Student Edition Level 2 2006

This textbook series seems to be the best available French textbook series at this time. It is proficiency-based (rather than mastery-based). Students are provided with an abundance of colloquial vocabulary for topics of interest to young people. I find that my students are more willing to engage in conversation than with the older-style methods. The strong points of this series are the recycling (of vocab and grammar) and the reading program. The reading program consists of a reader and a workbook. The reader includes short readings using vocab students won't know, but challenges them to figure out what they need to know, reflect on what they figured out, and make strategic decisions about what is not necessary to know. The workbook includes excellent lessons focused on specific reading strategies. The reading exercises in the textbook itself are not as good. The weak points in this program include the vocabulary presentations. Vocabulary is often presented for the first time to inexperienced students without accents, and without definitions for many items. For example, when students learn school vocab they see a picture labelled "Lycee Voltaire" (no accents) but they aren't told that "lycee" means high school. Other problems are often presenting/using adjectives only in masculine form, and introducing vocab phrases that involve advanced grammar and ignoring or over-simplifying the grammar that will have to be re-learned properly later. The first chapter in particular tries to introduce too much too soon, but the pace of the rest of the book is relatively even. Given the choices for French textbooks aimed at teens, this is a good one. But there are many weaknesses that could be improved upon. Overall, I feel my students will learn a great deal of French and francophone culture from this book, and have fun doing it.