{"id":9542,"date":"2013-07-25T11:37:28","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T15:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/?p=9542"},"modified":"2013-07-25T12:19:51","modified_gmt":"2013-07-25T16:19:51","slug":"the-alliance-francaise-celebrates-its-130th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/the-alliance-francaise-celebrates-its-130th-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"The Alliance Fran\u00e7aise Celebrates its 130th Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Jean-Beno\u00eet Nadeau & Julie Barlow<\/h5>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>
\n\"Logo<\/a>To celebrate the 130th anniversary of the Alliance fran\u00e7aise, French President Fran\u00e7ois Holland welcomed the institution\u2019s directors to the \u00c9lys\u00e9e Palace, where they discussed the organization\u2019s qualities and accomplishments.<\/p>\n

Holland\u2019s revelation that his grandfather had made him learn entire pages of the French dictionary by heart garnered a lot of media buzz.<\/p>\n

Holland\u2019s story was probably meant to be touching, but the President completely missed the mark. It was a poor choice of anecdote to illustrate the virtues of French language teaching. Instead, the story highlighted how, in teaching their language, the French have remained fixated on the written form of their language, idealizing written French as the perfect \u201cform\u201d of the language.<\/p>\n

French teaching has long suffered from this stubborn fixation on spelling, and teaching through dictation exercises. In teaching, the French idealize impossible language standards, then demonizes errors by labeling them as fautes <\/i>(literally, \u201cfaults,\u201d which carries a moral undertone, making them worse than mere mistakes). Yet the French language is more than its dictionary and spelling rules, which are constantly changing. In fact, today\u2019s French is to some extent the sum of all the fautes<\/i> of earlier generations who forged the language.<\/p>\n

We can only hope that the French will overcome this limited and uninspiring conception of their language, and that the next occupant of the \u00c9lys\u00e9e Palace will find a better way to congratulate the Alliance fran\u00e7aise when it celebrates its 140th\u00a0anniversary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jean-Beno\u00eet Nadeau & Julie Barlow \u00a0 To celebrate the 130th anniversary of the Alliance fran\u00e7aise, French President Fran\u00e7ois Holland welcomed the institution\u2019s directors to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[57,53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9542"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9542"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9546,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9542\/revisions\/9546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}