Teaching

Each of the four IUHP instructors taught one subject: grammar, literature, conversation, or culture, in addition to phonetics, which we all taught.

Grammar

The “textbook” I used was a compilation of grammar explanations and exercises put together by various IUHP instructors over the years. It is a little bit like a grandparent’s attic – somewhat cluttered but full of treasures. I chose to keep the book in its entirety, but only use selected portions in class.

Materials

We spent several weeks reviewing verb tenses, spending about a week each on past tenses, future and conditional tenses, and the subjunctive. We then covered various types of pronouns – object, relative, demonstrative, etc. – and finished off with a few odds and ends, such as the passive voice and verbs with infinitives. Whenever possible, I incorporated interesting and authentic examples. During our past tense unit, for example, I brought in an article from that morning’s paper about the previous evening’s soccer game, and showed two segments from Paris, je t’aime that illustrated the imparfait (“Faubourg Saint-Denis”) and the passé simple (“Bastille”). I also assigned compositions to practice verb tenses, such as the completion of a Breton fairy tale, “Le dragon de l’Elorn” for past tenses, and a reflective “Rêves et regrets” for future and conditional tenses.

“Enquête linguistique”

My favorite thing about the grammar classes was when the students themselves took charge. After a few weeks, the students’ awareness of various aspects of the surrounding language had been raised, and they asked me, their grammar teacher, about them. One group had noticed that their host families did not seem to use “ne” in negative statements; another had picked up on the peculiar inhaled “oui” that does not mean “yes” like an answer to a question.

I, in return, told them to figure it out themselves. We talked about the scientific method, and my students became little linguists: they listed their observations, formed hypotheses, and developed a method by which to gather data and test those hypotheses. For one week, they diligently hid their notebooks on their laps at the dinner table, then brought in their notes and came to conclusions. With only a few students and rather sporadic data-gathering, our results were not very refined, but they did identify some trends in ne-deletion and correctly discerned the pragmatic use of ingressive oui.

The upshot of this was that the students were very excited by their ability to use this process on numerous aspects of their language learning, and I was delighted to have turned them on to it while sharing with them what I do as a profession. (As a bonus, several of them later asked about studying linguistics in college.)

Phonetics

Similarly to the grammar text, the phonetics book is also a hodgepodge of descriptions and drills, from which I selected those that were most useful in twenty minutes. For future IUHP use, I am completely overhauling the phonetics book; when it is complete, I will include it here.

In small groups, we covered the aspects of French pronunciation most commonly problematic for Americans; our goal was to reduce the most salient markers of American accent in the students’ speech. We worked on intonation, final consonants, nasal vowels, and the famous R and /y/ (as in ‘rue’). Having taught F315 at IU, I brought in elements of this course to help IUHP students understand why certain sounds were problematic and how best to overcome them.