Delphi module

14.5.6
Reviews

As in undergraduate teaching generally, reviewing FL books is an excellent way to get students to read both actively and critically, and to employ the key cognitive skills of selecting, comparing and evaluating. Reviews need not be limited to books, but might also profitably encompass films or even TV programmes. The activity can begin at lower levels of proficiency, with students reviewing adapted or easy FL readers, or subtitled films. Students of literature at advanced level might review short set texts or other works by set authors; alternatively, reviews of long FL articles might be appropriate in some circumstances. By final year, all students should be capable of reviewing single books or full-length films on a variety of topics.

Whether the review is to be written in L1 or the FL will clearly depend on students' level of proficiency and the purpose of assessment (is it a form of reading or writing assessment, or both?). Generally, by the second year of a post-'A' level course, reviews should be in the FL, by which stage students should be adopting the relevant conventions of reviewing, after having considered sample reviews that have appeared in FL publications.

Issues to consider when introducing FL reviews include:

show students sample reviews and the degree of summarizing versus evaluation that they feature;
get students to work within a word limit;
put students' reviews on the departmental website or maybe include a couple of samples in the following year's module handbook;
design appropriate criteria; these are likely to vary depending on the level of FL proficiency;
ensure you, the department, language centre or library have sufficient resources to sustain the activity;
if appropriate resources are in short supply, ask students to review the same text or film from different perspectives - eg a pamphlet on French education might be reviewed for different target audiences: teachers, parents or foreign readers.