Author Description

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The Smart Sparrow Companion Website will not be available after December 31, 2020. It is free to access until that date. More information is available at CommeOnDitTextbook.com. Beginning July 1, 2020, workbooks with exercises from the Smart Sparrow Companion Website will be available for purchase, as will workbook answer keys. They will both be sold in ebook format only. Standalone textbooks are now available for purchase--and are priced to reflect this change. Multimedia textbooks featuring the print textbook bundled with an access code to a Companion Website will not be sold after June 1, 2020. Instructors should alert students and campus bookstores to buy the standalone textbook (PB ISBN 9781626164154) and not the multimedia for the Fall 2020 term. Comme on dit, a comprehensive first year French textbook program, engages students in the learning process from day one using an inductive methodology centered around guided observation and rule discovery. Together with students' communicative needs and an analysis of their most pervasive transfer errors from English, the everyday speech patterns of 100 native speakers--culled from 150 hours of unscripted recordings--form the linguistic backbone of the method. Students examine, compare, and contrast this wide variety of authentic discourse to discover both individual and shared language use and cultural perspectives. Additionally, students systematically and progressively acquire the fundamental sounds and rhythmic patterns of spoken French, which leads them to develop solid pronunciation and conversational fluency as well as notable listening comprehension skills. By the end of one academic year, students with no prior French instruction can expect to achieve intermediate-mid to intermediate-high proficiency on the ACTFL scale. To aid instructors in effectively implementing this distinctive approach, there is a separate Teacher Edition textbook (ISBN