Pause-Cafe: French in Review - Moving Toward Fluency

Pause-café is designed for the full second year of the study of French with emphasis on seven communicative functions: describing, comparing, narrating in the past, reacting and recommending, asking questions, talking about the future, and hypothesizing. These communicative functions are identified throughout the textbook by distinctive icons and are recycled in all six chapters. Although each chapter highlights at least one of the seven functions in turn, all seven are integrated into the chapter's oral and written work. The key grammatical structures that support these functions, called Points clés, appear with practice exercises at the back of the book. Pause-café helps students focus primarily on communicative functions because they are continuously recycled throughout the text, while the content and themes change with each new chapter.

Nora Megharbi is currently a lecturer at the University of California in Santa Cruz and serves as Coordinator of the French Program. A native of Paris, she has taught both in France and in the United States. She received her PhD. in Applied Linguistics / Second Language Acquisition from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Her research focuses on language teaching, pedagogical grammar and the use of multimedia and technology. At the University of Texas at Austin, she was a member of the development team for an online reference grammar of French entitled Tex's French Grammar (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tex/index.html), and a multimedia-based first-year French program, Français Interactif (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/). She designed materials for the first-year program project using video, multimedia technology, and Internet resources.

Stéphanie H. Pellet is an Assistant Professor of French at Wake Forest University, where she teaches French language and sociolinguistics courses. She received her Ph.D. in French linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught French language courses for several years. She has also taught French at Southwest Texas State University, Austin Community College, and Huston-Tillotson. She presents conference papers and writes on sociolinguistics and pragmatics in particular from the viewpoint of second language learners.

Carl S. Blyth (Ph.D., Cornell University) is the Director of the Texas Language Technology Center and Associate Professor of French Linguistics in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin. At UT-Austin, he has served as Coordinator of Lower-Division French (1993-2002); Acting Director of Technology, Literacy, and Culture (2001-2002); and Director/Assistant Director of the UT Summer Program in Lyon, France. With his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, Carl has developed an online reference grammar of French called Tex's French Grammar (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tex/index.html), and a multimedia-based first-year French program entitled Français Interactif (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/). In addition to his efforts in electronic publishing, Carl has written various journal articles, chapter essays, and books. Most notably, he was author of Untangling the Web: Nonce's Guide to Language and Culture on the Internet (1999) and editor of The Sociolinguistics of Foreign Language Classrooms (2003). More recently, he co-authored with Stacey Katz (University of Utah) Teaching French Grammar in Context (2007). Currently, he serves as the series editor of Issues in Language Program Direction, an annual volume devoted to foreign language learning in higher education. As his publications indicate, his main research interests lie at the intersection of sociolinguistics, technology, and language learning.

Sharon Wilson Foerster retired from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001, where she had been the Coordinator of Lower-Division Courses in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, directing the first- and second-year Spanish language program and training graduate assistant instructors. She continues to teach in the Spanish Summer Language School at Middlebury College in Vermont. She received her Ph.D. in Intercultural Communications from the University of Texas in 1981. Before joining the faculty at the University of Texas, she was Director of the Center for Cross-Cultural Study in Seville, Spain, for four years. She continues her involvement in study abroad through her work as Director of the Spanish Teaching Institute and as Academic Advisor for Academic Programs International. She is the co-author of the following McGraw-Hill titles: Pasaporte: Spanish for High Beginners (2009); Supplementary Materials to accompany Puntos de partida, Eighth Edition (2009); Metas: Spanish in Review, Moving Toward Fluency (2008); Punto y aparte: Spanish in Review, Moving Toward Fluency, Third Edition (2007); Lecturas literarias: Moving Toward Linguistic and Cultural Fluency Through Literature (2007); Metas comunicativas para maestros (1999); and Metas comunicativas para negocios (1998).