Customer Reviews

Portes Ouvertes: An Interactive Multimedia Approach to First Year French (Book, CD, CD-ROM)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This text is French instruction gone berserk. Students will have to go through so much visual junk and marginally relevant contextualizing that they may be exhausted by the time they actually get to any substance. There are dozens of typefaces and colors, formats, sections, subsections, boxes, icons, references to tapes, to videos, to CD's, differently colored backgrounds and edge shadings, ad infinitum, to say nothing of pages of full color pictures of smiling multicultural young people and so on which intellectually impoverished American students are presumed to require in order to "relate" to the material. The book is supposed to be a totally integrated multimedia approach to teaching French, based on people in a city (Besancon) in France. I wonder how many French instructors succumb to handing over classroom hours to passively sitting and looking at the videos around which so much of the text is based rather than stressing needed drill and interactive instruction? Why couldn't the video-based sections have been broken out as a separate text for teachers who want it, so that students wouldn't have to sprain their wrists and pocketbooks lugging around so much irrelevant material? But it is clear that all this packaging isn't really intended to benefit students anyway; rather, it is aimed at textbook selection committees. Look at the very first page of the book: a flow chart, in extra thick paper, showing how carefully edited the manuscript is. Is this useful to the students who had to purchase this flowchart? Where is the table of contents? If the student wants to look up where something is discussed, he or she will have to leaf through pages of flow charts, prefaces, maps, dedications and so on to an indeterminate section about an eighth of an inch into this massive hunk of marketing to find it. Want the index? Well, you have to ignore the four pages of credits in big type at the back of the book (how else inflate the page count and price heft of the product?). In my opinion, a French text ought to contain grammar and exercises to learn it. All the rest can be brought in optionally. Maybe it's time to start going back in that direction. One can only hope that this dinosaur is the end point of a trend destined for extinction.

I've attempted to use this book to teach first year French, and ended up spending obscene amounts of time supplementing it with personal materials so my students will have SOME idea of what things like relative pronouns, compound tenses, and locutions triggering the subjunctive are. The students HATED the daher exercises, the CD crashed all computers at the language lab, and the kids ended up frustrated, linguitically stunted, and angry about the monumental amount of money they had to spend on a worthless textbook. The book is a travesty, and is sure to damage any students subjected to it in place of real language instruction. Multimedia for multimedia's sake is just damned stupid, and has no place in a thinking, caring faculty: as a teacher and someone who wants the best for my students, I would NEVER touch this book again.

I have used this book througout college and I have found it to be the easiest to use out of all of the books I have looked at and tried using. Vocabulary they present is useful in real life settings, and the grammer explinations are complete and easy to comprehend.