Posted by Kahei R. (Tokyo - Japan)
on December 2009 - Japan
I attended the intensive courses of the CUEFA, which I thoroughly enjoyed and whose quality I highly estimate.
On the basis of the initial written tests I was put in the “Group 4” consisting of the advanced eight students. We had four teachers and weekly five 3-hour class meetings. The instructions were on the whole very well structured and were given skillfully and with great application. With substantial amount of homework, the above schedule meant not a light workload at all. With the fourfold rubric of “oral/written comprehension/expression” in mind, each instructor had different focus areas. They exposed us to a variety of speech types and vocabulary through well-prepared materials of short pieces of literary work, journalistic articles, TV footages, and tape-recorded commentaries. In addition to the exercises based on grammatical synopses, such as “ne explétif” and the like, submission of written texts was frequently required, which were then returned with meticulous corrections and comments. (This was the aspect of their education I appreciated the most.) The small class size permitted frequent free discussions among the students and the instructor, where the latter could intervene to correct on the spot the errors made in the French spoken by the former.
The multi-cultural class composition made these and the extracurricular exchanges all the more interesting. At the same time, it was not always easy to follow such conversations because of the variety of articulation of the French words practiced by the co-students, reflecting the features of their own mother tongues. (Personally, I thought it should not be very difficult for the instructors to reform such systematic phonetic distortions by devoting a few initial hours for individualized drills re-enforcing the elementary physical methods of producing some of the difficult French sounds.)
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