Reading Strategies and Building Vocabulary

An authentic French text, a news article from Radio-Canada, a travel brochure, a scene from a play, will always contain words you have never seen. Good readers do not stop at each one. They predict what the text will say, use the words they do know, guess from context and word structure, and check their guesses as they go. Grade 11 asks for more than the gist: you need to tell what a text says from what it suggests, separate facts from opinions and feelings, and recognise how the form of a text (news report, opinion piece, play) shapes what it does. At the same time, every text you read can grow your vocabulary, because French words come in families: once you know calme, you can work out calmer, calmement and even accalmie.

1. Before: read the title, subtitles, images and captions. Ask: What form is this text (news, ad, opinion, play)? Who wrote it, for whom, and why? Predict three things it might say.
2. During: read a paragraph at a time. Underline words you know and cognates; skip an unknown word once and see if the sentence still makes sense. Use context, word families and grammar (Is it a verb? a noun?) to guess the rest.
3. During: mark signal words: mais, cependant (contrast), donc, c'est pourquoi (consequence), d'abord, ensuite, enfin (order), selon (source).
4. After: summarise the main idea in one sentence, check your predictions, look up only the two or three words that still block meaning, and note them in a word-family list.

An explicit message is stated directly: Le concert a été annulé à cause de la tempête (The concert was cancelled because of the storm). An implicit message is something you infer: Les billets se sont vendus en huit minutes (The tickets sold out in eight minutes) never says the band is very popular, but that is the message. Ads, opinion pieces and plays rely heavily on the implicit. When you answer a question about implicit meaning, quote the words that led you to your inference: On peut déduire que…, parce que le texte dit que… (We can infer that…, because the text says that…).

• A play script (un texte de théâtre) has its own conventions. Each line of dialogue is a réplique, introduced by the character's name, often in capitals.
• Stage directions (les didascalies) are usually in italics or parentheses and in the présent: (Elle ouvre la fenêtre et regarde la rue.) They tell you what the audience sees and how a line is said: (à voix basse) in a low voice, (en colère) angrily.
• Example: LÉA (elle entre en courant): Vous avez entendu la nouvelle? → LÉA (running in): Have you heard the news? MAX (sans lever les yeux): Laquelle? → MAX (without looking up): Which one?