F492: French for Graduate Reading Knowledge

Syllabus:

This is the website I made for the course in Summer 2004. The links in the syllabus are the day’s transparencies with the grammar and homework.

Description:

Together with F491, the objective of this course is to provide graduate students with a receptive knowledge of written French. Students have covered the major grammatical structures in F491; these are reinforced and built upon in F492, but greater emphasis is placed on translation. In addition to daily grammar exercises and text preparation, there was also a long-term translation project: students selected academic articles from their fields of interest and translated approximately eight pages into fluent academic English.

Reflection:

This is the toughest course I have ever taught. It pushed me to adapt the style of teaching I had learned for undergraduate instruction and adopt methods that were more appropriate for graduate students, most of whom were older than I was. It also taught me how to think about learning a language in ways other than by speaking it, and how to field some tricky and unexpected questions. My experience teaching F492 now stands as a benchmark for how far I’ve come as an instructor and as a graduate student. If I had this course to teach again, I would be much more confident and laid-back in my teaching, and much less worried about daily classwork.