French For Professional Purposes 1B (R1136)

15 credits, Level 4

Spring teaching

This module is designed for advanced learners who have completed French for Professional Purposes 1A.

Building on existing levels of proficiency, the module aims to:

• enable you to understand the main ideas within extended discourse and to communicate effectively in French with increasing fluency, confidence and spontaneity in a variety of contexts
• provide opportunities, across a variety of topics, including common professional themes, for practice of understanding and communication in French, using the four language skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing, at an advanced level
• consolidate and develop the range of complex structures, syntax, and specialised vocabulary in French to allow further accuracy and control in use
• facilitate the analysis of some aspects of the general social, professional, political and/or cultural background of the language through a variety of contextualised activities and materials, in a range of media, eg text, audio, audio,visual, digital.

Your classes will consist of a variety of activities to develop your practical skill in all four communicative competencies (speaking, listening, reading and writing), and to encourage autonomous use of French. These will include presentations and discussion, text-handling and writing activities such as summarising and reporting, based on themes, grammatical structures and language skills.

Working individually and in groups, you will have opportunities to develop your knowledge and understanding of Francophone countries, society, and communities, through both authentic and specially prepared textual and audiovisual materials. In this module you will have the opportunity to focus on a topic or text of special interest to you.

Seminar activities are complemented by guided independent study, and will make use of Study Direct and other technologies.

This module is at level B2 (Independent User) of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for Languages.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 33 hours of contact time and about 117 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2022/23. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum. We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.