France Quatrième French

1. Literary culture: 4e themes

Finding oneself: expressing love · Living in society: clashing values · Fiction that questions reality · Informing, being informed, misinforming · Complementary: the city as a place of possibilities · Complementary: free theme chosen by the teacher

• Realist Fiction: Stories That Question Reality – Realist fiction builds an invented story from true-to-life details so that readers see how people and society really are. Naturalist novels add the idea that causes such as poverty, family and surroundings shape characters. Fantastic tales put one impossible event in an ordinary world and make us doubt what is real. Films can adapt realist books, but they always choose and change.
• Media Literacy – Media literacy is the skill of reading, questioning and creating media: news, ads, videos, posts, films and games. Every media text is made by someone, for a purpose, for an audience, using forms, conventions and techniques that shape how we feel. A media-literate person checks the source, evidence, other coverage and the original before believing or sharing, notices bias and filter bubbles, and makes their own media responsibly.

2. Listening and speaking

Following the structure of spoken information · Oral reports and presentations · Arguing in a debate · Expressive recitation of a memorised text

• Debate Skills: How to Argue Clearly, Fairly and Well – A debate is a timed, rule-based contest of ideas on a motion. One side argues for it, the other against it, and a chair keeps order. A good argument has a claim, a reason, evidence and a link to the motion. Research makes evidence strong: reliable, recent and relevant. Rebuttal answers the other side's weakest points; cross-examination uses short questions to expose them. Good debaters attack arguments, not people, and listen as carefully as they speak.

3. Reading

Implicit meaning and inferences · Genres, periods and literary movements · Reading images and mixed documents

• Visual Literacy: Reading Images Step by Step – Visual literacy means reading pictures as carefully as we read words. Use four steps: look, describe, analyse, interpret. Describe what you see (people, objects, the three planes: foreground, middle ground, background). Analyse the formal elements: colour, light, line, shape, framing and composition (rule of thirds, leading lines, point of view). Interpret: what feeling or message does it give, and who made it for whom? Remember that framing hides what is off-screen, and that a caption or text next to an image changes how we read it.

4. Writing

Planning, drafting and revising longer texts · Structuring an argumentative text

Coming soon

5. Language study

Simple sentence: subject, apposition, adverbials of consequence · Complex sentence: relative, conjunctive and indirect interrogative clauses · Word classes: pronouns, comparative and superlative · Passive voice and impersonal forms · Verbs: subjunctive and past conditional · Tense aspect: completed vs ongoing · Agreement: past participle with avoir, complex noun groups · Vocabulary: affixes, Latin and Greek roots, word fields · Reported speech and connectives · Registers of language

Coming soon