Book Review by Charlie Mansfield 23 May 12000Mireille Ribiere & Thalia Marriott (1998) Help Yourself to Advanced French Grammar - Second Edition, Harlow, Longman ISBN 0582 329450 Pbk 281pp.
Electronic commerce reached the English-speaking world with the dot com flotations in the Spring of 2000 but the point fr revolution (with its pun on the French word for business) had been a potent indicator to francophonie since the mid-nineties that Internet products and services available from those .fr pages were documented in a readable language and available in mainland Europe. While dot com meant 'subject to postal delays' .fr meant local. In European e-commerce .com means 'on the shelf', .fr means 'help yourself'.
Higher education in England started to feel the demands from UK businesses in early 2000 to provide graduates with that new mix of skills for the electronic global marketplace; that is with excellent web design skills coupled with high standards of literacy in a second major European language and culture. These skills were presented as the new future by Lyotard as long ago as 1979 in his famous Report on Knowledge for anyone who could read French.
With 2001 earmarked as a year-long celebration of Europe's languages what can undergraduates in English universities do to prepare for a professional life in the global e-world and multi-lingual information society? They could help themselves to Ribiere and Marriott's Help Yourself to French Grammar in its new second edition since its example material draws on the concerns of the early twenty-first century. This new workbook engages the student with such ideas as 'L'entreprise et le client' (117) where students work on mature texts explaining principles of modifying the product to meet the customer's needs, with socio-economic trends (ch. 23) and the book even manages to integrate an extract from France's data protection law: 'L'Informatique doit etre au service de chaque citoyen.'
However, the grammar exercises do not restrict themselves to technological futures but offer up texts on social issues in contemporary society, for example, by using a description of the open family in an exercise on the use of direct and indirect object pronouns (18) and by looking at 'La banlieue s'enflamme' in chapter 14 (85-90) to introduce the subjunctive (very cleverly demonstrating that the subjunctive is relevant in everyday speech and is not just to be viewed through Gide's 'porte etroite'. The passage represents an interview between a journalist and a social worker, the reader of the grammar book, or rather, the user of the self-study manual, being encouraged to underline the verb or expression which the subjunctive follows: 'En fait, tous les jours on s'attend a ce qu'il se produise un incident' (85).
It's worth pausing here a moment to look at the purpose of the book. It's made as a functional object for serious self-study even going as far as providing removable answer pages at the back. The authors have created an object lesson in excellent Open Learning design, with diagnostic exercises to generate needs-driven learning in the user before delivering the new piece of grammar under consideration.
Ever since Barthes' RB par RB (Paris, Seuil 1975) it's been impossible to read a collection of lexia or textual fragments without allowing a complex narrative weave its way into the book to somehow make coherent the disparate characters that inhabit the fragments. I still have a clear image of Toto and the Duponts from Point de Depart, my first French textbook of the sixties. I remember, too, the surprise on my first arrival in West Berlin in the early eighties to find that the billboards were in colour, unlike the photographs in my copy of the workbook, Menschen und Maschinen.
What country does this help yourself workbook paint? It's a land where you can now do your shopping on the Internet, 'Maintenant on peut faire ses courses a domicile grace a Internet' (147). It is a place where Fauvet & Fils have doubled their turnover in less than a year (96) thanks to effective teamwork, where Thomas is the unwitting object of premier amour (21), where train fares have fallen by fifteen per cent (20), where Lola and Gabriel use the future tense of some of those tricky irregular verbs like falloir and aller to plan un grand repas de fete (12) and where 'L'image (traditionnel) des Francais ne correspond plus a la realite (quotidien)': A. Make the adjectives in brackets agree with the nouns they refer to. Answers on page 225.
This is a very pleasing collaboration on French grammar and one wonders how biographical, in the Barthesian sense, is their dialogue on page 111 between Agnes and Macha, co-authors of a roman policier.
(Note: accented characters have not been used in this review article because of the recent problems in the new versions of American web browsers)
2000 Charlie Mansfield
