| Unit name | French in the World |
|---|---|
| Unit code | FREN20077 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | I/5 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Dr. Paul Earlie |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Units you must take before you take this one (pre-requisite units) |
Language and Cultures 1a or 1b |
| Units you must take alongside this one (co-requisite units) |
Language and Cultures 2a or 2b |
| Units you may not take alongside this one |
None |
| School/department | Department of French |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Why is this unit important?
What does it mean to be ‘francophone’? When you hear the phrase ‘francophone country’, what and where do you think of? A map of the world with parts shaded in red or blue? Statistics on the total number of French-speakers across the globe?
Moving away from overly abstract or universalizing concepts of francophonie, this unit takes a human-centred approach to the compelling and complex history of what happens when the French language comes into contact with the plurality of worlds beyond hexagonal France. Through encounters with varied events, debates, and places in the evolution of the French language – which sees it move from a provincial dialect of Latin to the second most taught language in the world today – the unit works to challenge, if not explode, preconceptions about the larger French-speaking world, many of which have been influenced by the legacies of French universalism and European colonisation.
The unit is not intended to provide an encompassing overview of the vastly different cultural and political contexts in which French has been and continues to be used. Instead, it offers a mobile and contestable mapping of French in the world that you are free to reshape, replot, and rethink in your coursework and later studies, including on your year abroad.
How does this unit fit into your programme of study?
This unit develops your ability to work critically with theory and method, from postcolonialist thought and socio-political history, introduced in the first year of your programme, to cultural-historical methods such as préhistoires and keywords. It seeks to empower you to enter with confidence into debates at the forefront of the discipline, on multilingualism, intersectionality, and decoloniality, for example.
Drawing on the French department’s research specialisms in linguistics and cultural studies, literature and philosophy, history, politics, film, theatre, and the visual arts, the unit is designed to be interdisciplinary. Students taking it will work with and across a range of cultural objects, such as podcasts, dialogues, translingual writing, travelogues, multilingual cinema, multimedial art installations, street art, music, theatre adaptations, and more. You will be given scope to engage with these different forms according to your own interests and preferences, which may or may not influence your choice of later option units in Year 2 and Year 4.
In its inclusive and innovative pedagogical design, the unit will also help prepare you for the Year Abroad by giving you confidence, sensitivity, and agility in the way you use French, considered here as a living, changing and flexible tool for self-expression rather than a unitary entity with a standardized ‘correct’ form.
An overview of content
This unit adopts a transnational approach to thinking about the distinctive ways the French language has both shaped and been shaped by the cultures and languages with which it has come into contact, whether through accidents of geography and human mobility, or at times by force. French’s fluctuating status as a lingua franca has been driven by centuries of contact, trade, and migration as well as by the aggressions of colonisation, whose impacts live on in France’s enduring economic and cultural influence in Africa (Françafrique) or in countries such as Vietnam and Madagascar. But the ‘soft power’ represented by the French language also extends beyond former territories such as Francophone Canada and has impacted countries including Australia, Japan and China or, closer to home, the Republic of Ireland, which became an observer member of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) in 2018.
The unit’s geographical complexity is complemented by a broadly historicizing approach, which seeks to upset assumptions that human mobility, transcultural exchange, and multilingualism are phenomena of the modern age or that cultural histories of language are linear. You will undertake comparative case studies of episodes in the history of francophonie that will encourage you to call in question some of the supposed ‘givens’ of modernity, such as Enlightenment narratives of progress and development that have marginalized indigenous thought systems located beyond Europe. Themes that may be explored through specific geographical, historical, and linguistic contexts may include: migration and displacement; colonialisation, its prehistories and afterlives; language, gender, and sexuality; diasporic French-speaking communities; hybridity and multi-ethnicity; intercultural exchange; multilingualism and translanguaging.
How will students, personally, be different as a result of the unit?
Over the course of this unit, you will be exposed to voices and views that have sometimes been marginalized in the discipline of French Studies, and you will be encouraged to reflect on ways in which power both shapes representations and determines the visibility (and audibility) of different social, cultural, and linguistic groups. As you work to think beyond clichés about the ‘Francophone world’, you will gain an appreciation of the cultural and political complexity of the French language’s use in a variety of national and international contexts, preparing you for your period of study and/or employment abroad. Teaching on this unit follows an inclusive pedagogical model: you will be invited to interrogate structures of marginalization or exclusion, and to consider your own positionality in the process of learning.
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this unit students will be able to:
Each week, your teaching will involve:
Tasks which help you learn and prepare you for summative tasks (formative):
Group commentary presentation, 15 minutes (0%, required for credit) [ILOs 1-5]
The presentation will be delivered in French and will analyse a range of primary target-language material (e.g. travel writing, literary texts, podcasts, historical maps or caricatures, grammar books, language policy documents, websites, films, visual culture) through the lens of one of the unit’s key themes (see above). This formative task feeds directly into the summative essay assessment, where you will build on skills in structuring an argument, analysing authentic primary texts, and dealing with broader methodological and/or theoretical questions.
Tasks which count towards your unit mark (summative):
Essay, 2,500 words (100%) [ILOs 1-4].
When assessment does not go to plan
When required by the Board of Examiners, you will normally complete reassessments in the same formats as those outlined above. However, the Board reserves the right to modify the form or number of reassessments required. Details of reassessments are normally confirmed by the School shortly after the notification of your results at the end of the academic year.
If this unit has a Resource List, you will normally find a link to it in the Blackboard area for the unit. Sometimes there will be a separate link for each weekly topic.
If you are unable to access a list through Blackboard, you can also find it via the Resource Lists homepage. Search for the list by the unit name or code (e.g. FREN20077).
How much time the unit requires
Each credit equates to 10 hours of total student input. For example a 20 credit unit will take you 200 hours
of study to complete. Your total learning time is made up of contact time, directed learning tasks,
independent learning and assessment activity.
See the University Workload statement relating to this unit for more information.
Assessment
The assessment methods listed in this unit specification are designed to enable students to demonstrate the named learning outcomes (LOs). Where a disability prevents a student from undertaking a specific method of assessment, schools will make reasonable adjustments to support a student to demonstrate the LO by an alternative method or with additional resources.
The Board of Examiners will consider all cases where students have failed or not completed the assessments required for credit.
The Board considers each student's outcomes across all the units which contribute to each year's programme of study. For appropriate assessments, if you have self-certificated your absence, you will normally be required to complete it the next time it runs (for assessments at the end of TB1 and TB2 this is usually in the next re-assessment period).
The Board of Examiners will take into account any exceptional circumstances and operates
within the Regulations and Code of Practice for Taught Programmes.
