Who’s the major player in this week’s G7 meeting in Biarritz? Will Macron’s environmental agenda come more to the forefront in light of the Amazonian fires? Will France also be instrumental in other questions such as the best approach to the Iranian nuclear deal and trade wars with China? Does French media give you any additional insights to how to interpret the crazy world we live in, including what might be happening behind the scenes in Biarritz? And if this is something you like to learn and discuss in French, can we at FrenchRev help you? Don’t be afraid to ask!
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LeMonde (and the Guardian and der Spiegel) definitely give different and necessary perspectives to both international and US events. I love talking politics in French class. but it can be hard on the non-liberals when most of us are quite liberal. I have wondered if it would be good if we set up discussions more like a debate, where people choose and/or are assigned one side or the other.
That’s an interesting idea, Corrie! Let’s talk more about this!
The blog is now entering into a short period where I’ll be discussing political identities from the angle or construct of identity as defined by a newer cohort of second language acquisition researchers. The idea of staging a political debate in the SLA is not unheard of, but there is also simply the post-structural notion that everyone carries their political identity (which is far from being absolutely written in stone) into every communicative context. In a micro- or fine-grained analysis of phonetics, for example, we could say that phonemes carry some tinge of political meaning, and things just become more obviously fraught with political meaning as you go from that microlevel to things like full texts or oral performances. Then there is another way of “doing politics” in a language classroom, which is through classroom management – does the language teacher always determine what activities and what topics are to be worked on? Who determines the syllabus, when, as it turns out, the old grammar-based syllabus no longer has hegemony over what gets done in a classroom?