Excellence in teaching

Rosemary Lancaster lectures in the Department of French Studies, School of European Languages, and her special interests are immersion teaching, cultural studies, twentieth century poetry, women's fiction, and teaching with text and film. She won the Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award and the UWA Excellence in Innovation in Teaching Award in 1996. These awards represent a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

The majority of students who enrol in any of the first year courses in the School of European Languages generally come from schools that have equipped them with sound oral skills in their subject but not with the reading and writing competencies necessary to do critical textual analyses. The School's language departments capitalise on this facility and encourage its refinement and extension in the undergraduate years.

In designing a new first year French Cultural Studies course, fully implemented last year, I have attempted to provide a transitional "training" period that acknowledges the students' spoken facility and interest in contemporary issues, while easing them, step-by-step fashion, into acquiring sophisticated reading and writing skills. In brief, the two-semester course is constructed around four modules, that introduce students to an increasingly complex array of text types, drawn from both popular culture and the literary canon. Working initially with short "media" writings, such as newspaper articles, comic strips, film clips and book blurbs, students eventually come to study longer works, including a novel, a film and film script and selected short stories and poems. Each topic, presented in French, is underpinned by a unifying theme. For example, the third module, entitled "Paris littéraire", examines a variety of texts commonly inspired by Paris's landscape, yet revealing different representations of urbanity and using geography as metaphor in different ways.

In particular the course cuts across glib classifications of writings as "high-" or "low-brow", "good" or "bad", or "old" or "new". Rather, it attempts to involve students in reading carefully, with a firm consciousness of a text's cultural context, social function and linguistic and expressive merit as an example of its genre. In a typical tutorial students compare how the registers of language and social agenda of the Michelin tourist guide differ from those of a celebrated twentieth century poem when evoking the ambience of an animated Parisian boulevard. So students are led to consider how well, (skilfully, innovatively, subversively) each author has exploited the conventions of the text type in hand.

Over the past year, and with exciting input from Dr Mark Pegrum, the topics of the Cultural Studies course have been tailored to include interactive work in the audio-lingual laboratory and Multimedia centre, with relevant materials gleaned from the Web, videos and CD-ROMs. Information relating to recent French singers, twentieth century feminine identities, Parisian landmarks, historical moments, newspaper reports, art works and contemporary film all interlock with the module topics and form part of fortnightly assignments which students can begin in class, then complete in pairs or small groups in their own time. Students report that they are reading and writing diversely in French as never before!