Core French

Bienvenue en 9e année ! This is the listening and speaking half of Grade 9 Core French (FSF1D), your first high-school French credit. You'll build on everything from elementary Core French (listening plans, three kinds of questions, the past tenses, the futur simple and conditionnel, registers and persuasive speaking from Grades 7 and 8) and use it in real, longer conversations.

In 12 lessons you'll build a listening plan and describe your routine; ask great questions and listen actively; meet French-speaking communities in Africa and Asia (the Grade 9 culture focus) and use à, en, au; handle an airport and make polite requests; follow and give directions; tell stories with depuis, il y a, pendant and venir de; give a spoken review with comparisons; compare two spoken texts and discuss food waste; work on pronunciation and accents across the francophonie; choose tu or vous and solve a problem with a teacher; talk about celebrations and family traditions with object pronouns; and finally give a 3-minute exposé on a francophone region, with feedback and reflection.

Every new word has a sound-it-out spelling for English speakers (capitals show the stressed syllable; (n) means a nasal sound), dialogues come with English translations, and words used mainly in Canada are labelled used in Québec and other parts of Canada. The sibling unit covers reading and writing.

Curriculum: The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9 to 12: French as a Second Language (2014), Core French, Grade 9 (FSF1D). Since 2022 this is the de-streamed Grade 9 Core French course, still using the code FSF1D. Expectations covered: A1.1, A1.2, A2.1, A2.2, A2.3, A3.1, A3.2 (Listening) and B1.1, B1.2, B1.3, B1.4, B2.1, B2.2, B2.3, B3.1, B3.2 (Speaking).

Welcome to the reading and writing half of FSF1D, Core French, Grade 9 (Academic). In Grade 8 you learned y and en, lui and leur, the plus-que-parfait, the conditionnel, reported speech and the relative pronouns où and dont. This unit builds on all of that and takes you to high school level.

You will read many kinds of texts: a school newsletter, a novel excerpt, an interview about Acadie, a suspense story, text messages and an email, a show review, a festival poster, a science article about monarch butterflies, a formal letter to a town council, blogs from Senegal, Belgium and Martinique, a poem, and a comic. For each one you will learn how the form works, then write your own.

Along the way you will master the Grade 9 grammar that real French writing needs: the present tense of tricky verbs, adjective agreement and position, questions with inversion, the three story tenses with past participle agreement, adverbs, two object pronouns together, comparatives and superlatives, the future after quand, demonstrative and possessive pronouns, ce qui / ce que, the subjonctif, the gérondif, and the homophones and typography rules that editors check. You will also learn about francophone, Acadian, Métis and other Indigenous cultures in Canada and the wider francophone world, and practise choosing the right register for your reader.

Explanations are in English so a student and a parent can learn together. All the texts were written for these lessons; the people, schools and events in them are made up, while places and cultural facts are real. Canadian French words are labelled as you go. The companion unit Listening and Speaking covers strands A and B.

Curriculum expectations covered: C1.1, C1.2, C1.3, C1.4, C2.1, C2.2, C2.3, C3.1, C3.2, D1.1, D1.2, D1.3, D2.1, D2.2, D2.3, D2.4, D3.1, D3.2 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9 to 12: French as a Second Language, 2014, Core French, Grade 9, Academic, FSF1D).