Roger Hawkins - Practising French Grammar: A Workbook

Fourth Edition

Practising French Grammar offers a set of varied and accessible exercises for developing a practical awareness of French as it is spoken and written today.

The lively examples and authentic texts and cartoons have been updated to reflect current usage. A new companion website provides a wealth of additional interactive exercises to help consolidate challenging grammar points, available at: www.routledge.com/cw/hawkins.

Practising French Grammar provides concise summaries of key grammatical points at the beginning of each exercise, as well as model answers to the exercises and translations of difficult words. It can be used alone or as the ideal companion to the fourth edition of French Grammar and Usage by Roger Hawkins and Richard Towell.

Roger Hawkins is Professor of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, UK.

Richard Towell is Emeritus Professor of French Applied Linguistics at the University of Salford, UK.

Marie-Nolle Lamy is Emeritus Professor of French at the Open University, UK.

Practising Grammar Workbooks

Also available in this series:

Practising German Grammar, Third Edition
Practising Italian Grammar
Practising Spanish Grammar, Third Edition

Practising Grammar Workbooks can be used alone or as the ideal companions to the Routledge Reference Grammar series:

French Grammar and Usage, Fourth Edition
Hammers German Grammar and Usage, Fifth Edition
A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, Second Edition
A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, Fifth Edition

Fourth Edition

Roger Hawkins , Richard Towell and Marie-Nolle Lamy

Companion website exercises designed by Juliet Solheim

This fourth edition published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1997, 2010, 2015 Roger Hawkins, Marie-Nolle Lamy and Richard Towell

The right of Roger Hawkins, Marie-Nolle Lamy and Richard Towell to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hawkins, Roger (Roger D.)
Practising French grammar: a workbook / Roger Hawkins, Richard Towell, and Marie-Nolle Lamy. - Fourth Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. French languageGrammarProblems, exercises, etc. 2. French languageUsage Problems, exercises, etc. 3. French languageTextbooks for foreign speakersEnglish. I. Towell, Richard, author. II. Lamy, Marie-Nolle, 1949- consultant. III. Title.

PC2112.H36 2015
448.2'421dc23

2014035014

First edition published 1997 by Hodder Education
Second edition published 2010 by Hodder Education and 2013 by Routledge

ISBN: 978-1-138-85120-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-85119-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-72428-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Palatino
by Phoenix Photosetting, Chatham, Kent

The authors and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material in this book:

Le Figaro for the article Financer les tudes ltranger in .

It has not been possible to identify the sources of all the material used, and in such cases the publishers would welcome information from copyright holders.

Why write a book of exercises which focus on French grammar?

Grammatical knowledge is one of several types of knowledge/skill which a person needs to acquire in order to use a foreign language effectively. Others are: knowledge of vocabulary; a sensitivity to the appropriate use, in different contexts, of grammar and vocabulary; the ability to understand spontaneous, normal-speed speech; and the ability to produce spontaneous, normal-speed speech.

While these types of knowledge/skill interact fairly seamlessly in the use of a foreign language by a competent speaker, observation tells us that they do not develop seamlessly. Each component in foreign language learning appears to develop in response to different types of stimuli. To acquire grammatical knowledge, foreign language learners seem to need to work with grammatical properties; to acquire knowledge of vocabulary they need to work with vocabulary; to acquire the ability to understand spontaneous, normal-speed speech, they need to work with spontaneous, normal-speed speech and so on.

Practising French Grammar

This Workbook aims to help you focus on the grammatical properties of French. The knowledge you develop as a result should complement your performance in the other areas of French language learning and should help to develop your knowledge of vocabulary, your ability to understand and produce fast French spontaneously and so on.

The Workbook is designed to accompany French Grammar and Usage by Roger Hawkins and Richard Towell (London: Routledge, 2015), which provides the relevant background information required to complete the exercises successfully. The order of chapters in the Workbook follows the order of chapters in French Grammar and Usage , and each section heading gives a relevant reference to French Grammar and Usage . However, the Workbook has also been written as a relatively free-standing set of exercises, so that it can be used on its own. Many of the exercises are preceded by a brief summary of the grammatical point under discussion.

Most of the exercises are guided tests on specific topics, and answers will be either right or wrong; e.g. if you are asked to complete a blank like , Section 12). There are usually no right answers to these exercises, although we do provide one possibility in the answers section. These exercises are indicated in the text by .

There is no particular recommended way to use this Workbook. You could work through it systematically section by section, or pick and choose exercises from different sections as you go along. Any use of the exercises should increase your awareness of the grammatical properties of French, and that is the essential function of the book. At the end of most chapters, though, there is an exercise which presupposes that you are familiar with the whole chapter. Answers are provided to each exercise, but only look at these after you have done the exercise!

Finally, practising French grammar is not an end in itself, but a means of improving your ability to understand and use French effectively. Nevertheless, we hope that you will find the tasks we have devised varied and interesting.

Conventions used in the text

FGU = French Grammar and Usage
= an open-ended exercise

Nouns