Reviews

If you are into French (or French-speaking) movies, the Institut Francais is definitely a place to go! Apart from organizing the enormously successful annual French Film Festival, it offers French movies, both old and new, often cheap or free, occasionally with very interesting guests.

I attended an intensive course of French this August at the French Institute, level ''avance 2''.

Our teacher Michel did very well to balance a variety of activities during a pretty long morning (9am-1pm), and he did extremely well in creating a friendly, supportive learning atmosphere.

I personally favour a communicative approach to teaching (I'm a teacher myself), and in each lesson we had a different theme for us to discuss in small groups before presenting to the class. I was a bit rusty before the course, but after these two weeks, my fluency greatly improved!

We also did some skills work: particularly listening, as some of us may take the DELF B2 exam soon, but for all students this is a very useful activity. Although I can understand RFI radio quite well, doing a listening question (eg listening for specific information from natural-sounding dialogues) requires some practice. I really appreciated this.

We also played a few language games, or did enjoyable pairwork speaking activities (for fluency). Each day two students had the chance to give a talk/presentation to the class on a topic of their choice, and some of these were really cool.

Regarding grammar, there was a part of the lesson devoted to this each day, and Michel also wrote our mistakes on the board following a speaking activity. And just personally I thought he was good at highlighting some common pronunciation problems.

The most important constructive feedback I can give would be to also emphasise the importance of collocations/fixed phrases in speech (ie taking some ideas from ''the lexical approach'').

At an institutional level, my only regret is that we didn't have a coursebook for us to work on at home. However I believe they are considering ''Alter Ego'', ''Taxi'', and ''Edito,'' and I heard that they´ll decide on one before the new academic year kicks off.

Again, I was really satisfied with the course, and Michel did an amazing job to involve everyone, and he deserves a medal for getting the shyest students to participate! The lessons were always clearly structured, and our teacher seemed to enjoy teaching us as much as we did having him as our teacher.