is a list of words and
grammatical concepts, devised in the beginning of the 1950s for teaching foreigners and residents of the
French Union
The French Union () was a political entity created by the French Fourth Republic to replace the old French colonial empire system, colloquially known as the " French Empire" (). It was ''de jure'' the end of the "indigenous" () status of Frenc ...
, France's colonial empire. A series of investigations in the 1950s and 1960s showed that a small number of words are used the same way orally and in writing in all circumstances; thus a limited number of grammatical rules were necessary for a functional language.
Origins
''Français fondamental'' was developed by the ''Centre d'Etude du Français Élémentaire'', which was renamed to the ''Centre de Recherche et d'Étude pour la Diffusion du Français'' (CREDIF) in 1959. It was headed by linguist Georges Gougenheim.
[Stern, H. H. ''Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Applied Linguistic Research''. ]Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...
. 24 March 1983
p. 55
Retrieved from Google Books on October 17, 2012. , 9780194370653. The
Ministry of Education of France sanctioned and promoted it as a method of learning French. The use of ''français fondamental'' was common in French textbooks, and especially prevalent in audiovisual learning methods used in the 1960s.
[Decoo, Wilfried. ''Systemization in Language Learning Models''. Taylor & Francis US, January 1, 2009]
p. 63
Retrieved from Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...
on 17 October 2012. , 9780415361934
Gougenheim, Réné Michea, Paul Rivenc, and Aurélien Sauvageot served as researchers for the project. There are 1,475 words in the "first degree" and 1,609 words in the "second degree."
[
]
See also
* Basic English
Basic English (a backronym for British American Scientific International and Commercial English) is a controlled language based on standard English, but with a greatly simplified vocabulary and grammar. It was created by the linguist and philo ...
* Vocabolario di base (in Italian: Basic Italian)
References
Further reading
* Gineste, Roger and R. Lagrave. ''Le français fondamental par l'action: Langage et vocabulaire. Section d'initiation à la langue française (ou Cours préparatoire 1re année) 1er degré. Méthode active et fonctionnelle destinée aux élèves dont la langue maternelle n'est pas le français''. , 1961.
see entry
in WorldCat
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...
)
External links
Français Fondamental, corpus oraux, contenus d'enseignement 50 ans de travaux et d'enjeux Ecole normale supérieure Lettres et Sciences humaines, Lyon, France 8,9 et 10 décembre 2005
{{DEFAULTSORT:Francais fondamental
Technical communication
French language
Simplified languages
1959 in France
Word lists
History of the French Union