FREN301

Intermediate French I

Christian wind, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Department of FHIS offers a series of eight courses designed to build students’ skills progressively in the four basic communicative functions of listening, reading, writing, and speaking. FREN 301 is the first of a pair of Intermediate courses—301 and 302—aligned with level B1 objectives of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).

With an approach that is communicative and collaborative, inductive and interactive, the course aims to reinforce the skills acquired at the A1 and A2 levels and provides students with the tools to understand and use French independently. At the B1 level, you will have the opportunity to go beyond everyday communication situations in order to express yourself on current social and cultural issues.

In FREN 301, you will be welcomed and supported so that you have all the tools necessary to move forward with confidence. The first few weeks of the semester will allow you to review essential concepts before moving on to more advanced material.

Note: This course is not available for credit to students with French Immersion 12 or those who were educated in a Francophone school.

In FREN 301 and FREN 302, you can expect to:

– Consolidate and refine previously acquired grammar points (such as pronouns and past tenses) and learn new structures (such as the subjunctive, complex past tenses, and logical connectors) to enrich both spoken and written expression.

– Explore a wide variety of themes (e.g., art, travel, work, ecology, relationships, new technologies, etc.), which will serve as topics for discussion, writing, and vocabulary expansion.

– Study authentic materials (literary excerpts, news articles, videos, podcasts, songs, etc.) to strengthen key language skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking).

– Develop intercultural skills through activities focused on various Francophone cultures, both in Canada and around the world.

– Acquire tools to express and justify your opinion, recount an experience, describe and analyze a work of art, talk about your plans and wishes, and give advice, among other abilities.

– Work individually, in small groups, and with the whole class to explore different ways of learning and mastering the language.

Language of instruction: French

Recommended pre-requisites: one of FREN 12, FREN 112, FREN 202, or assignment based on placement test. Credit will be granted for only one of FREN 301 or FREN 122. Equivalency: FREN 122.

Elementary French I

A course for non-specialists based on the A2 level of the European Framework and focused on the understanding and production of detached sentences and expressions related to everyday life (such as personal and familial information and one’s immediate environment including transportation, recreation, and shopping).

French grammatical structures such as past tenses, pronouns, negation, comparison, and the future tense will be studied with an interactive approach, stressing communicative competences.

This practice will include:

• communicating in the context of the practical exchange of information on familiar topics;
• understanding spoken messages;
• reading short texts such as personal letters, ads, schedules, short articles;
• expressing practical ideas and opinions both orally and in writing.
• learning about diverse cultures of the French-speaking world.

Three hours a week will be devoted to providing students with communicational tools that help to deal with everyday situations that one might encounter in a French speaking region.

At the end of the semester, students will be able to understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance, to communicate about routine tasks requiring direct exchange of information on familiar matters, to describe aspects of their background, immediate environment and ordinary needs.

Lectures and class discussions are mostly conducted in French. If you are unsure whether this is the appropriate level of French course for you, click here.

Language of instruction: French

Recommended pre-requisites: one of FREN 11, FREN 102, or assignment based on placement test.

Race, Ethnicity and Language

Instructor: Marie-Eve Bouchard
Language of instruction: French

This course is based on the fundamental idea that discourse practices are an important indicator of wider social and cultural structures. Language has a key role to play in the racial and ethnic boundary-making processes, as it is a vehicle for the ideologies that get attached to racialized and ethnicized subjects. It is through language that racial and ethnic ideologies are produced and reproduced, perpetuated and resisted.

This course takes interest in the construction and maintenance of racial and ethnic boundaries through the use of language. This course is built around two main questions:

1. If race and ethnicity are ways of categorizing identity (rather than being inherited essences of identity), then how and why are race and ethnicity so powerful in shaping social life and experience?
2. If race, ethnicity, and language are social constructs, how can we (as citizens, students, and scholars) represent and discuss these concepts without reifying them?

We will read a range of ethnographies and articles that seek to overcome these dilemmas.

Recommended readings: Most readings will be available on Canvas.

Redefining Courtliness

Cod. Pal. germ. 208, f° 82v

Courtliness has been one of the most fundamental concepts in the study of medieval literature for almost 150 years. When he described “amour courtois” in 1883, Gaston Paris might not have imagined the perennial critical success that the term would have, as well as its lexical productivity, leading to cognate notions such as courtoisie/courtliness, courtly culture, courtly politics, grand chant courtois and, of course, courtly literature.

But what exactly is courtliness? Is it a social phenomenon? An aesthetic? An ideology? A way to regulate human relations within feudal courts? A narrative and poetic framework that organizes writing about adventures and love? A fantasy concocted by troubadours and trouvères, but never realized as such or, on the contrary, an authentic way of life that dominated the Occitan- and French-speaking courts of the 12^th century and beyond?

New critical perspectives of recent decades have profoundly transformed the ways in which we might envisage courtliness. Gender studies and queer studies shed new light on courtly heteronormativity, while feminist approaches help us better understand the dialectics of emancipation and objectification that structure courtly writing. The global medieval perspective helps us better comprehend how courtliness anchors itself within a series of concentric geopolitical and geocultural circles that stretch from Al-Andalus to the Holy Land. Material philology and new codicology shed light on the networks of production and reception, located at the intersection of courts and cities, that allow the dissemination of courtly phenomena.

Required readings:

1. Poésie des troubadours. Henri Gougaud (ed.)., René Laveau & René Nelli (trans.). Paris: Points, 2009
2. Marie de France, Lais. Philippe Walter (trans.). Paris: Folio Gallimard, 2020
3. Tristan et Iseut. Les Poèmes français, la saga norroise. Philippe Walter (trans.). Paris: Lettres gothiques, 1989
4. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la charrette. Alfred Foulet & Karl Uitti (ed. & trans.). Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020
5. Heldris de Cornouaille, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (ed. & trans.). East Lansing (Mich.): Michigan State University Press, 1999
6. Guillaume de Lorris, Le Roman de la Rose. Jean Dufournet (ed. & trans.). Paris: GF Flammarion, 1999

NOTE: Item 5 (Heldris de Cornouaille, Silence) is available online through UBC Library.

Language of instruction: French