The Internet has the ability to provide reading material for students studying French in a third year course and beyond. This material can be designed to be appropriate for their level, with the goal that the students will be reading to learn. Since the reading material provides a wealth of cultural information about the country of France and acquaints students with information on international events and gives them a French perspective of these events, the goal is to have students improve reading skills as they learn about the culture of France.
By accessing the World Wide Web site , students and teachers can receive a daily summary of news events. The majority of these events occur in France and Europe, but they include as well items from around the world. Since this is distributed by Radio France Internationale, these summaries are from a French viewpoint, giving a contrast to the American news sources. The news events comes in two parts. One, entitled 'Les Titres,' is a short summary of the main news events of the day. The other, 'Revue de Presse', is a digest of the articles of Parisian and provincial French newspapers, including Liberation, Info-matin (while it was being published), France-Libre, Le Monde, Figaro, Nice-Matin, Nord-Eclair, to name a few. These are newspapers published in all parts of France.
The project is ideal for students who are at a level where they are ready to develop proficient reading skills. One of the problems faced by teachers of students at levels three, four, and five is how to find authentic reading material that is appropriate for students to comprehend without having to spend a large amount of time searching unfamiliar vocabulary in the dictionary. The articles presented by Radio France Internationale provide the appropriate type of reading material necessary for developing good reading skills with a minimum of work on the part of the teacher to prepare.
The problems encountered by readers in a second language have been addressed by researchers who have published several articles on the subject. These include the following texts:
By reviewing these articles one can learn that the necessary components of proficient reading are an ability to decode the text and having good background schemata. The latter, which refers to the previous knowledge a reader has about the subject of the text, is as important as the student's language ability in being able to extract meaning from a text. Appropriate texts should include material that involves students in cognitive processes that use their knowledge of the language as well as what they know about the subject matter so that they can make predictions when encountering unfamiliar vocabulary and structures. Proficient readers rely as much on what they know about the topic as they do on the actual text provided to them. When cues presented are not known, the reader goes to his knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about the meaning of the text. This permits the student to continue the reading activity without having to take time out to look up a word and thus lose the train of thought established. The focus is on reading to learn, not learning to read. One researcher (Westhoff) describes good reading materials: there should be abundant reading material at appropriate levels with enough fresh unknown elements to give the learner frequent opportunities to hypothesize about the meaning; but they should at the same time have enough familiar repeated elements to allow the reader to test these hypotheses.
The news items presented through Radio France Internationale is able to provide reading texts which meet these criteria. First of all the material is abundant; there will always be more items than can be used. In addition, the variety of news items range from worldwide political events to items about sports, plane crashes, natural disasters, and economic news. The teacher can choose those which he/she feels will be most acceptable for the class or the student. Since many are of events such as sports events, natural disasters, plane crashes, that are presented in the news in the United States, the students will have strong background schemata to help in understanding the reading selection. They will be in a position to hypothesize about the meaning of the text when unfamiliar words or difficult syntax are presented.
Some of the items will be less familiar to students, especially those of political, economic and social events in France and Europe. For these items, the teacher can start with short selections, have students become familiar with both the events and the vocabulary used to relate the event. Gradually the amount of information on these events can be increased as the students become proficient in their ability to comprehend the texts.
By using subject matter with which the students are familiar, they will be in a position to concentrate more on learning information from the material than in concentrating on the vocabulary and syntax. They are reading to learn.
What one learns through reading these texts is a wide variety of cultural information about present-day France. The following is a list of some of the areas of information that was presented during the fall semester.
Social news: a computer hacker in France wanted by the FBI; a decrease in the level of consumption of both wine and bread; the number of deaths on the highways; more stringent penalties for those caught driving under the influence of alcohol; a decrease in the number of AIDS cases reported in France; an alert regarding the level of pollution in Paris; social unrest among young people, causing riots in some cities.
Political and economic news: nuclear testing by France in the Pacific and the international reaction to it; the wave of bombing attacks, the subsequent arrests and the relation of these to the election in Algeria (this included a lesson on the historical relationship between France and Algeria); the strikes taking place in France, with profiles of those affected by the strike, including the size of the towns they live in, their income, and their attitude to the strikes; the death of Mitterand and funeral observances; commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the death of De Gaulle; polls reporting the popularity of both president Chirac and prime minister Juppe.
Several of these items required that historical information be given to explain the present day situation. This permits a history lesson that contains more context than presenting a straight-forward history lesson.
The teacher can get access to Radio France International in two ways, each having advantages and disadvantages. By using the Internet and going to the URL , the teacher will find the news summaries. The accents are included on this. The disadvantage is that it is available for one day only and if the teacher does not have daily access, he/she may not be able to follow all the news. The other way is to subscribe through e-mail by writing to this address: LISTPROC@CREN.ORG . The same material will be sent on a daily basis. The advantage is that this can be stored. The disadvantage is that this form does not contain accent marks.
The teacher can skim the daily transmission and choose those items which he/she feels will be most appropriate and transfer these to a word processing program. He/she can then adapt the material to the abilities of the students. In effect the teacher can tailor-make the articles for each class and choose to highlight, make comments, and give definitions as he/she chooses.
The first step is to determine if any of the vocabulary or syntax will be a deterrent in the students' comprehension. If there are, several options exist. These include:
The option chosen will be determined by the purpose of the reading. If a quick reading is the goal, then putting unfamiliar vocabulary in English or giving a definition in French will permit the student to get the gist of the article quickly and be ready for discussion. However, the students will not have given much attention to the words that were translated. But if a discussion of the article or writing activity follows, the students will be required to note those words that are a necessary part of the activity and therefore will give attention at the time needed. If it is a word repeated frequently then it is likely that it will become a part of the student's vocabulary, without it having been assigned as such. Those words that were defined but not used in following activities will have been an aid; but not being necessary at this point, they will not have interfered with the students reading comprehension.
Suggestions 3 and 4 are useful as pre-reading activities. These types of activities should be useful in helping students understand the processes involved in reading and train them in developing into proficient readers. By training students to make hypotheses, they should eventually learn to do this on their own.
A list of vocabulary should be a part of the assignment. This is especially true for the stories that become continuing dramas. In the fall semester the bombings in France and Algeria, the strikes, and the death of Mitterand were such stories that contained new vocabulary that was repeated in subsequent stories and because words familiar to the students. All of these stories had vocabulary specific to them, which the students now are quite familiar with.
While grammar is not the focus of this exercise, it can be reinforced easily by the teacher's ability to manipulate the items through the word processing program. He/she can easily mark, by underlining, putting in bold or italics, certain constructions he/she wants the students to note. When the grammar lesson was studying adverbs, it was very easy to put all the adverbs in bold so that the students would note how they were formed and used. Another time, an item contained a good example of a conditional sentence, which was easily highlighted. Since at this level conditional sentences and the subjunctive is studied, it is always useful to note when these are used in the articles and highlight them. It should also be noted that the imperfect and the passe compose are used as past tenses so that a knowledge of the passe simple is not necessary for this reading activity.
In addition to the choice of presentation of the text, the teacher has a choice of presentation as a class activity. One item only may be chosen each day for discussion. Or the teacher may prefer to collect several items and have a reading once a week. These can also be used as a longer reading assignments over a period of days.
The items may be used for oral discussions on a simple level, asking students to explain what they understood about the reading with the purpose of reinforcing vocabulary and having students practice conversation. At more advanced levels, students can discuss what they know in addition about the subject. Discussions can be had also on comparisons of the viewpoint presented and the viewpoint of the same item in the United States. Political and economic events in France can be compared to such events in this country.
These items can be used to generate writing by the students. For those events which are continuing, they can at certain points be asked to reread all the items about the event and write an essay describing what has been happening. They can be asked to use them to write letters to a real or imagined correspondent in France and give their viewpoint of the situation or ask further questions about it.
Because of the possibilities of choice offered to the teacher, this activity had become a useful reading assignment. It offers a choice of presentation, one that is tailor-made for the class. It offers a choice of responding activity, such as class discussions, written assignments, not only of the event itself but of comparisons to the occurrence of such events in the United States. It permits students to learn of international events that they may not have the opportunity to read about in this country. One of the outcomes I have noticed is that my students become more aware of news events and spend more time
listening to the news and reading about it. They also relate incidents of having knowledge useful in other classes that other students do not have. Students who correspond with French penpals will have a better understanding of their correspondents' life and those planning visits to France will be in a position to talk knowledgeably with their hosts about political, economic, and social events occurring in the country.
Marcille Ansorge
Lincoln Public Schools
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