This video features one image with voice over.
Image: [Professor Catherine Theobald sits in front of the camera and speaks to us.]
Voice-over:
[Bonjour! Je m'appelle Catherine Theobald. Je suis professeur de français. Bienvenue! Welcome! Hello! My name is Professor Theobald, and I'm a French and Francophone Studies professor here at Brandeis. Thank you for checking out this video about French 104 and 105. That's our fourth semester and fifth semester class, and I'm doing this video together because these two classes really do dovetail. We use the same grammar workbook called Contrastes, although grammar certainly isn't the center of this class, I'll just go into that a little bit.
In 104 we really try to reinforce the structures that you learn in your first three semesters, past tenses, descriptions, some subjunctive, not a lot of new structures going on there. In 105, we branch out a little bit more and work on demonstratives, work on your connecting words when you're writing. But, we certainly work on the four skills and culture every single day, so listening, speaking, writing in class, very active, lots of discussions, culture infuses everything that we do and that could be as in today when I taught 105, we're talking about the civil war in Algeria because we're reading a short story at the end of this semester about assimilation and refugee status and these sorts of things.
So both of these classes really do focus on current events, what's happening now in France and other Francophone countries. In 104, the units are on time and perceptions of time and history and then space, geography but also personal space and then it ends with current events. So that could be immigration, it could be universalism. In 105 we start with the ideas of French language and what's happening with slang, texting language, and then we move into this culture of intellectualism and where that is right now, and the idea of eloquence, and then our final unit in 105 is on social movements so that could be the march for climate, that could be the gilets jaunes, that could be working on mobilisation around the idea of refugees in France.
So, thank you for listening, and I hope to see you in class!
Merci! Au'revoir!]