GLN’s African Spotlight: A Summer of French!

Elisa Jennings, GLN Leadership Fellow 2019, highlights several classes being offered by Jennifer Makeya Van, GLN Teaching Associate, who is sharing French and African language and culture in several formats. She is part of an outstanding team of dedicated teachers who shine at The Global Language Network.

We are very proud to feature one of our brilliant French teachers, Jennifer, in our newsletter this summer! Jennifer only recently joined the Global Language Network and taught with us for the first time this past Spring, but she is already gearing up for the Summer semester with an engaging and unique curriculum for her new Nearly Native, Frequent Flyer, and Tourist classes!  

Jennifer will draw on her own experiences as a native of Côte d’Ivoire to really give her students a glimpse of real life, and she hopes for French students who are eager to learn about a French-speaking country other than France itself.

Her Nearly Native class will be centered around prominent African films and articles with discussion related to social issues, history, and issues and challenges of African society. She wants to use her diverse media to really immerse her students in a culture they may not have experienced before, and inspire an intricate and profound knowledge of African culture. Her Frequent Flyer class will also be discussion-based and focused on cultural issues, and she will be helping coach her students to read complex articles and understand these fundamentally difficult discussions.

Jennifer’s Tourist class will be reorganized to include a lot about her own country, Côte d’Ivoire, and Jennifer hopes to continue her emphasis on grammar concepts because she does believe that they are the foundation of mastery of French.

We really hope that you will be able to join one of our classes this Summer semester because, as you can see, our teachers are investing an incredible amount of passion into their classes. They are genuinely incredibly excited for the chance to share their language and culture with you, and we hope that you’ll be available this summer to experience it!