French 201 is a four-credit Syracuse University course which allows students with skills at the Intermediate level to continue their acquisition of the language and to prepare for advanced university courses. Intermediate-level skills are reinforced by applying them to new contexts, but the focus of the course is the systematic development of advanced-level skills.

By the end of the course students should be able to sustain understanding of main ideas and details over long stretches of connected discourse. They should be able to create with the language and to initiate, sustain, and close basic communicative tasks.

Students are expected to read, with increased comprehension, connected texts dealing with a variety of factual topics and to write well enough to meet practical needs.

To reach these goals, activities will involve the use of film and video to develop note-taking skills to summarize and organize what was seen and heard. Oral skills will be honed in extended discourse, paragraph-length accounts, role playing, and interviews. Activities will focus on understanding the facts and details of narration and description. Production of texts such as letters, journals, summaries, and reports will be systematically developed.