Summer Courses

A series of topic-centered courses refining the skills of academic essay writing, studying a wide range of ideas as expressed in diverse literary genres and periods. Introduces the analysis of literary texts and gives training in the writing of critical essays and research papers. Recent topics include: Utopia and Anti-Utopia, City as Metaphor, Portraits of Women, Culture Conflict, and Labyrinths.

Whether a story is an imaginative transformation of life experience or an invention, the writing must be well crafted and convincing, driven not only by plot and theme but also through characterization, conflict, point of view, and sensitivity to language. Students produce and critique short stories and novel chapters while studying fiction techniques and style through examples.

Emphasizing the basic linguistic structures and verb tenses, this course has been structured for true beginners of French. Using visual stimuli (advertisements, comics, photographs, etc.), students will learn to identify and describe places, people and things as well as more abstract spatial, temporal (hour, day, season), and emotional (feelings, thoughts and opinions) ideas. Readings from short texts and everyday encounters (Métro, bank, stores, markets and cafés, etc.) will further help students to quickly become self-sufficient through basic language skills.

Only visiting summer students should register in this course. To ensure that participants are placed in the appropriate level, all visiting students in the Immersion Program take an online placement test.
The course has an extra course fee of 100 euros.

Having completed FR 1200 or FR1300, AUP returning students can earn elective credit toward graduation by registering FR 2005I FRENCH IMMERSION: INTERMEDIATE I.

Beginning with a review of basic French Grammatical Structures, this course moves on to cover more complex forms such as the pluperfect, the conditional and the subjunctive. Students will be able to talk about the past, make hypotheses and express their opinions and emotions. Special attention is paid to increasing students’ ability to understand spoken French and to converse on a number of topics pertaining to different times and places. Learning objectives for this Intermediate B1 level course are:

- study familiar situations encountered in work, school, and leisure
- learn to formulate sentences about personal interests, express ideas and opinions, and interact with other French speakers
- ability to handle situations likely to arise when living in France
The course has an extra course fee of 100 euros.