Jean Dard (June 21, 1789 — October 1, 1833) was a French teacher in

Saint-Louis, Senegal Saint Louis or Saint-Louis ( wo, Ndar), is the capital of Senegal's Saint-Louis Region. Located in the northwest of Senegal, near the mouth of the Senegal River, and 320 km north of Senegal's capital city Dakar, it has a population officially ...

who, in 1817, opened the first

French-language French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Nor ...

school in Africa. He also compiled the first French-

Wolof Wolof or Wollof may refer to: * Wolof people, an ethnic group found in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania * Wolof language, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania * The Wolof or Jolof Empire, a medieval West African successor of the Mal ...

dictionary and grammar (1846). Dard developed a new approach for teaching French as a foreign language, the "mutual method" or ''méthode de traduction'' (translation method), based on a learning approach pioneered by Aloïsius Édouard Camille Gaultier, by which children were taught to read and write in their native Wolof and then learned French by translating. According to

Jean-Benoît Nadeau Jean-Benoît Nadeau (born in 1964) is a Canadian author, journalist, and lecturer, and a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. He is the author of ''The Bonjour Effect'' and '' Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong'' which he co-wrote ...

and

Julie Barlow Julie Barlow (March 1968 in Hamilton, Ontario) is a Canadian journalist, author and conference speaker who writes and publishes both in English and French and is based in Montreal, Quebec. As an author, she has written four books on language and ...

, Dard's method was "very modern and very effective, and Dard was said to have achieved remarkable results with it." In Senegal, Dard took a signare by whom he had a son. He then returned to France for reasons of health and married Charlotte-Adélaïde Picard—an eyewitness of the wreck of the ''Méduse''—by whom he had three additional children. Dard served as a teacher and town secretary in Bligny-lès-Beaune. The Dards returned to Senegal in 1832, but he died there a year later.Nadeau and Barlow, 200.

References

French lexicographers 1789 births 1833 deaths 19th-century lexicographers {{France-linguist-stub