Défi Francophone 2 par Hedwige Meyer, and Lorenzo Giachetti (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Défi Francophone 2 par Hedwige Meyer, and Lorenzo Giachetti Jessica L. Sturm Meyer, Hedwige, and Lorenzo Giachetti. Défi Francophone 2. Klett World Languages, 2023. ISBN 978-8-41890-738-8. Pp. 130. Culture is a crucial part of language teaching, which the authors of Défi Francophone 2 recognize. Their goal is to "propose … an original and motivating approach" and to have "culture … at the core of every activity" (iii). As the title implies, this focus on culture includes the Francophone world, not simply France. For example, la Réunion, Belgium, Morocco, Québec, Cambodia, and France are all featured in some way in the first six chapters. To this end, each of the 16 chapters includes two cultural dossiers. Each opens with Découvrir activities, introducing the theme through various texts. Following Découvrir are activities called Construire et (inter)agir and Construire et créer that allow students to interact and create with the language. These dossiers are based on authentic cultural documents, such as blogs and infographics, or articles and response letters. Dossier topics are timely and provide plenty of room for authentic discussion; for example: waste, climate change, inequities, impoliteness and unruliness, sexism and parity, and human rights protection and solidarity, among many others. With such topics, the classroom becomes a place for cultural discussion along these issues of social justice and allows students to explore such issues as they relate to the many French-speaking countries represented. Rather than grammatical structures, each chapter is built around linguistic, communication, cultural and social, and actional objectives. Activities are constructed within the context of the authentic texts provided and lead students to engage with the material, testing understanding and encouraging them to take the information further through personalization of the material. Students are asked to compare the material in the book to similar material they've previously encountered, to compare themselves to the author of a text, and in general, to relate what they read to their own lives as they discover Francophone cultures. The book also explores grammar and vocabulary through the context of the texts provided, by asking students to compare the active and passive voice used in a text, or to find the meaning of a new word based on the words around it and the purpose of the text. Each chapter also features three Défis, projects for students to complete, such as staging a debate or creating a program for a performing arts festival. The third Défi is always numérique and is situated on MyFrenchHub, the online platform for the book. Overall, this text is a good, solid basis for a communicative classroom, featuring topics that are part of our modern world and activities that will facilitate students' ability to create with the language and engage with the material [End Page 157] presented. However, I would love to see more gender-inclusivity in language presented (e.g., non-binary pronouns and adjective endings) and for topics such as sexism and parity to move beyond the gender binary, though the chapter 16 text "Tendance: jeux non genrés" is a nice start. [End Page 158] Jessica L. Sturm Purdue University (IN) Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".