New Course: Intermediate French for Professionals Posted by meaghan on May 9, 2022 in For Learners, Learning Material Updates
Make deeper personal and professional connections in French with the Intermediate French for Professionals Course.
If you live and work in the Francophone world and you need to level up beyond the beginner fundamentals, this course is for you.
What will you learn?
This course will help you progress from CEFR B1-B2 (ACTFL Intermediate Mid – Advanced Mid) with 70+ hours of learning materials, including:
- 20 conversation lessons
- 66 vocabulary lessons (covering 1,051 words and phrases)
- 49 grammar lessons
For beginners nothing will build your proficiency faster than learning the most useful, high-frequency vocabulary. That’s still true for intermediate learners, but what’s “most useful” vocab becomes more complex: more vocab depth, idioms, domain-specific terminology, etc.
But providing topical vocab lists (like “office objects” or “directions”) actually hurts your ability to retain what you’re learning due to “semantic interference”. It’s also just not very fun.
Instead, when we develop lessons, we think of a common scenario a French learner might find themselves in at work or in town. Then we tell a story about it. What are you likely to be doing? Who are the characters you’ll interact with? What conversations would you have?
This approach lends itself to more natural speech you might not find in a textbook approach, as well as other retention tactics like “spiraling” (resurfacing previously learned material) and “interleaving” (reinforcing material in multiple modalities and contexts). A lesson about technology can weave in office terms, occupations, comparison words, etc. in a more effective and memorable way.
Conversations, Vocabulary, and Grammar
Each of the 10 units contain three lesson types that support this storytelling format:
- Conversation lessons are 60-minute exercises based on the unit theme. For example, in a unit about office technology, two employees discuss their company’s new messaging system.
- Vocab lessons are 30-minute exercised that build vocabulary needed to understand the theme and the conversations. The conversation about the messaging system is supported by two vocabulary lessons about comparing technologies.
- Grammar lessons are 20-minute exercises that expand on grammar patterns seen elsewhere in the unit. The conversation about the messaging system uses the phrase “une fois que…” (once…), so the companion grammar lesson focuses on how to describe sequences of events.
For educators hoping to use this course with students, review the Scope and Sequence documents included in each unit for help with lesson planning and suggested classroom activities.
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