Revised 08/2025

FRE 201 - Intermediate French I (3 CR.)

Course Description

Continues to develop cultural awareness, listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills, and introduces complex sentence structures. Classes may be conducted in target language. Part I of II. This is a UCGS transfer course. Lecture 3 hours per week.

General Course Purpose

FRE 201 students will become skilled listeners, speakers, readers, and writers in the target language while developing an understanding and awareness of the culture, heritage, and civic values of the cultures studied.

Course Prerequisites/Corequisites

Prerequisite: FRE 102, or three years of successful completion of high school French, or demonstrated experiential learning, or by placement test, or equivalent. NOVA requires all students who did not take FRE 102 at an accredited institution of higher education or who have previous knowledge of French to take our placement test. We recommend that students who have not taken FRE 102 within the last year also take our placement test.

Students must be proficient in the present tense, the near future, pronouns, subject/verb/adjective agreement, the simple past and imperfect tenses, commands, adverbs, the subjunctive, and the future and conditional tenses.

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following within these areas:

  • Written Communication
    • Use any outside sources and course material to develop, convey, and exchange comprehensible ideas in the target language.
  • Professional Readiness
    • Collaborate with others and continue to use the target language and cultural behaviors to communicate appropriately in personal and professional settings at an intermediate level.
  • Critical Thinking
    • Apply basic critical thinking skills to begin to solve problems and make sense of complex issues.
  • Interpersonal Skills
    • Control language sufficiently to be easily understood by those interacting with language learners.
    • Ask for clarification, self-correct, or restate when not understood, and circumlocute to maintain conversation.
    • Sustain spontaneous spoken, written or signed conversations and discussions on familiar concrete topics and begin to sustain on unfamiliar concrete topics.
    • Discuss and explain information, incorporating various time frames, series of connected sentences, paragraphs and probing questions.
  • Interpretive Skills
    • Demonstrate oral and written evidence of the ability to make inferences by identifying key details from texts and other forms of media.
    • Demonstrate basic understanding of cultural and linguistic differences when writing, listening to, and talking about current events, social issues, popular culture, music and the arts.
    • Comprehend main ideas and identify supporting details.
    • Derive meaning of words and phrases by comparing and recognizing parallels between target language and native language structures.
    • Rely on knowledge of target culture to interpret texts and other forms of media.
  • Presentational Skills
    • Present relevant evidence of the ability to tell or retell a story and provide additional description.
    • Demonstrate ability to create messages in context relevant to oneself and on general interest and work-related topics.
    • Produce a series of cohesive and understandable oral and written sentences.
  • Intercultural Communication
    • Make comparisons between products and practices to help understand perspectives in native and other cultures using the target language.
    • Interact at a functional level in some familiar contexts with people in and from other cultures using the target language and appropriate learned behaviors.
    • Identify different cultures within target language regions.

Major Topics to Be Included

  • Personality traits and relationships
  • Feelings and emotions
  • Francophone cultures
  • Daily routines and cultural activities
  • The media
  • Politics
  • Social issues and justice
  • Society