French Courseware is an application of Word for Windows, which consists of five units of work for students and a unit for staff development. The work is aimed at students who have been studying French for about a year, although some units have been used successfully with Year 12 pupils. It therefore contains material likely to appeal to the interests of key stage 3 pupils pen pals, school subjects, personal problems, and environmental issues Les petites annonces, Au coll ge, Les amities, Ecovert.

The staff development unit is a gentle introduction to straightforward word-processing techniques - a factor in ensuring that a high percentage of staff in a department are on the same wavelength.

The activities that this courseware facilitates are fairly straightforward, and generally highly motivating. Pupils can read short texts for comprehension, and put relevant information that they have extracted into sentences. Thus reading tabulated information about les vedettes leads to re-sorting that information and selecting it to fit a new format. There are traditional exercises in rearranging the lines of a poem to restore the sense, multiple-choice quizzes, and true- or-false exercises.

Technical faults are hard to find, though it’s just possible to quibble with the fact that a learner who inadvertently wipes text from the screen will not be able to retrieve it without leaving the program.

A welcome feature is the on-line dictionary. Inducing learners of this age-range to look up words is one of the French teacher’s lost causes. A dictionary on-line removes the drudgery. Where you don’t understand a word, highlight it, and click on the mini-dictionary button to see an English equivalent. The reverse process is also possible: it is easy to insert a French word from the dictionary into your text. When it comes to staff development, you can create your own files and build up a dedicated small dictionary to go with them, tagged with similar file names.

Watching a class at work on French Courseware it is easy to see at first hand how independent learning is advanced when the teacher is no longer the dominant source of interaction in the classroom.

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