French Urban Space – Detailed User Guidelines for Teachers
______
/ / French Urban Space –Detailed User Guidelines for Teachers
2008
Author: Charlie Mansfield
French Urban Space - Detailed User Guidelines for Teachers including
An Introduction to the Use of Concordances in Literary Study
Contents
Contents 2
The Materials and the Lecturer in French Studies 2
Web Browsing & Viewing Requirements 3
The Target Learner Group 3
Using the Resources 4
An Example Set of Activities to Follow 4
Exercise on Lefebvre & Paris (Introducing the LOUPS Strategy for Reading) 5
The SIFT Exercise 5
SIFT XML to CSS 5
Using Chemins du savoir for Essay Planning 5
Zola Text and SIFT 6
The Section: Le Spleen de Paris 7
Poet as Rag-Picker 8
Working with Images 8
Reuse and Copyright 8
An Introduction to the Use of Concordances in Literary Study 9
Background to Concordances and Example in Published Research 9
What can be gained from Using Concordances 10
What Kinds of Textual Study does this Lead to 10
What Kinds of Conclusions can be Drawn 11
Sample Lesson Plans that incorporate Use of Concordances & Sift 11
Sample Lesson Plan A - The Ups and Downs of City Life 11
Sample Lesson Plan B - Measurements and Place Names 17
Additional Material Available on Concordances 23
Bibliography 23
The Materials and the Lecturer in French Studies
The initial component of French Urban Space was a set learning objects that Mansfield, McNeill and Baker had written and used successfully in university teaching (Mansfield & McNeill 1997). They are re-purposed in this package for today’s web technologies. The previous objects are grouped together as Les Chemins du savoir within the whole package of materials called French Urban Space. Les Chemins du savoir, as the journal article explains, is a brain-storming tool for students of French Studies planning their first major essay on Paris of the nineteenth century.
Additional resources are added which include new photographic images and short video footage which are packaged appropriately for undergraduates, with a target year group of 2nd year Undergraduates pursuing a degree in French with major components of literature or area studies.
It is hoped that lecturers will run through the materials, following a set of example activities, which this book: Detailed User Guidelines for Teachers explains. This will give them an overview and an understanding of where the web materials might fit with their teaching on the Paris novel. Lecturers may then deploy the materials as they see fit. They may re-use sections from this book, photocopied or pasted into new word-processed documents for their students or download the worksheet and marking scheme for their classes.
Web Browsing & Viewing Requirements
We decided to settle on a minimum recommended browser and software requirement for the learner which would allow the materials to be used successfully on Windows and Mac computers. To this end the project recommends the use of the free Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Windows Media Player software (a substitute of which is free to download for Mac users).
To take full advantage of the Web 2.0 use the materials make of the Document Object Model (DOM) of web pages certain settings are required within the Firefox browser, and these are made clear in the materials themselves.
The Target Learner Group
Almost every UK university degree programme in French provides a module on the novel of nineteenth-century Paris, often with references to the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Metropolitan French literature of the nineteenth century is frequently studied and taught since it offers a threefold entrée into French cultural studies: (i) a way of approaching sustained reading of continuous French whilst being attentive to imagery in language, (ii) a history of the nineteenth-century as the political events unfolded in Paris to create a social space which still influences French and a wider European society today, and (iii) points of geographical reference for students planning to travel to Paris for fieldwork or for the period of residence during their Year-Abroad. These three points have directed the creation of these materials: French Urban Space. The materials refer to, and offer points of entry into, several key French literary texts (especially those of Zola, Baudelaire and Balzac) and so are aimed at a target audience of late first year and of all second year undergraduates. The introduction to tools for textual analysis will also be useful for students preparing for research projects after their Year of Residence Abroad.
It is hoped that staff and students will benefit from the contemporary images in their understanding of the relevance of French area studies and cultural studies for today. It is an over-arching aim of the resource package as a whole that learners will be able to question the relationship between the following:
· language (as a cultural phenomenon in literary artefacts)
· the lived experience of urban space
· visual imagery and media representing city space
· the distribution of power and relationships in city environments
It is hoped, from the incorporation of the visual resources, that many literature students will be enthused into considering overseas fieldwork of their own to extend their studies in French. Via SOCRATES-ERASMUS many UK undergraduates are able to spend a year of residence in France during their Year 3 and this would be an opportunity to follow through with projects or personal research based on gathering and annotating visual resources themselves.
Using the Resources
The final two sections: Poet as Rag-Picker and Working with Images introduce photographic images as cultural artefacts to study alongside the literary texts. The poetry from the previous section, Le Spleen de Paris opens up the themes which these last two sections illustrate. The literature student is often unfamiliar with visual resources so these final two components provide basic introductory practice in engaging with non-textual resources. In Poet as Rag-Picker, images of twenty-first century Paris are juxtaposed alongside secondary sources. The aim here is to see the relevance of reading critical material to prepare for contemporary study of the urban space.
Finally, the learner is ready to move onto to Working with Images. Continuity is provided into this section by means of the Baudelaire reference, finally the learner is invited to view three photo-montage sequences and respond to a question on contemporary urban space.
Thus, by following the Course Executive the materials can be studied independently. However, it is anticipated that lecturing staff will take and re-use the materials within their own resources or simply point their class to a single page with express instructions on a learning activity of their own. It is in this last application that the longer resources are true learning objects (LOs) which can be mined and exploited in very many different ways, eg the Zola novel, and the very successful re-purposed materials, Les Chemins du savoir.
To aid re-use of the package, the art-work for a CD cover is provided on-line with the materials in Adobe PhotoShop format. Areas on the back cover are left blank for teaching and library staff to make discs available in Language Labs, Learning Resource Centres and for classroom distribution. An A4 poster is also available as a large PhotoShop (.psd) file for others to modify with their own url (web address) if French Urban Space is installed locally on their own university server or in a local VLE, such as WebCT.
An Example Set of Activities to Follow
This set of example activities provides a way into the resources, giving you a plan for using the materials. It offers clear, step-by-step ways of using sections and also a set of experiments to try, since two key sections of the resource are interactive and will change depending on the selections of users during each session. Finally, OUTCOMES are offered as working practices which you can take away from the exercise for application in your own study or research.
Exercise on Lefebvre & Paris (Introducing the LOUPS Strategy for Reading)
This first exercise has 2 aims: (a) to give you opportunities to interrogate a very short text and through that to see how hypertext links can offer context-sensitive help to your reading. And (b) to introduce you to a method for reading longer texts in French, such as novels. This self-study method is called LOUPS (Least-Often Understood Phrase Study-system). LOUPS encourages the autonomous learner to focus on their difficulties in reading to help improve their confidence and vocabulary.
OUTCOMES: (i) Copy and keep a 'Vocabulary List' from your LOUPS of the extract. (ii) Try the LOUPS strategy on a novel you are currently studying.
LOUPS is a strategy for students moving on to reading more complex critical texts and novels. The acronym is Least Often Understood Phrase Strategy, and requires four steps:
(1) Read very quickly, just skipping through the text and underline all the phrases which may interrupt your reading. Underline more than individual words if you can; thus a noun should include the article, prepositional compound or adjective that suggests its gender, eg au sein de tells you that sein is masculine. With verbs try to capture the subject, too.
(2) Carefully consult the dictionary for each underlined phrase. Take care of verbs with se or s'. Note the definitions or translations in the margin near the loup (the 'wolf' that caused you trouble).
(3) Read again, glancing across to the 'lamb' (the translation you noted down) to maintain reading speed.
(4) Store your loups + lambs for vocabulary-building and revision. These can also go into a student's own PDP (Personal Development Portfolio) as a way of recording language acquisition.
The SIFT Exercise
The SIFT software (developed in 2006 by Mansfield under an AHRC-funded project in Middle French) gives the learner the technology to experiment with the Document Object Model of a web-page. The aim here is to give you experience of how a text on a web-page can be re-displayed by changing the settings of the document's style-sheets. This is often referred to as Web 2.0 technology. By using this SIFT page you will begin to form the basic concepts for understanding the basis for tagging literary texts (or corpora) with a mark-up language for later queries and experimentation.
SIFT XML to CSS
The XML tagging language is a building block for The Semantic Web, a way of using web pages to link scholarly comments with particular parts of a text, perhaps a word or a phrase. Attributing meaning to text plays a key part of language learning and in the study of fiction and poetry. Working with text tagging, then, can be very fruitful for those studying literature.
OUTCOMES: (i) A knowledge of the structure of xml elements and tags. (ii) practical visualisation of changing attributes and how attribute values permit extraction of specific notes from linguistic or literary corpora. (iii) opportunity to tag own example textual data and see immediate results, thus building appreciation of tagging in note-making.
Using Chemins du savoir for Essay Planning
The theme and period of study is Paris in the nineteenth century. Many degree programmes in the UK use the novels from this period in studies of French culture and out of this corpus researchers have begun to develop approaches to urban studies or the space of the city in literature. See particularly Ross, Wilson and Harvey from our Bibliography below. The interactive web-page Chemins du savoir is for use after attending lectures or during the reading of the cited novels as a way of generating essay notes based on a theme.
Example Exercise: Use the keyword 'Modernity' to search through the 120 'textemes', you will then have to follow-up the highlighting process of SIFT with Control F, to find each entry. Read each texteme to see which novel or novels and which secondary source materials discuss this theme.
OUTCOMES: (i) a set of electronic notes from the brain-storming session on nineteenth century French literature. (ii) a model to follow when taking own notes and developing notes into re-usable resources. These form the basis for synthesis and argument-making in longer essays and research papers.
Zola Text and SIFT
This activity is an opportunity to use the SIFT tool on the full text of a French novel, Émile Zola's L'Assommoir (The Grog Shop), published in Paris in 1877. The first exercise is to use SIFT for what it was originally designed, to reveal patterns or strata in a large corpus. The names of the novel's characters are perfect for this. First, use the CORPUS TEXT setting to reduce the font size to only 0.5mm. Then scroll through the novel to gain an impression of its distribution and extent. Then scroll back to the top and choose the main character, Gervaise, from the PROPER NAMES drop-down. Click the start button and her name will be re-rendered in blue and a font size of 5mm. If you have a scroll-wheel on your mouse (see image here) use it to let the novel 'play' or scroll down automatically on its own. You will have a visual unfolding of the patterns of where Gervaise appears through the narrative. A next step is to add a second character, say, Lantier, the scroll through will let you form a hypothesis about the (a) the periods in the novel where Lantier figures, (b) his importance, and (c) his relationship with Gervaise. Try this now Zola text and SIFT