French Department

French Department at Barnard

The Department’s primary goals are firstly to enable students to develop competence in spoken and written French, and secondly to expose students to the literature and culture of French and French-speaking countries. An important additional objective of the French Department is to encourage students to consider studying in France or a Francophone country.

In regard to students’ linguistic competence, our specific goals are:

1. To enable students to express themselves on a range of topics with an acceptable degree of fluency and accuracy.
2. To facilitate their comprehension of a variety of texts (both from literature and the media) written in French.
3. To foster students’ confidence in the possibility of their living and studying in a French environment.

In the context of the language requirement (the first and second years), this implies a competence premised on students’ ability to achieve, by Intermediate French II, oral and written fluency. Students will be able to use all tenses in the indicative and subjunctive, to deploy pronouns appropriately and understand the expressive and grammatical utility of conjunctions, rhetorical devices, and so on. Students will have the ability to write a cogent essay in French on a literary or cultural topic, and will possess a vocabulary beyond basic French, including rhetorical and conceptual vocabulary. In the context of the major requirement (the third and fourth years), students will progress to a greater competence in French, including advanced speaking skills, particularly in terms of discussing literary and cultural topics, and writing extended analytical essays. The culmination of a student’s progress is the one-semester cap stone experience in the spring semester of the senior year, where she will write a substantial thesis on a topic of her choice, supervised by senior members of the department, and defended before an appropriately selected committee.