A Discussion of Techniques Used in the Teaching of the Passe Compose/Imparfait Distinction in French.

Abstract

RESULTS OF AN INFORMAL POLL taken recently of teachers of high school French show that one of the most difficult points of French grammar to teach to native speakers of English is the distinction between the passe compose and the imparfait.1 Students are confused because no neat equivalent distinction exists in English. The same can be said, however, for many, perhaps most aspects of the French language. Why then the extraordinary confusion experienced by students faced with this particular structure? I belive that most of their troubles are the result of vague, incomplete, contradictory, and generally poor explanations found in most beginning textbooks. The aim of this article is to point out the harm in these textbook explanations and then to propose a simple yet complete alternative which eliminates most of the confusion. The traditional portion of the article is of necessity longer than the non-traditional proposal, as I must break down the complex traditional explanations and discuss the problems with each point. (These are not always immediately obvious except in the fact that they do not work well.) Data for this study were taken from twelve current beginning and intermediate level college textbooks.2 The non-traditional explanation then proposed is in fact found in many of these books, but always mixed in with and lost among other explanations. It is a simple statement of the basic difference between Imperfective and Perfective aspect, a difference that is taught in graduate linguistic classes (hence my introduction to it) and has been discussed in linguistic articles (see Pulgram; Comrie 3, 70; Klein 98-100). I have been using the linguistic explanation exclusively in my college French classes for the past five years, with consistently excellent results. All of the beginning French texts examined introduce the passe compose, by giving a blanket definition of that tense, and then in subsequent chapters add sub-explanations, precisions and exceptions. This practice is unsound, confusing the student by giving him false impressions, leading him to believe one thing and then telling him just the opposite later on. It would be preferable to provide the student with one clear explanation at the outset, which holds in all cases. An example of a totally useless general definition of the passe compose which is found in many textbooks is that the passe compose is used to indicate that an

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