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.