Skip to main content

Cours Illustré de Français




I thought I would blog about one or two of the French course books I have known over the years. Mark Gilbert's Cours Illustré de Français would look very dated now, but when it came out in 1966 (the last in the series, book 5 was published, I believe in 1973) it was rather revolutionary. This was also the time of the early audio-visual courses for slide projector and reel-to-reel tape recorder, but Gilbert's book was rooted firmly in the London University tradition of oral work through question and answer - LOTS of it. Oral and written. It was a method pioneered by Sweet, Prendergast and Gouin, a sort of controlled direct method.

Cours Illustré was the ultimate death by QA book. It was illustrated with pictures by Celia Weber, some of which were for decoration, some which could be used for questioning. It was all in glorious black and white and took a number of characters as the basis for its descriptions and stories. They did stories then!

Comedian Eddie Izzard made the book notorious with his stand-up routine about school French and Nikki the monkey (search youtube - you'll laugh). The other main characters were members of the Lavisse family. Having a family in the couse book was de rigueur in those days because it served some very useful teaching purposes. (I even wrote an essay on this topic years ago during my PGCE course at the West London Institute - part of London University.)

I reckon we would do well to return to using families in course books - never mind about politico-social sensitivities.

Anyway, each chapter of the book would feature a description or a short story and was followed with lists of questions to be exploited orally and on paper. The book was the apotheosis of this method of teaching a language: scrupulous selection and grading of language, an oral approach with little use of English, lots of whole class oral question and answer, grammar taught through repeated drilling and practice rather than by explanation in English but in a meaningful way.

As a method it had its limitations, but it worked well for pupils who could concentrate at length and induce grammar rules for themselves. I used the course from 1968 through to O level in 1973 and my memory is that the early books were the best. I recall the book still being used in my first teaching practice school, Beverley Boys, in 1980.

Amazingly I see that you can still get copies of it quite easily from used book shops on the internet. I may even be tempted to buy one!

Comments

  1. I too learned French the hard way with this series, and while I remember nothing of my O-level exam, looking at book 5 (which I don't remember if we did), it is unbelievably hard compared to modern GCSEs (which I teach). Full scale Past Historic and Imperfect Subjunctive! 500 word reading comprehensions! Vocab from abasourdi to zèle! It's possible no teachers used this for O-level, but instead from AO or A-level study.

    On the other hand, the earlier books are still useful for teaching oral skills (question and answer is pretty good for this), and, I have found, the more challenging translation work associated with entrance exams for schools like Westminster.

    And I often wonder if the ever-so-slightly exotic illustrations didn't make me appreciate French in all its différence just that little bit more...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for commenting, Richard. I'm pretty sure we didn't use Book 5 either. My recollection is that we moved away from the book after about Y10, focusing on exam-style tasks and other classroom activities.

      Delete
  2. How I hated the famille Lavisse and Nikki the monkey!. I remember being sent out of class at my posh Surrey Girls Grammar School for commenting on how ridiculous it was that the Nikki was hoseing Mr Lavisse's car and how exactly was this going to help me if I ever went to France? Interestingly, my husband, who went to a Secondary Modern had a much more interesting book, which he thinks was called "audio visual French" or some such thing. Even after 45 + years, I've never forgotten Nikki or the Lavisse family. Who could?!!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It sounds like your husband may have used Longman’s Audio-Visual French. No monkeys in that one, but no doubt some silly stories!

      Delete
  3. I was taught with the Longmans Audio visual french textbook. After a long time away from much involvement in the french language I have recently been teaching my daughter (as a result of the pandemic) using the Gilbert series. I have to say that the Gilbert books are superior on a number of points including the illustrations. I found the Longmans more than a bit dull at times and I think the same cannot be said about the Gilbert books. I'm sorry to disagree with the teenage Emma but I think that she got the better deal at her grammar school !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It just shows how opinions vary, doesn’t it? Thank you for commenting.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,