David Young in Kansas City has a question that we need the group’s input on:
Ben,
Next year I will be teaching mostly French at my high school, Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas. This is a solution that our counselors came up with to the problem of tons of Native/Heritage speakers of Spanish in beginning Spanish classes. Actually I am very much looking forward to the opportunity to teach French and learn more myself. I think that it is preferable to teach French to those who know zero French rather than teaching classes of beginning Spanish to classes that have a majority of native speakers. I have my certification to teach French but I must admit that my French proficiency is not great. I took 3 years of college French, listen to some French music, from time to time read French, have watched French language TV. The past few years, however, I have not taken in a lot of French. My task this summer will be to immerse myself as much as possible in French and prepare myself to teach French next year. I just bought the Bucky va a Paris DVD that you sell. I will also devour everything that I can of you and others teaching French. I am also thinking of taking some sort of French course this summer. Obviously the ideal would be some sort of TPRS month long course, which I don’t think exists. I am looking into courses in Quebec City or Montreal. My proficiency in French is very low compared to my proficiency in Spanish or Portuguese (which I currently teach at the high school and at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS) but I also believe that by teaching French using TPRS/CI I will also be able to improve my own proficiency a great deal. My school is half Hispanic and I will have perhaps a majority of Spanish speakers in my classes. I am pretty sure that we have zero French speakers in my school. Do you have any ideas of what I should do or where I should go to increase my French proficiency as much as possible during the summer?