Cultural Modules

Through a series of close to 300 slides with accompanying commentaries, the 17 Cultural Modules allow the viewer to pay a visual visit to almost every place mentioned in the dialogues and cultural notes of the Bonne route ! textbook. The characters in the book come from a wide variety of places across Canada and the United States, and each of those places is highlighted in one or more of the modules, through pictures and interesting bits of cultural and historical information. Since the setting of the early chapters of the book is a French immersion program at Laval University, one of the modules contains pictures of Old Quebec City and the surrounding area. After the course at Laval ends, several of the book’s characters head off to various parts of the francophone world. The modules “follow” them to those places and again, through pictures and commentaries, introduce the viewer to each of those corners of the world.

The final module in the series focuses on the “francophonie” and more specifically, on the Francophone Summit, with the main goal being to make the students aware of the “raison d’être” of that organization, its history, and its membership.

The overall purpose of the modules is two-fold: 1) to highlight the content of the dialogues and cultural notes in the textbook; 2) to enhance the learning experience of the students by allowing them to “visit” and learn some additional cultural and historical details about places with which, in most cases, they are probably unfamiliar.

The Cultural Modules exercises are based on these Cultural Modules, but they also reflect the grammatical structures presented in the corresponding chapter in the textbook. They contain a variety of interactive exercises (True/False, Matching, and Multiple Choice) designed to reinforce the content of the modules, while at the same time providing the students with additional practice in the application of the language forms they are learning in the classroom.

There are two levels (Niveau 1 and Niveau 2) in each set of exercises. Niveau 1 basically contains only vocabulary that has been presented up to that point in the textbook and/or the modules. Niveau 2 contains a number of words which should be familiar to students with a more extensive background in French, but which haven’t yet been presented in the context of Bonne route !.