French as a Second Language (Core French)

Bienvenue en 8e année ! This is your fifth year of Core French and your last year of elementary school. In Grade 7 you built a listening plan, asked questions three ways, compared, told stories in the past, followed instructions, travelled, debated and gave an oral presentation. In Grade 8 you'll get ready for high school: understanding what people mean (not just what they say), and speaking with more grammar, more confidence and the right register.

In this unit you'll listen between the lines, talk about high school and your future with the futur simple, use the little pronouns y and en, imagine and give advice with the conditionnel, handle a formal interview, understand news reports and report what people said, make group decisions, tell a funny anecdote, explore registers and Canadian French, analyse and create a campaign for the planet, and give a persuasive speech with feedback.

Every new word has a sound-it-out spelling so a grown-up who doesn't speak French can help, model dialogues come with English translations, and expressions used mostly in Canada are labelled used in Québec and other parts of Canada. The sibling unit covers reading and writing.

Curriculum expectations covered: A1.1, A1.2, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3 (The Ontario Curriculum: French as a Second Language, Core French, Grades 4–8, 2013, Grade 8). Specific codes are given for A1.1 and A1.2; the other expectations are listed by their overall codes.

Welcome to Grade 8 reading and writing in French, your last Core French unit before high school! In Grade 7 you learned the futur simple, the imparfait and how it works with the passé composé, the pronouns le, la, les, qui and que, the polite conditionnel, and you wrote opinion letters, biographies and stories. This year you will read and write more kinds of texts and think more critically about them.

You will read a news article, a blog, an advice column, a campaign poster, a mystery story, a magazine quiz, a travel journal, an interview, a tourist guide and an argumentative essay, and you will write your own versions. Along the way you will learn the pronouns y and en, negative expressions (ne ... jamais, plus, rien, personne, pas encore), the indirect object pronouns lui and leur, pronouns in commands (Remplis-la !), the plus-que-parfait (j'avais fini), si sentences with the conditionnel, reflexive verbs in the past, reported speech, and the relative pronouns où and dont. You will also learn to judge evidence and sources, and you will finish by taking a yearbook page through the whole writing process.

The texts take you to francophone communities in Ontario (Sudbury, Timmins), Québec City and the Huron-Wendat community of Wendake, and Saint-Boniface in Manitoba. Canadian French words are labelled as you go. All the texts were written for these lessons; the people and schools in them are made up, while the places and cultural facts are real.

Explanations are in English so a child and a parent can learn together, even if no one at home speaks French. The companion unit Listening and Speaking covers the oral strands.

Curriculum expectations covered: C1, C2, C3, D1, D2, D3 (The Ontario Curriculum: French as a Second Language, Core French, Grades 4–8, 2013, Grade 8 overall expectations).