This page presents syllabus and lesson plan examples, examples of student work, and evidence of teaching effectiveness at the university level.
Syllabus and Lesson Plan Samples
This introductory syllabus was created for the high school Honors French 1 course at WP Davidson High School. The classes were composed of 16-25 students ranging from 14 to 17 years old. Most students in this class were in the 9th grade.
This proposed syllabus was created to be adapted for an intermediate or advanced French conversation class at the university level. Students would need to have completed at least the introductory language sequence in order to enroll in this course.
This culture and grammar lesson plan (version with additional English) was used when teaching the penultimate unit of a French 101 course at the University of Alabama. The textbook used for this course was the second edition of Rond-Point. There were 15-20 students enrolled in the classes at this level, and each class was 75 minutes long. The final projects for this course (imagined restaurant promotional videos) are displayed in the student work section below.
Student Work
Student work has been anonymized based on student preferences.
In-Class Work
Students spend much of their class time working in groups. To guide student practice of new concepts, I use Gallery Walks, Information Gap Activities, Concept Maps, Think-Pair-Share, modified KWL activities, and Information Gap Activities. The activity at this link is typical of language practice in my classrooms. Students co-created stories with their classmates during a modified Gallery Walk to practice the passé composé. This was a French 101 activity at the University of Alabama.
Digital Projects
As a final course project for Honors French 2 at W.P. Davidson High School, students created a bande-dessinée following the sequence outlined in this document. The goal was to assess student use of conjugations, particularly the subjunctive.
Long-Term Projects and Presentations
The below videos were submitted as mid-semester and final course projects for French 101 courses at the University of Alabama. These projects required students to apply their new vocabulary to a real life context in which they created a digital brochure for a vacation club (travel and leisure vocabulary) or a restaurant (food and dining vocabulary). Students were given the
Ciara – Le club Edelweiss
Zayne – Le club Fanatiques de Pêche Français
Joshua – Le restaurant Le neuf
Malon – Le restaurant Epulor
Research Projects
The following two presentations were presented to a panel of professors as the final projects for Biological Topics in French at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There were 6 students in this one-credit pilot workshop course. Students collaborated to give 10-minute presentations and write 3-page papers in two groups. The assignment description is at this link in French and English.
Group 1 Presentation – L’éducation et développement des enfants
Group 2 Presentation – Le développement linguistique des enfants
Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness
See this document for evidence of teaching effectiveness across multiple university-level classes, and the following documents for student comments from my most recent student evaluations: French 1 (remote) in Fall 2020 and French 3 (remote) in Winter 2021. You will note a departmental change in survey questions that occurred between the two quarters.
Dr. Chelsea Tanous 