Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

FR 257 is the third term of a three term sequence, which equals two full years of college French. It provides the same content as FR 202 and 203, but in a one term accelerated format. FR 257 continues the work begun in FR 256, expanding and perfecting the communicative use of French and cultural awareness.
FR 257 is offered for eight hours of transfer credit. It satisfies the foreign language requirement for the B.A. degree, counts towards the Arts and Letters distribution requirements for the A.A. degree, and contributes to the general education requirement for other Associate Degrees.

Students successfully completing the Second Year French sequence:

1. Are able to handle successfully most uncomplicated communicative tasks and social situations.
2. Can initiate, sustain, and close a general conversation with a number of strategies appropriate to a range of circumstances and topics.
3. Can generally be understood even by native speakers not accustomed to dealing with non native speakers.
4. Are beginning to use paragraph-length connected discourse and narrate and describe in major time and aspect frames.

Students are expected to attend all classes, participate actively in classroom activities, and prepare oral and written homework assignments. Students will work with audio tapes in the media center or at home, and they may meet with the teacher in conferences. After the introduction to the course, French will be used in the classroom at all times. Students should plan to spend a minimum of one hour in preparation and practice outside of class for each class hour.

Students are assessed globally rather than from the point of view of the presence or absence of a given linguistic feature. Students will be assessed through a daily evaluation of their individual progress and improving competence in using the language as demonstrated by the quality of oral and written preparation and participation and daily oral and written assignments. Though tests are not used as an assessment tool, attendance is an important factor.

The course focuses on the acquisition and correct use of pronunciation and intonation, grammatical structures, functional vocabulary, and cultural concepts for the purpose of successful communication in French. Successful students have reviewed, expanded, and perfected previously learned material, have practiced, and will be able to use the following communication topics and structures:
 

1. Communication topics
   1. Entertainment
   2. Expressing preferences, opinions, attitudes, emotions, intentions
   3. Earning and spending money; shopping, price, quality
   4. More advanced descriptions and narrations
   5. Geography
   6. Travel
   7. Levels of language
2. Structures
   1. Additional indefinite, negative, and time expressions
   2. Subjunctive and past subjunctive
   3. Double pronoun objects
   4. Comparatives and superlatives
   5. Relative pronouns and clauses
   6. Additional uses of the future and conditional
   7. Possessive pronouns
   8. Indirect discourse
   9. Additional practice with prepositions and articles
   10. Additional infinitive constructions
   11. Literary tenses