Resources: Bescherelle Grammar

Bescherelle 3: Grammaire Pour Tous: Bescherelle 3 - Grammaire Pour Tous (French Edition)

Recently, I have started reading the Bescherelle French Grammar reference.  If you are not really into grammar, this may not interest you.  However, if you are determined to learn French, I have a couple reasons I think you should consider reading or at least skimming this grammar, even if grammar "n'est pas votre truc"

1. Grammar is important to the French society.  You can see this in their writing system (a good deal of spelling reflects the grammatical value of a word instead of its phonetic value), you can see this in France's school system (the Bescherelle Grammar and Conjugation references are must-haves for every student), and you can see this in everyday interactions (In my observations it seems to me that French speakers delight in viewing their language as grammatically complex and they have a very secure language attitude in relation to this).

2. This grammar can serve as a source for input flooding in written form.  There are both grammatically correct and grammatically incorrect (marked clearly) examples in this grammar.  The ability to compare the two is particularly helpful for learning which constructions are acceptable and which are not.

Using the Hachette Grammar Workbooks

The following lists some ideas for using the Hachette Grammar series beyond its own suggestions:

1. Complete each exercise orally before writing the answers.
2. As you work through the workbooks, highlight, in the table of contents, the concepts with which you have difficulty so that you can easily access them for future review.
3. Circle exercises you would like to review.
4. Mark exercises that you would find helpful to do with a native speaker.
5. Record yourself doing the free writing exercises, then listen to the recording with a native speaker and ask him or her to give you feedback.

Reflections: The Hachette Grammar Workbooks

The following is a list of some of my thoughts on using the Hachette Grammar Series:

• I found that month 6 of intensive language learning was the perfect time for me to start working through this systematic grammar series.  I attempted to start it during month 2 and again during month 4 but I found that there were too many answers that I was completely unsure of(probably about 75% at month 2 and 40% at month 4).
• At month 6, I was confident of about 90% of the material in the level A1 book even though I was probably at a level B2 in comprehension, and B1 in production at that time.
• I have preferred using the series as a systematic review rather than a first exposure to the grammar concepts.  At month 6, I had a solid foundation especially in oral comprehension and I was able to consult my memory on how I had heard things said by native speakers in order to choose answers to grammar questions.  This was a much more enjoyable way for me with my particular learning style, whereas someone else may have the patience and preference to learn the grammar concepts from a workbook like this.

Review: Hachette French Grammar Workbooks

The Hachette "Exercices de Grammaire" is a series of grammar workbooks for the french language which follow the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR) levels of language proficiency: A1, A2, B1, B2.

The editors state that their workbooks target adolescent or adult students of French as a foreign language and that the exercises are designed to be used in the classroom or for personal study.

I have been pleased with the following aspects of the series:

1. The workbooks are monolingual - French only for instructions and exercises
2. The workbooks introduce each new concept with a section of the examples for observation
3. Many of the exercises create a context - a letter, a conversation, a story
4. The exercises are thorough and systematic
5. Sprinkled throughout the chapters are suggested activities for free writing exercises

My only suggestion for improvement would be even more context for the exercises which focus on verb conjugations.  The most common way to teach verb conjugations seems to be to refer to them by their grammatical labels.  This gives learners a superficial understanding of the tenses' meanings in daily communication.  I am still on the look out for grammatical exercises which treat verb conjugations with deep meaning rather than grammatical labels.  This series gets closer than many others I have seen, but it is still not quite there.

Tomorrow, I will share some of my personal reflections on when I started using this series and why.  Then on Thursday, I will share some ideas of how I have modified some of the exercises in order to evaluate and strengthen all four areas of language acquisition rather than focusing primarily on writing as the series does.

Resources: Hachette French Grammar Workbooks

       














A couple months ago, I started working through this grammar series. This week I will review the Hachette workbooks and share some of the ways that I have been integrating this resource into our language learning sessions.

In Review: Thirteenth Week of French Language Learning

In Class:

• Oral Comprehension
• Subjunctive practice
• Punctuation
• Pronunciation
• Anglicisms
• Reading comprehension
• Register differentiation 
• Pet Vocabulary
• Relative Pronoun
• Public presentation and defense of an idea
• Jean de la Fontaine poem: "Le renard et le corbeau"

Language Sessions:

• Story-building
• Story reading: language helpers to us and us to language helpers
• Ear-training: vowels

On our own:

• Marathon vocabulary reviews
• Speaking practice: recording ourselves, role plays, ect.
• Listening comprehension: listening to Bible CD, recorded stories
• Watched cuisine DVD
• Watched French movie
• Working through French elementary school curriculum books for history, language, geography, science, etc. 

In Review: Twelfth Week of French Language Learning

In Class:

• Subjunctive Usage and Construction
• Article discussion on the theme of punctuality
• Cooking and recipe vocabulary
• Relative Pronouns
• Prepositions
• Oral Comprehension: Vacation Dialogue
• Discussion about current retirement debate in France
• Vocabulary surrounding the sense of hearing
• Vocabulary surrounding the sense of touch
• Vocabulary surrounding the sense of taste

Language Sessions:

• Story-building: playground busy picture
• Practice presenting our families and talking about family photos
• Information gap activity (Go Fish) to practice describing details
• Listening to stories read aloud
• Reading aloud: we began reading books (which we had heard read to us several times) aloud to our language helpers
• Thank you note writing

On our own:

• Always reviewing recordings
• Listening to stories read aloud
• Reading 

In Review: Eleventh Week of French Language Learning

In Class:

• Imperfect Tense Verb Construction
• Past Perfect Tense Verb Construction
• Vocabulary of will, plans, goals
• Punctuation
• Simple Past Tense Verb Construction
• Vocabulary surrounding the sense of smell

Language Sessions:

• Oral Comprehension of Numbers and Years
• Farm animal vocabulary
• Reading and discussing vocabulary and usage of words in low level children's books
• Timeline vocabulary
• Story-building: farm busy picture
• Recorded language helpers reading several children's books

On our own:

• Reviewed recordings of stories and vocabulary
• Sing intonation of dialogue recordings
• Reading at our reading level

In Review: Tenth Week of French Language Learning

In Class:

• Dictation Practice
• Conditional Tense Verb Construction
• Weather Vocabulary
• Reading Comprehension: article summary

Language Sessions:

• Ear-training: vowels
• Oral reading comprehension: language helper reads story aloud and we discuss it together
• Story-building with farm picture
• Game for describing things

On our own:

• Reviewed recordings
• Began reading low level books at our reading level (80-100% vocabulary comprehension)
• Anthropological Observation: Mapped the Saturday market; tallied social groupings at the market; tallied hat usage at the market

In Review: Ninth Week of French Language Learning

In Class:

• Learned culturally significant French songs
• Simple Future Verb Tense
• Weather vocabulary
• French Geography
• Learned a cultural recipe
• Opposites
• Learned about "Asterix" a very popular and cultural comic strip
• Indirect Pronouns

Language Sessions:

• Clothing vocabulary
• Entered Story-building phase Yeah!!!!
• Story-building with a messy bedroom busy picture, and a clean bedroom busy picture
• Fruit and vegetable vocabulary
• Story-building through a dining room busy picture, and a supermarket busy picture
• Input Flooding: vowel recognition
• Story-building through a bathroom busy picture
• Story-building through Creation story pictures

On our own:

• Reviewed language session recordings
• Listened to Bible Stories for children

In Review: Eighth Week of French Language Learning

In Class:

• Reading Comprehension
• Hobbies
• Job Interviews
• Demonstrative Pronouns
• Ear-training and pronunciation: liaisons, consonants
• Oral Comprehension
• Storying with imperfect verb tense
• Adverbs
• Pronoun "y"

Language Sessions:

• Input flooding for rhyming words
• Input flooding for minimal pairs
• Categorizing pictures vocabulary items by grammatical gender
• Soliciting the vocabulary for describing daily activities in the present tense
• Comprehending description of daily activities in the past tense
• Soliciting the vocabulary for describing the process of making crepes
• Soliciting the vocabulary for describing the process of washing dishes
• I Spy with busy pictures
• Listening to self-recordings of ourselves describing our daily activities, language helper gave corrections to our mistakes
• Soliciting the vocabulary for situational dialogues (e.g. first meeting someone, accidentally running into someone, giving condolences at a funeral)

Note: all our soliciting of vocabulary happens through the use of pictures with the help of some negotiating in French; soliciting vocabulary should not be a translation exercise.

On our own:

• Guided tour of the historic district of our tour
• Watched the children's cuisine DVD (we understand more every time)
• Reviewed language session recordings
• Reviewed class recordings
• Self-recordings
• Attended a small group Bible Study
• Watched a children's movie twice
• Listened to children's songs

In Review: Seventh Week of French Language Learning

In Class:
Imperfect Verb Tense
Use of "il y a"
Use of "pour"
Pronoun "en"
Sentiments
Letter writing
Reading comprehension

Language Sessions:
Input flooding of person and number agreement for verbal conjugation in the present tense
Kitchen vocabulary
TPR with kitchen, living room, and basic verbs (with language helper giving lists of instructions which we then have to remember and follow)
Reverse Role Play: Welcoming guests into home
Dining Room Vocabulary
TPR acitivites - setting the table for dinner, clearing the table, etc.
Possessive Pronoun and noun agreement practice: language helper said "at my house I have my..." and we echoed "at your house, you have your..." 
Categorizing pictures of vocabulary items into groups according to grammatical gender

On our own:
Guided tour of an historical castle in our town
Guided tour of our town's courthouse
Guided tour of our town's library: specifically their process of rebinding historical books
Reviewed recordings from language sessions
Reviewed recordings from class
Listened to children's music

Vowel Comparison Posts

Yesterday, I posted some information about French phonemic vowels.  Today, I have posted several posts which compare the French phonemic vowels to those of other languages.  My hope is that these posts might be a starting point for French language learners from which they can research further in order to improve their comprehension and production of the French language.

1. English vowels compared to French
2. Spanish vowels compared to French
3. German vowels compared to French
4. Dutch vowels compared to French
5. Japanese vowels compared to French
6. Standard Mandarin vowels compared to French
7. Western Armenian vowels compared to French

Disclaimers: these posts are by no means exhaustive and I do not claim to have specific experience with all of the listed languages.  I am only passing on phonological information that I was able to find on the internet, as well as some of my personal experience concerning the English language as it compares to French.  Furthermore, I only dealt with monophthong vowels in order to simplify the discussion a bit.

French Vowels Compared to English Vowels

As in French, English also has a large amount of phonemic vowels: up to 16 depending on the dialect (see English vowel chart below).

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However, English speakers who are learning French will still have particular trouble with vowels because French has 6-8 phonemic vowels that are not used in English.  What this means is that those six to eight vowels are interpreted by English speakers as allophones of one of the phonemic vowels in English, or simply as a foreign sounds.  For example, my brain interprets the vowel /y/ as an allophone of /u/; /ø/ as an allophone of /ə/; and since the French /ɛ/ is raised, /ɛ/ as an allophone of /e/.  The French phonemes /ɑ̃/ and /ɔ̃/ and /œ̃/ and /ɛ̃/ and /œ/ are all interpreted as foreiɡn sounds that my tonɡue is not comfortable with and which my ear sometimes has trouble distinɡuishinɡ.


In this sort of situation ear-training is essential.  The tongue will follow the ear, but until the ear hears the differences between these vowels, correct comprehension and pronunciation will always be somewhat of a guessing game.

French Vowel Chart:

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French Vowels Compared to Spanish Vowels

Spanish has the following 5 vowel phonemes.

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That means that Spanish speakers will have to train their ears to hear up to 10 new vowels when learning French.

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French Vowels Compared to German Vowels

German Phonology.  German Vowel Chart:

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French Vowel Chart:

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French Vowels Compared to Dutch Vowels

Dutch phonology.  Dutch vowel chart:

via

French vowel chart:

via

French Vowels Compared to Japanese Vowels

Japanese Phonology.  Japanese Vowel Chart

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French Vowel Chart:

via

French Vowels Compared to Standard Mandarin Vowels

Standard Mandarin is said to have anywhere from 2-8 phonemic vowels.  The two nucleus vowels in the barest Mandarin phonology are /a/ and /ə/.  This is expanded by some to include some or all of the following: /e/ ([e ~ ɛ ~ œ]), /o/ ([o ~ ɔ]), /ɨ/ ([z̩ ~ ʐ̩]), /i/ ([i]), /u/ ([ʊ ~ u]), and /y/ ([y]).  The allophones are listed in brackets.


Compare these to the French vowel chart below.  

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French Vowels Compared to Western Armenian Vowels

Western Armenian Phonology.  Armenian Vowel Chart:

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French Vowel Chart:

via