Enhancing French skills:Enhancing French skills is a website for intermediate learners of French, created for students in a three-hour semester course at the University of Texas at Austin. Students expand their knowledge of the French language and francophone cultures and continue the development of their communicative abilities by practicing the four basic skills of speaking, listening, writing and reading.
Enhancing French skills includes authentic language videos from French websites such as TV5 Enseigner.tv, France.fr, and RhôneAlpes.tv (Média) as well as interviews of French speakers on cultural topics (Rencontres). Videos and activities are organized into five broad themes and tagged by communicative language function with links into Tex’s French Grammar for specific grammar explanations and interactive exercises. In addition to Tex’s French Grammar, we also use as a text in this course Contextualized French Grammar: A Handbook, 1st edition, by Stacey Katz Bourns (Cengage: 2013).