How do we work?
All courses follow the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) levels from A0 to C2. After an individual written and oral placement test, students are divided into groups consisting of a maximum of 18 students.
The activities offered are based on excerpts from textbooks or on documents created by teachers, with a preference for authentic documents: these include excerpts from newspaper articles, videos, radio, literary texts, the press – national, French-speaking or local –, blogs, advertisements, songs, posters, excerpts from films, TV series, clips, short films and trailers.
The teaching style is predominantly based on a communicative approach and an action-oriented focus: there are many interactions in and out of class such as informal discussions, oral presentations, press reviews and short dissertation presentations. Similarly, students are offered individual or collaborative projects to allow them to apply what they have learned outside the classroom.
Thus, in the middle of each semester a “Breathing Week” is set up, a week during which – in addition to the usual courses – projects and cultural outings in the field are arranged. For instance, some groups went to taste local products at Les Halles shopping centre; others explored the Emmaüs charity village in Lescar, while working on recycling. Other groups went to visit the Basque village of Espelette or the Guédot farm in Rébénacq.
The higher the level of the CEFR, the more students benefit from specific courses, with specialised discourses: these include literature, cinema, history and geography, French songs, art history and French for University Purposes.
Digital tools are integrated into teaching: students have access to the UPPA Moodle platform (eLearning) and to the Microsoft Teams virtual classroom tool. At the same time, teachers regularly use mash-ups (Padlet), electronic voting machines (Wooclap, LearningApps, Socrative, Kahoot, etc.) in their lessons, and some offer video clips based on a flipped classroom approach.
