LE DEPARTEMENT DES LANGUES

EQUIPE PEDAGOGIQUE

Allemand :    Mme VLAEMINCK, M.   HURNI

Anglais :       Mmes ASLANIDES, LEGRAND,  MUNIER,VIGNON-BUTOR, WATKINS,
                    MM. CORBET, DUBE, VALES

Espagnol :    Mme BADUEL,
                    Mme BOURGOUGNON

____>>Les langues à Saint Louis

Sites de documentation dédiés:

NEWS for SL Students

Nachrichten für SL studenten

  MATERIEL AUDIOVISUEL

                Le lycée dispose de deux laboratoires multi-media de 24 et de 18 places qui permettent aux élèves de s'entraîner de manière individualisée à la compréhension et à l'expression orales. Les cours dispensés en laboratoire sont destinés en particulier à la préparation des épreuves de compréhension orale (Concours Communs Polytechniques, Polytechnique et Ecoles de Commerce) et vidéo (Banque Agro). L'accès à Internet et par conséquent aux nombreuses archives des différents sites de radios étrangères complètera le travail sur CD-Rom et DVD en élargissant l'aspect civilisationnel de l'enseignement.

Des lecteurs de CD-Rom permettent également d'assurer la pratique de la compréhension orale dans les salles de classe.

Plusieurs salles de cours sont par ailleurs équipées d'une télévision et d'un magnétoscope-lecteur DVD nécessaires à l'entraînement à la compréhension vidéo (épreuve des concours d'entrée aux écoles d'agronomie) et à l'enseignement de la civilisation en classes préparatoires économiques et commerciales.

DOCUMENTS DE TRAVAIL CONSEILLES(lorsque deux ouvrages sont conseillés, n'en achetez bien sûr qu'un seul)

            Pour toutes les langues il est fortement conseillé de posséder une grammaire et un dictionnaire bilingue et/ou unilingue. De nombreux ouvrages de référence sont disponibles au CDI, ainsi que des magazines d'actualité dont la lecture régulière est essentielle pour améliorer la compréhension écrite et s'informer sur les événements de l'année.

Allemand:

- grammaire recommandée : La Pratique de l'Allemand de A à Z (Hatier)
- dictionnaire bilingue: Harraps'

Anglais:

- manuel de remise à niveau : L'Anglais après le Bac, Bouscaren & Rivière (Ophrys)

- grammaires :          La Grammaire de l'Anglais d'Aujourd'hui, Thomson & Martinet (Pocket)
                                    Grammaire Raisonnée de l'Anglais 2, Persec & Burgué (Ophrys)
                                   Fiches et tests de grammaire, C. Rivière, (Ophrys - Parcours Université)
- dictionnaire bilingue: Le Robert & Collins
- dictionnaire unilingue : Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary
- manuel de civilisation : A Cultural Guide, F. Grellet (Nathan)

                                           Fiches de Civilisation Américaine et Britannique (Ellipses)

  MODALITES DES EPREUVES ECRITES CONCOURS INGENIEURS ET ECOLES DE COMMERCE

SOME ADVICE FOR THE HOLIDAYS

LANGUAGE

- Do some grammar revision ifever you find you have problems with the following points:

         ° tenses: use and agreement; aspects

         ° modal verbs

         ° various types of clauses: time, concession, comparison, result ...

         ° the passive and especially infinitive structures following passive (he is said to...)

         ° verbs followed with either infinitive or ING or both with a difference in meanings

         ° relative pronouns and clauses

         ° determiners

Doing ‘thème grammatical' - you will find plenty of books on the market with or without correction - is the best way to check and improve your grammatical skills.

COMPREHENSION

         Here are a few tips to improve your comprehension skills:
- Read an article from the English-speaking press every week. Here are the two sites which give you all the links towards the UK and the US press:

http://www.wrx.zen.co.uk/

http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx

Every two weeks spend longer on the exercise by writing some notes to try and organise the ideas of the text and by thinking of a couple of points to comment on it. Check vocabulary if necessary and write it down in a notebook. (Do not devote more than 20 minutes to the whole exercise)

- Listen to the radio on the net. You may start with the Learning English section of the BBC World website. There you will find short articles which you can listen to, along with the script and some vocabulary explanations.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/index.shtml

Here are other radio websites where you will find reports to listen to:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/ : this will give you access to all BBC channels http://www.npr.org/ (for the US)

http://www.voanews.com/english/portal.cfm (for the US)

http://www.abc.net.au/ (Australian website)

- Don't forget you can also watch reports on the Net:

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/

http://news.sky.com/skynews/home

http://www.cnn.com/

http://www.cbsnews.com/

http://www.euronews.fr/: this will give you access to the English-speaking channel of Euronews but also to other languages if you need it.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/

- Go and see at least a couple of films in English.

- Pick a book from the following lists and read it. You can even get some short stories if you fear a whole novel is too long.

Some American authors :

- Paul Auster : The New York Trilogy (described as ‘anti-detective fiction' or ‘mysteries about mysteries'), The Music of Chance (two men facing the consequences of gambling after playing with men beyond their league)

- Carson Mc Cullers: (writes about the South) The Ballad of the Sad Café, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

- Bill Bryson: Notes from a Small Island, The Lost Continent, Down Under (funny travel books about the UK, the US and Australia)

- Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road (recently turned into a film, a brilliant portrait of America in the 50s)

- Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (a documentary-style novel around a horrific crime perpetrated in the 1950s in Texas)

- Raymond Carver: Short Cuts (a collection of short stories whose topics revolve around death, infidelity, chance and luck)

- Tony Hillerman: (the author of ‘Navajo mysteries') The Fallen Man, Sacred Clowns

- James Lee Burke: In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (recently turned into a film by Bertrand Tavernier - his detective stories are set in the South of the US)

- Douglas Kennedy: The State of the Union (easy reading about the story of an American family over three generations from the 60s to nowadays)

- David Gutterson: Snow Falling on Cedars (a murder case set on a fictional island off the state of Washington coast and against the background of anti-Japanese racism following world war 2)

Some British authors

- David Lodge: any novel by him really, they are all good fun. Here are two of them: Paradise News (a trip to Hawaï for a father and his son to see the father's dying sister), Changing Places (two professors, one American and one British, swapping jobs)

- William Boyd: A Good Man in Africa (humoristic), The Blue Afternoon (a reworking of Romeo and Juliette in the context of the beginning of modern technology), Restless (a spy-thriller)

- Pat Barker: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road (a trilogy about the first world war)

- Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong (a very moving novel also about the first world war; it is actually the first part of a trilogy whose parts two and three I feel are not so well-done), A Fool's Alphabet (the story of a man told in 26 chapters, each set in a different place and lettered from A to Z)

- Jonathan Coe: What a carve-up (social satire of the British upper-class), The Rotters' Club (a group of friends coming of age in Britain in the 1970s)

- PD James (any of her books really, her hero is a London detective superintendent) Shroud for a Nightingale, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, The Murder Room, The Lighthouse. She has also written a science-fiction novel, The Children of Men worth a read.

- Ian Rankin (his hero is a Scottish inspector) Knots and Crosses was the first one I read, being recommended to me. Also worth reading: Fleshmarket Close, The Black Book

Other English-speaking authors

- Tim Wilton, an Australian author: The Turning (a collection of short stories with recurring characters), The Riders ( an Australian who with his young daughter treks through Europe in search of his wife)

- J.M. Coetzee, a South-African author: Disgrace (the downfall of a university professor in post-apartheid South Africa), Youth (the portrait of a young South-African student in the 1960s in London)

Here are some other suggestions made by other teachers:

·         James Baldwin, Go tell it on the mountain

·         David Lodge : ils sont tous bons !

·         Ann Tyler, j'aime beaucoup A Patchwork Planet mais il y en a beaucoup d'autres

·         Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

·         Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin

·         Sue Townsend, The secret Diary of Adrian Mole (les suivants sont bien aussi)

·         Alison Lurie, tous les romans sont excellents

·         Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary et The Edge of Reason

·         Nick Hornby : About a Boy et High Fidelity

·         Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead et Xenocide

·         Janet Evanovitch, One for the Money, Two for the Dough, et les suivants

·         John Irving, The Water-Method Man, The 158-pound Marriage, The World according to Garp, Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen, A Widow for One Year, the Fourth Hand

·         Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City, plusieurs volumes

·         Jostein Gaarder, ils sont tous bien, j'ai une préférence pour The Solitaire Mystery

·         Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring et Falling Angels.

·         Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions, et tous les autres sont bien aussi.

·         Charles Palliser, The Quincunx, un pavé mais excellent ; The Unburied.

·         George Orwell, 1984

·         Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

·         Julian Barnes, England, England

·         Joseph O'Neill, Netherland

No matter what you choose, enjoy yourself and do enjoy your holidays

CONSEILS pour  l'espagnol.