks to an introduction to/a revision of basic grammatical concepts (i.e. What is a Part of Speech? What is a Grammatical Function? What do Gender and Number mean? Etc). Further, though the course mainly focuses on writing skills, register differences, and in particular stylistic differences between written and oral expression, will also be underlined. Finally, this programme also reviews central difficulties linked to the choice and use of tenses in French (second semester).