AATF Convention Chicago 2025

Get to know the materials presented by the French Heritage Corridor to help your students explore “Le français chez nous”! FHC raises awareness about the Midwest's rich French history and cultural heritage from the 1600s on. Investigate with your students the legacy of Marquette, LaSalle, the voyageurs, les habitants, DuSable, and more with FHC's teaching materials. Ready-made activities in French, online and on paper, introduce the region’s French history: they’re Standards-aligned and fun! Venez explorer!

Following up on our session in San Diego, we will provide our session participants with more ways to plant culture throughout their teaching, rather than teaching culture as a separate entity. The session will give participants an opportunity to share ideas and bring new strategies to plant seeds of culture with any level of students.

Cette contribution propose le développement d’une plateforme numérique adaptative visant à optimiser l’apprentissage du français langue étrangère (FLE) auprès des apprenants hispanophones à l’Université du Nouveau-Mexique. Partant du constat que plus de 60% de nos étudiants sont bilingues espagnol-anglais, et que les approches pédagogiques actuelles ne tirent pas pleinement profit de ce capital linguistique, nous proposons un dispositif technologique innovant basé sur l’intelligence artificielle. Le projet vise à créer une interface interactive capable d’identifier automatiquement les zones de convergence entre l’espagnol et le français, permettant ainsi de personnaliser l’apprentissage selon le profil linguistique de chaque apprenant. L’originalité de cette approche réside dans l’utilisation d’algorithmes d’apprentissage qui analyseraient en temps réel les productions des étudiants pour identifier leurs points forts et leurs difficultés spécifiques, notamment dans les domaines morphosyntaxique, lexical et phonétique. Cette proposition s’appuie sur des recherches récentes en linguistique computationnelle et en didactique des langues romanes, tout en répondant aux besoins spécifiques de notre contexte d'enseignement. L’implémentation d'une telle plateforme permettrait non seulement d’optimiser l’apprentissage du FLE pour nos étudiants hispanophones, mais aussi de générer des données précieuses pour la recherche en didactique des langues assistée par ordinateur.

In this session, participants will learn how students in a French conversation class designed and implemented engaging National French Week activities to promote French language and culture on campus. Emphasizing student involvement, this presentation will showcase how students can take the lead in creating and executing these activities as part of their coursework. We will explore a variety of event ideas, strategies for student engagement, and methods for integrating these activities into the broader curriculum. Attendees will leave with a toolkit of practical ideas and resources to celebrate National French Week and engage the wider campus community.

Language skills and cultural knowledge are necessary in the globalized world and our daily lives. French is a global and local language, spoken by over 300M around the world and 33M in the Americas. In a multilingual world, the opportunity to learn French should be available to all. The mission of French language advocacy is to ensure that access and opportunity to learn French are available to all interested learners. We can all be advocates!

Are you a chapter officer? Do you have an idea to share -- something that has worked well for your chapter and would be easy to implement in another? Or, is your chapter in need of fresh ideas, having a hard time overcoming a challenge, or needing some help? Bring your great ideas and your struggles to this round-table session and connect with, share, and learn from other chapter officers.

If you already sponsor a chapter of the Société Honoraire de Français ( SHF ) or Jeunes Amis du Français (JAF) or are considering founding one, please join us. After presenting an overview, including opportunities for awards, materials, and activities, the presenters look forward to hearing about your own experiences. Whether it be to recognize your outstanding students, provide them with service opportunities, or build an esprit de corps through fun activities, this organization can enrich and promote your program.

Current and graduating students of la Société Honoraire de Français will discuss how they helped French classes become a thriving community that fosters connection through one shared interest: the French language and cultures. They will elaborate on how this connection came to be, what has worked, what has not, and how other programs might be able to implement a few of these ideas into their own, regardless of their challenges or circumstances.

It’s the 21st century! Participants will discuss several inventions introduced at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair including the Ferris Wheel and the zipper and how these inventions still impact our world today. Join us to celebrate the many contributions of francophone inventors of the past, present, and future. Exciting, innovative, engaging inventors…On y va!

Three presentations focus on how to engage students in experiential learning through French for Special Purposes. Dr. Andrea Jonsson shares recent meaningful collaborative activities in France in which students work with community organizations in a popular Serve-Sustain-Learn program. Suzanne Cook describes her university’s evolution of a gen-ed course on Sustainability in the French-speaking world into a sustainability-focused French-International Business study abroad that focuses student sustainability initiatives in the luxury industry. Both model high-impact project-oriented practices. Finally, E. Nicole Meyer contributes fresh interactive exercises that reinforce the importance of cybersecurity to everyday practices and future career possibilities as well as an update on the commission’s activities. All three promote ways that all can include fun, meaningful French for Specific Purposes activities into their programs to increase student interest and learning.

The Middle School Commission is creating a volume of cultural activities that target the Americas! Come preview some of what we have prepared and give us your suggestions for finalizing it for publication!

This presentation will address the "Comparisons" standard from World Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (French), which can be found in pages 43-48 of the manual. In two concurrent sections of a university-level course on contemporary Francophone literature, the professors challenge their students to investigate migration patterns from the global South (specifically Senegal, Rwanda/Burundi, Guadeloupe, and Cameroon) to Metropolitan France. The students are then invited to compare these literary crossings - push factors, demographics, modes of travel, safety, success rate, etc. - with similar migration patterns towards the US. The goal of this comparison activity is to understand what motivates people to embark on such transnational crossings in hopes of finding a better quality of life. A selection of students from both sections will be invited to share their findings at the AATF convention in Chicago.

How to enhance a French class with a virtual partnership? This session discusses a sample project conducted at the presenter’s institution. In it, a college class in the US partnered virtually with a High School class in France. Presentation points include project rationale, course units, course goals, oral and written assignments designed to meet ACTFL goals, as well as student feedback. The presentation concludes with the benefits, limitations, and future of this virtual partnership.