Conversations

Course Description

Summary

Light or intense, fluid or challenging, conversation is inherently social. It transforms participants from passive recipients of information into active producers and transmitters of knowledge and sociocultural practices. Across contexts, conversations do more than communicate ideas: they shape relationships, identities, and ways of being in the world. In his Essays, Michel de Montaigne described conversation as the “most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds.” From early modern salons to contemporary public debates, conversation both reflects and shapes collective life. Drawing on Maboula Soumahoro’s work on race, diaspora, and belonging, the course will also consider how language and social context shape whose voices are heard, how identities are negotiated, and who gets to participate in public discourse. In this course, students will explore and practice the French art of conversation as both a linguistic skill and a dynamic cultural form. Through the analysis of diverse conversational practices and exchanges with French students on pre-selected topics, they will develop fluency, refine their use of formal and informal registers, and strengthen their ability to sustain dialogue, negotiate meaning, express and defend viewpoints, and interpret the implicit codes of spoken interaction. By combining cultural inquiry with sustained practice, students will engage conversation as a lived, evolving process.

Intermediate-high. Conducted in French.