When students study abroad in the College, they are engrossed in the culture, daily routine and language of their new environment. To aid with this adjustment and to facilitate immersion, all Paris program students, regardless of experience with French, are required to take language classes.
In addition to this traditional classroom learning, each student also participates in weekly, hour-long conversation sessions in small groups led by local Parisian students. These outings bring to life the topics discussed in the French classroom, by putting students in real situations where they encounter the vocabulary they study at the John W. Boyer Center in Paris.
“The ‘séance de conversation’ is meticulously designed with two most important goals for University of Chicago students studying in Paris,” Director of the French Language Program in Paris and French Language Instructor Xin Miao explained. “Firstly, it aims to foster their French language progression by offering unique opportunities for spontaneous dialogue with local college students; secondly, it seeks to deepen the students’ understanding and appreciation of French culture. The goals are achieved through engaging sessions held in authentic Parisian settings, carefully chosen and enthusiastically shared by their local assistants.”
For example, students practice ordering pastries in cafes and navigating home using only Parisian metro signs and announcements. To end the quarter, students eat dinner with their conversation partners and professors as well as attend a French play that they have studied in class.
The conversation partners, though guided by the weekly topics of the professors, have the ability to choose the location and exact activities that the students will participate in. This means that UChicago students are introduced to places that they may not have found on their own, giving them a lens into the lives of students in Paris.
Paulina DePaulo, a rising fourth-year in the College studying computer science and philosophy, had no experience with French before arriving in Paris. So, alongside her European Civilizations course, she was enrolled in a beginner language class with many of her classmates.
In class each week, DePaulo and her fellow beginners were led through common scenarios, taught helpful vocabulary and coached on their pronunciation.
“At the same time as we're learning the basic building blocks of the language, we're also learning specific scenarios in which we would be able to use those phrases,” she said. “I think this emphasis on building conversational toolkits is important because we're actually in Paris.”
When DePaulo learned about the weekly conversation sessions, she felt an initial uneasy confusion. Adjusting to a new timezone, city, language and class environment within the span of mere weeks was already disorienting, without the added pressure of what seemed, at first, to be an additional oral examination with an actual Parisian.
However, what DePaulo found in her weekly conversations was anything but discomfort. Instead, these outings with her conversation partner, Timothée Adam, became a safe place to ask questions, follow curiosity and adjust to life in Paris.
“It's really important to have a more casual connection to French as you're learning it,” she explained. “Tim encourages us to talk to each other in French and helps us get a deeper understanding of colloquial French phrases for basic situations which is really nice."
A picture of an artist’s station at 59 Rivoli where Adam took DePaulo and her groupmates.
(Photo provided)
As they work on their language skills with Adam, DePaulo and her groupmates are also getting the opportunity to explore hidden treasures of Paris that they may not have visited otherwise. For example, her group visited 59 Rivoli, a historical public art showcase, on one of their first outings.
What makes these excursions particularly beneficial to DePaulo is the way in which they learn French through the environment around them. As the artists worked at 59 Rivoli, Adam showed DePaulo and the other students how to ask the artists questions about their work and how to read a poem painted on the walls.
“If there's something that he sees that he thinks that we should know, or that he thinks it would be helpful for us to be able to read, he'll stop and walk us through it.”
But although these weekly sessions take students through the arrondissements of the city, each conversation remains rooted in the class curriculum back at the Center in Paris, adding depth to their education, not a disturbance. For example, the week that his students were learning how to count in French, Adam planned an outing to the park across from the students’ dorm where they played a numbers trivia game.
As the game progressed, DePaulo witnessed a noted improvement in her and her classmates' skills.
“It was hard at first, but it really made all of us a lot more comfortable with using French numbers,” she reflected. “By the end, it was very instinctual and we’d played a really fun game that put our learning into practice.”
Dorine Gautier is a student at the École du Louvre, a prestigious French university, where she studies the restoration of art. Since the beginning of the year, she has been one of the conversation assistants that works with UChicago students each week.
Gautier was inspired to become a language partner after having her own experience learning a language and culture abroad through immersion guided by locals when she lived with a host family for three months in Bautzen, Germany.
On the language side, Gautier recognizes that French, being a “living” language, is always evolving which makes certain aspects difficult to learn in a structured classroom setting.
“There are many words that have changed or been varied with time, or pronunciations of words that evolve, or even ‘jargon’ expressions that the French use, but that are not taught in school,” Gautier said. “That’s why studying French with a local is just as important as studying vocabulary in class.”
Students walk through the 11th arrondissement with their conversation partner while discussing the different neighborhoods of Paris.
(Photo provided)
Gautier enjoys showing students her favorite locations tucked away in the different neighborhoods, but also getting to interact with students from a wide range of backgrounds and hear fresh perspectives through genuine conversations about different topics each week.
“It has also been a really enriching experience for myself, to interact with new people,” she explained. “Our exchanges have allowed me to discover other cultures simply through conversations, which has been very interesting.”
This mutually beneficial relationship opens the minds of students and conversation assistants alike to new outlooks, all while building on students’ language skills.
When studying abroad, students are afforded the invaluable opportunity to engage with locals who will act not only as language resources, but also as friends and cultural guides.
“Beyond facilitating linguistic practice, these assistants share both their invaluable insights into student life in Paris and aspects from their home cultures from various regions across France,” Miao concluded. “For most of the cases, our students forge friendship with their conversation assistant during the nine-week stay and continue to see each other in Europe or in the United States long after their Study Abroad program in Paris.”
