GACE French (P-12) (741) flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Liaison obligatoire

Pronunciation of an otherwise silent final consonant before a vowel-initial word, required after determiners, pronouns, and adjectives (les_amis, vous_avez) and forbidden after et and before h aspiré.

Enchaînement consonantique

Linking of a pronounced final consonant to the initial vowel of the next word across a boundary, as in avec_elle or une_amie, without any change to the written form.

Nasal vowel contrast

French distinguishes four nasal vowels /ɛ̃ œ̃ ɔ̃ ɑ̃/, so pain, brun, bon, and banc differ only by nasality and rounding; mishearing them changes meaning in listening tasks.

Schwa deletion

The e muet is dropped in normal speech, so je ne sais pas is realized roughly as [ʃɛpa]; listeners must reconstruct elided pronouns and negation from reduced input.

French number traps

Seventy is soixante-dix, eighty quatre-vingts, ninety quatre-vingt-dix; vingt et un uses et but vingt-deux does not; cent and vingt take -s only when multiplied and final.

Register cues in speech

Informal French drops ne, uses on for nous, and asks questions by intonation; formal French keeps full negation, uses inversion, and prefers the nous form and conditional politeness.

Passé composé versus imparfait

Passé composé presents bounded completed events that advance narrative; imparfait presents background, habitual, or ongoing states, so the pair encodes aspect rather than simply past time.

French rhythmic group stress

Stress falls on the final syllable of a sense group, not on each word, so je pense que c'est une bonne idée carries stress on idée and phrase-final position.

Conditionnel de politesse

The conditional softens requests and hypotheses in formal spoken French: je voudrais, pourriez-vous, auriez-vous l'amabilité; it replaces blunt present-tense imperatives in constructed responses.

Discourse repair phrases

Expressions such as je veux dire, plutôt, enfin, and excusez-moi let a speaker self-correct mid-utterance; fluent repair preserves comprehensibility where silence would break the message.

Vouvoiement rules

Vous addresses strangers, superiors, and newly met adults; tu is used with peers, children, family, and after mutual agreement. Mixing the two within one exchange is a register error.

Passé simple function

A literary past tense marking bounded, plot-advancing events, usually paired with imperfect background description; recognizing it is essential for reading French narrative and historical prose.

Pronoun y and en

Y replaces à plus a thing or place; en replaces de plus a noun or a quantity. Both must be traced to their antecedent to resolve meaning in dense reading passages.

French false friends

Actuellement means currently, éventuellement possibly, assister à to attend, demander to ask, librairie bookshop, and formation training; translating literally produces comprehension errors.

Ne ... que restriction

The construction ne ... que means only, not negation; ne ... guère means hardly and ne ... point means not at all. Misreading these flips the proposition of a sentence.

Connectors of concession

Bien que, quoique, encore que, and même si introduce contrast; the first three take the subjunctive, while même si takes the indicative. They signal a counterargument in expository text.

Verb-echo distractors

In reading questions, options that repeat words verbatim from the passage often misstate the relationship; the correct answer typically paraphrases the proposition or its logical consequence.

Past participle with avoir

With avoir the past participle agrees only with a preceding direct object: les lettres que j'ai écrites, but j'ai écrit les lettres. No agreement occurs with an indirect object.

Pronominal verb agreement

Reflexive pronominal verbs agree with the subject when the pronoun is a direct object (elle s'est lavée); no agreement occurs when it is indirect (elle s'est lavé les mains).

Subjunctive triggers

Il faut que, bien que, pour que, avant que, à condition que, douter que, and superlative or unique antecedents (le seul qui soit) require the subjunctive in formal written French.

French punctuation spacing

French inserts a space before ; : ! ? and uses guillemets « » for quotation; decimals take a comma and thousands a space, so 3,5 and 12 000 replace English conventions.

Accents that change meaning

Ou means or while où means where; a means has while à means to; sur means on while sûr means sure; du and dû, cote and côté differ only by the accent mark.

Adjective position shift

Most adjectives follow the noun, but beau, jeune, grand, petit, nouveau, and vieux precede it; position can shift meaning, as in un grand homme versus un homme grand.

Subject clitic obligatoriness

French requires an overt subject clitic with finite verbs, so il pleut and je viens cannot drop the pronoun as Spanish or Italian allow; this is a core typological contrast.

Langue d'oïl and langue d'oc

Medieval Gallo-Romance split into northern langue d'oïl, ancestor of standard French, and southern Occitan or langue d'oc; Francoprovençal forms a third group around Lyon and Geneva.

Circumflex etymology

The circumflex often marks a consonant lost from Latin or Old French, usually s: forêt from forest, hôpital from hospital, être from estre, fenêtre from fenestre.

Négritude movement

A literary and political movement of the 1930s led by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas, affirming Black identity and rejecting colonial assimilation in French-language writing.

Classicisme and Louis XIV

Seventeenth-century French classicism, patronized under Louis XIV, produced Corneille's tragedies, Racine's Phèdre, Molière's comedies, and Boileau's codification of taste and the unities.

Laïcité in schools

French secularism, grounded in the 1905 separation law, bans conspicuous religious symbols in public schools under the 2004 law, a frequent topic in culture and citizenship prompts.

Overseas départements

France includes five overseas départements: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, La Réunion, and Mayotte, which are integral parts of the Republic and the European Union.

Three communication modes

ACTFL organizes communication into interpretive (listening and reading), interpersonal (negotiated two-way interaction), and presentational (one-way speaking or writing) modes, each assessed differently.

Backward design stages

Wiggins and McTighe's model sets desired results first, then acceptable evidence of learning, then learning experiences; assessment is designed before activities, not after them.