Customer Reviews

Skills and Techniques for Reading French

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Although there is no question that the format of this book may seem somewhat dated (no illustrations! just words on the page!), there is no other text that I know of that does as good a job as this one in what it sets out to do. Indeed, as old-fashioned as it is in some ways, I find that today's students are hungry for exactly these skills, and I have been pleasantly surprised to find how well they take to this book. I particularly like how well structured the exercises are: difficulty increases incrementally,so students experience success as they go along, and when they complete a set of exercises, they feel quite accomplished. I use this text as supplement in an advanced French-III high school class (201-202 college level) where the focus is on communicative proficiency. As teachers in high school and college, we tend to "assign reading." What this text does is get down to the nitty-gritty of how exactly one learns to read a text when one can't come close to understanding every word.

This book offers a number of techniques to help a well-prepared French language beginner to advance along on his reading of French texts in prose (not poetry). Well organized, it starts with tips for vocabulary building, then progresses to dissecting short phrases and simple clauses, moving next to simple sentences and finally to compound and complex sentences. Techniques are given on breaking apart clauses, complicated and long sentences or paragraphs into smaller components pieces to unlock its meaning. Interspersed across various chapters are illustrations of some common building block type words with many different meanings- que, tenir, faire, etc Every section & chapter have exercises to reinforce each technique described. Answers to exercises are given at the end of the book.

My French proficiency is intermediate, and I read the book over several months, completing about 90% of the exercises. I did find my ability to decipher both fiction and non-fiction prose significantly improved. More specifically, I could quickly grasp how the structure of each sentence, paragraph was put together and pretty much get the overall gist of each sentence, even without understanding every word.

The book's weak point is that all the passages used are excerpts from works written before 1970s. Thus, the vocabulary may be dated. It may be good if the author can upgrade the book with more contemporary passages.

A more recent book, albeit more expensive, is Karl Sandberg's French for Reading, which I just bought from Amazon.

Skills and Techniques for Reading French by two Ph. D. professors of French first published in the late fifties(1958) at the famous Goucher College is a real treat !

The Foreword must be read to understand their approach : a reading MANUAL tested and tried in the classroom before publication.

The authors assumed that " the student has acquired a modest vocabulary(2 thousand words), a rudimentary knowledge of grammar and of sentence structure, and some elements of pronunciation".

So, it is not directed at beginners .

The book is divided into Four parts :

I The first is concerned with " Vocabulary Building " : Cognates, Word families, Verb forms recognition, Inferences from the context, Prepositions and Conjunctions, Pronouns.

II A Study of the sentence : Main elements, sentence structure, where you learn to practice rapid reading with a purpose ( efficient reading)

III Reading with a purpose : Central idea, interplay between elements

IV Precise Understanding : 15 excepts taken from some of the best French classical writers through the centuries, among them Eve Curie, A. Thierry, H. Bergson in various scientific and historical texts.

The book as the authors asserted " is primarily designed as an AUXILIARY text to accompany and supplement the regular language and grammar books used during the SECOND year of French "

I personally learned a lot as an advanced student of French in the first 12 pages dealing with word families and prefixes and suffixes. The section on Inferences and Rapid reading with a purpose can be beneficial even to a student in reading English.

I would recommend the book for Intermediate and Advanced students of French. Initially. I wanted to assign a 4-star but the text is so systematic and efficient I upgraded it to a 5-star.

This purchase came in timely manner as promised, was in the condition described, and I'm very satisified with the transaction.

This is a bad language book. It is supposed to be for people with some French background, but even the first chapter of the book shows that it would fail for most. The first chapter deals with cognates and provides a seemingly useful list of changes (e.g. "quer" often changes to "cate" endings in English). Then after a score of these rules there are translation/guessing exercies which, one would think, make use of these rules. Sadly, only two of the 31 words exclusively follow the guidelines provided. Moreover, the authors don't seem to be able to communicate well in English through their table, so how can they be expected to actually teach someone else French?