On Beginning French in College

Abstract

FOR two consecutive years I had the unusual opportunity of conducting simultaneously in a private preparatory school and junior college two elementary courses in French, one designed for junior and senior preparatory students, the other for college freshmen. Here, as in most colleges and universities, the one-year elementary college course was presumably the equivalent of the two-year preparatory course. Can the college undergraduate hope to develop in one year the same linguistic skills as the two-year preparatory student? The desire to find an answer to this question prompted me to observe and compare very carefully the relative attainments of the two groups which I was teaching. The psychological approach to the problems of instruction was of necessity different in each class. The material chosen to be studied, however, was made as similar as possible. This was particularly true during the second semester of the academic year. The preparatory students had begun and partially completed in the preceding year the study of a grammar which devoted fifty lessons to the presentation of the elements of the French language. The study of this grammar was completed in the early part of the second semester of the second year. A grammar composed of twenty lessons and presenting only the minimum essentials of French syntax was chosen for the college students. The college class completed its study of this grammar at about the same time that the preparatory students completed their first grammar, i.e., during the early part of the second semester. For the remainder of the year, both classes used the same review grammar. Since the students were at different levels of attainment during the first semester, it was not possible to offer the same reading material. During the second semester, however, both classes had the same reader and the usual reading fare: Meilhac and Halevy's L'lPt de la Saint-Martin, selections from L'AbbW Constantin, and standard short stories by Daudet, de Maupassant, and Anatole France. By the end of the year, then, the college students had been exposed to the same amount of material as the senior preparatory students. Comparatively speaking, how much had each group assimilated?