The Heart of an Artichoke , livre ebook

CALEC - Claire Lerognon , Linda Phillips Ashour

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141 pages

English

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How many people do you know who studied French in school or spent a year abroad in college but now regret losing the language they once loved? Maybe you're one of them. Your eyes stay glued to the subtitles during a French film. Classes seem scary, expensive, or both. A week in Paris, let alone a year in Provence, seems beyond reach. So what could keep your fervor for language alive or reignite it after such a long hiatus?

In The Heart of an Artichoke, Linda Phillips Ashour and Claire Lerognon take an improvised and informal approach to learning that will reawaken readers' passion for French. This spirited exploration of language, literature, and culture mixes the task-based approach with piecemeal learning for an unconventional alternative to classroom instruction.

Sujets

Foreign Language study

Lettres et linguistique

General officer

Language

General

French

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Publié par	CALEC
Date de parution	07 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781636070636
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0650€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Praise for The Heart of an Artichoke

“As though guided by the Horatian precept for poetry, this enthusiastic book delights and teaches simultaneously. If you are an amateur of French who wants either to expand your familiarity or to improve your proficiency, this is your livre de chevet —unless you fear being kept awake. A book for students who prefer to find the language embedded in the culture, it is also for venturesome teachers, because it proves the benefits of combining piecemeal appropriation with task-based absorption. The innovative mise en page stitches together dialogue, anecdote, quotation, and vivacious vignette in an invigorating and inspiring collage.”
— Stephen Yenser, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, author of T he Fire in All Things , winner of the Walt Whitman Award

“Claire Lerognon and Linda Phillips Ashour’s passionate involvement with and conversation about la langue française help debunk stereotypes about speaking, reading, and writing in a second language. Being responsible for the organization’s language and communication training efforts, I commend their work in The Heart of an Artichoke as an homage to learning and a tool for cultural understanding.”
—Atul Khare, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Operational Support

“Over several lonely months during the fall–winter of 1968–69, I practiced my French while wandering the streets of Paris, reading signs, advertisements, restaurant menus, historical markers out loud to myself. I was too depressed to realize that I was teaching myself about the intricacies and charms of the French language. Over time, I not only achieved a certain facility with the language, but also found some French copains .

“But I do wish I had encountered interlocutors as engaging as Linda Phillips Ashour and Claire Lerognon, whose passion for French would have greatly sustained me. For, unlike my teachers at the Sorbonne, they appreciate and celebrate that mastering a language—and life—is not about obsessing on perfection, but about savoring the journey as we go and being prepared to ‘learn piecemeal.’”
—Peter Skerry, Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
ALSO BY LINDA PHILLIPS ASHOUR
Speaking in Tongues
Joy Baby
Sweet Remedy
A Comforting Lie
Copyright © 2022 by Linda Phillips Ashour and Claire Lerognon
Claire Lerognon’s dedication from The Carrying by Ada Limón (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions, milkweed.org.
Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne , photograph by Ana Sohier (Facebook), Conseillère municipale déléguée au patrimoine et à la politique linguistique à Rennes.
Dépanneur , photograph by jbcurio, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jbcurio/2569846862 .
Metro, Boulot, Caveau , photograph by Jiel Beaumadier, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jielbeaumadier_manif_retraites_1_paris_2010.jpg#metadata .
Papillon , photograph by Paris Vox (Facebook), https://www.facebook.com/parisvox/ .
Michel Houellebecq , photograph by REUTERS/Benoit Tessier.
Mathias Énard , photograph by Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images.
Cover and interior design © 2021 by Margot Asahina
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or any other organizations with which the authors may be affiliated.
TBR Books is a program of the Center for the Advancement of Languages, Education, and Communities. We publish researchers and practitioners who seek to engage diverse communities on topics related to education, languages, cultural history, and social initiatives.
750 Lexington Avenue, 9th floor New York, NY 10022
www.calec.org | contact@calec.org www.tbr-books.org | contact@tbr-books.org
ISBN 978-1-94762-695-9 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-63607-163-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-63607-063-6 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948151
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo .
To my mother and her map of the world —Linda Phillips Ashour À mon frère Gilles
When Eve walked among the animals and named them— nightingale, red-shouldered hawk, fiddler crab, fallow deer— I wonder if she ever wanted them to speak back, looked into their wide wonderful eyes and whispered , Name me, Name me. “A Name” by Ada Limón —Claire Lerognon
C ONTENTS
Title Page
Praise for The Heart of an Artichoke
Also by Linda Phillips Ashour
Copyright
Dedication Page
Introduction
1 - First Things First - Tout d'abord
2 - Great Expectations - Sans un couac
3 - The Glitter of Grammar - Une règle d'or
4 - In Other Words - Vrais ou faux amis?
5 - Now You're Talking - Une affaire de rythme
6 - Louder Than Words - Mais en douceur
7 - One Piece at a Time - À la tâche
8 - Book Basics - Le grand déballage
9 - Quiet Please - Moteur, ça tourne!
10 - Here at Last - Bel et bien là
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
About TBR Books
About CALEC
Introduction

LINDA: How many people do you know who studied French in school or spent a year abroad in college but now regret losing the language they once loved?
Maybe you’re one of them. Your eyes stay glued to the subtitles during a French film. French classes seem scary, expensive, or both. A week in Paris, let alone a year in Provence, seems beyond reach. So what could keep your fervor for the language alive or reignite it after such a long hiatus?
The Heart of an Artichoke offers an informal approach to learning that will help reawaken readers’ passion for the language. Our exploration of language, life, and culture is an unconventional alternative to classroom instruction. It mixes the task-based approach that is the backbone of Claire’s teaching practice with the piecemeal learning I cobbled together after living almost nine years in France.
In a dialogue that began years ago, I stand in for you, the reader. If you’ve ever wished you’d asked more questions of your teachers or perhaps challenged the answers, this book allows you that freedom now. As coauthor and friend, I took a lot of liberties with my professeure. Not only did Claire encourage my interruptions with grace and good humor, she often turned the tables on me with questions of her own.
It may come as a surprise to you—as it did to me—to learn that mastering grammar and sounding French won’t make you fluent. More important than the perfectly constructed sentences Francophiles often crave are communicative savoir-faire and intercultural savoir-être. Who knew that beginning an exchange, almost any exchange, in French with bonjour takes a speaker farther than an impeccably rolled R?
Claire and I debunk a few other comparable myths as we peel back the leaves of the artichoke. Above all, learning a language is learning to communicate — to achieve a purpose. Instead of rules and exercises, try communicating “for real,” as I did in a fan letter to a beloved Gallic actor, or brace yourself for a new registre de langue with Claire’s down and dirty glossary of street argot . As you read about our adventures and come up with your own, remind yourself how you got hooked on French in the first place. Reculer pour mieux sauter. Sometimes taking a step back really is the way to leap forward.
So what does learning have to do with an artichoke? A nineteenth-century French maxim says it best, “ Cœur d’artichaut, une feuille pour tout le monde ”—heart of an artichoke, a leaf for everyone. There’s something fresh for French fanatics to discover on every page.
Claire and I talked, laughed, and anguished about what sometimes seemed like a crazy endeavor, frequently returning to our central metaphor and what it represented for each of us. We knew our answers wouldn’t be the same as the ones we began with, et tant mieux. No matter how much or how often our opinions diverged, we always agreed that pleasure must remain at the core of an enterprise meant to last a lifetime.
1 First Things First Tout d’abord

CLAIRE: “ Quand je serai grande, je serai maîtresse et j’aurai douze enfants. ” I imagined living on a farm, unaware of how that many children might affect the vocation I dreamed of as a little girl. At least half of the self-prophecy came true: I have been teaching in various capacities for over twenty years.
That it all began as a way to draw closer to my mother is most certain. I was seven and eight and her pupil in second and third grades. Sharing her with twenty daytime rivals and four siblings at night was hell. She explained to me why she was Maîtresse and not Maman in the classroom, and why she could not call on me as often as she would on others. Our secret understanding soothed my heart, yet I kept raising my finger higher each time she failed to respond. I would sit at her desk at night and open my classmates’ cahiers , religiously screening for errors I could correct, or hatch lesson plans for my own imaginary pupils.
Improbably, teaching found me again.
In the summer of 1990, I worked for a clothing company in Zurich, selling cheap stuff out of big cardboard boxes in what used to be a porn theater. White neon light shone over the slanted floors scarred by torn-out rows of seats. I shouted shoe and clothing sizes with an encouraging word for hesitant customers in rudimentary Swiss German. I needed the money, but the old town at night turned out to be far more precious to the student I was then. It was in one of its narrow winding streets that I first encountered Herbin. The thick ring of people gathered around him and his band obstructed my view, but I could hear the sound of his tap shoes hitting the cobblestones and the “oohs” and “ahs” that accompanied his performance. The end of his Swiss tour and the beginning of our romance meant I would