Dear colleagues,

Let me first thank you for taking the trouble of visiting our site, hoping it was not too arduous even if you don't enjoy the effulgence of Ethernet T 100 (I don't!).

I would like also to thank Yale University Press, and particularly Mary Coleman and Tim Shea, who have worked so hard to help us make this wonderful thing happen.

Well, you may wonder whether this first attempt at creating a site for French in Action  teachers is wonderful... it may not be, at least not yet! But it certainly has wonderful possibilities.

Whether we have taught with French in Action  for just a few months or for a few years, we all have had ideas about how to teach it better: we have discovered tricks, invented games that worked for us and could work for others, and our accumulated experience enables us to teach a given lesson better than we taught it last time.

The purpose of this site is to make it easier for all of us to teach each lesson and to teach it better, by taking advantage of the experience of others.

Over the next several months, we will be developing for each of the French in Action  lessons a special page that you can consult before teaching a lesson to assist you with your preparation. Each page will contain a variety of lesson plans or sets of objectives that you will be able to choose from or adapt to your particular needs.

We also intend to offer for each lesson a word-by-word transcription of the teleplay episode with suggestions for what could be done in presenting the video of that teleplay. We will try to provide as many suggestions as we can so that you may choose those that will best fit your situation.

Another aspect of this site will be links to many outside sites, in France or other francophone countries, that are relevant to the linguistic and cultural contents of each lesson. You will be able to use these sites in a number of ways depending on the facilities at your disposal: You may access those sites and show them in class in real time, if you are privileged as to have a network connection, a computer, and a large monitor or a projector in your classroom; you may download part or all of those sites on your computer and then show them to your class the next morning...or whenever, if you have sufficient space on your hard drive or use a Jazz or Zip or SyQuest drive ; you may ask your students to access the sites on their own in the Language Lab if it has the network connections and computers, or else at home. Or else, if all you have is a computer and printer, you may print some sections of those sites on paper and distribute them, or on transparencies and project them.

We will try to suggest for each site some tasks that could be assigned to the students so that their visit to the site will result in a real cultural and linguistic gain.Your students will find the description of those tasks on our site itself, or you may download them, select the ones you wish to assign and print them for distribution to the students.

In addition, we will aim to provide for each lesson one or two additional exercises that you can print and distribute to the students.

We see this site as a place to exchange information and ideas as well as a place to feature the work of students. So please send us samples of what your students are doing, indicating each time " done after lesson X " so that it can be included in the page for the right lesson.

If we can make it a real collaborative effort it will be a great experience for all of us.

Please send in your suggestions, your ideas, the tricks you have discovered, the URLs and descriptions of sites you think are useful for one lesson or another. Send in additional exercises that you would be willing to share with us, and send us your students' contributions to the masterpieces of French literature!

Thank you,

Pierre Capretz
Yale University