Alliance Française de Normandie Review: Two Weeks in Rouen

After two years of learning French by myself I decided it was about time to cross the channel (or “la manche - the sleeve” as the French call it) and immerse myself in both country and language by taking an intensive French language course.

I plumped for two weeks at Alliance Française Normandy in the small but very pretty city of Rouen, the capital of Normandy, about an hour north east from Paris. I had a friend living there whose couch I could crash on, and at 240 euros a week (plus one-off fees of 45 euros for study materials and 40 euros for a registration fee) the course seemed among the most affordable on offer, both compared to other language schools in the area and Alliance Française centres in other French cities.

Who Are Alliance Française?

Alliance Française is an international organisation that aims to promote the French language and francophone culture around the world. Created in Paris in 1883, its primary goal is teaching French as a second language. Headquartered in Paris, the Alliance has approximately 850 centres in 137 countries at the time of writing. All the organisations outside Paris are local, independently run franchises, each with a committee and a president.

They finance most of their activities from the fees they receive from their courses and from rental of their properties. The French government also provides a subsidy covering approximately five percent of their budget.

The Registration Process

After registering for my dates online and paying my fees, I was invited to do an online test to help find my level in French so I could be placed in the right class. Like nearly everywhere in Europe, Alliance Française uses the CEFR framework, which ranges from A0 to C2. The test took a solid 40 minutes and was primarily multiple choice questions, some audio clips, and a few long-form questions where responses of up to 300 words were required.

I was relieved to be informed that my level was B1 (intermediate), and on my first day had a quick chat with one of the teachers where we reviewed the results of the online test and she asked further questions to confirm I had been graded at the right level. From here, I was told I would be going into the B2.3 class.

This was less about my ability and more because it was the only B2 class being run during this period. As a small school, they are limited by the range of classes they can offer. The whole B2 syllabus takes 3 months to work through in intensive lessons, so the number of classes running is dependent on the number of students. I had no complaints at starting in the middle, as all content has to be covered at some stage, and with only seven students in my class, I had no complaints about student numbers either.

The Classes

Alliance Française’s method could be described as bottom up, with grammar coming before everything else.

This was a marked change for me, as in my own learning I’d taken the opposite approach — trying to immerse myself in the language and zoom out, being happy to get the gist of things from the top down rather than understanding it microscopically.

Lessons frequently broke down the structures and patterns of French until it felt like we were left with the core building blocks, with focus on meaning coming later. Some of the longer-term students would often voice some of these building blocks or rules they had learned when tackling a tricky question — for example, that a conditional phrase only uses certain connectors, or that gérondifs are only ever used in three scenarios.

Whilst this approach is useful to fall back on when you are in unfamiliar terrain (I find it useful with the subjunctive), I couldn’t help but think it involved extra, unnecessary layers of cognition rather than relying on intuition from absorbed patterns.

There was plenty of speaking with the teachers, all making sure we took it in turns to answer questions out loud in front of the rest of the class; however, there was very little focus on phonetics. Maybe a B2.3 course isn’t the place to focus on them — although if not then, when?

For example, I had a classmate who wasn’t correctly pronouncing the French R (although this didn’t stop him from being understood, as there are no similar sounds to R in French). It certainly wasn’t my place to tell him this, but it did feel like something he would have found useful to know.

There were in total seven students in my class, so we received plenty of contact time with the teacher. Lessons started at 9am until around 11am, where we’d have a 20-minute break and then resume again until 1pm. We also had about 30 minutes worth of homework each day too.

Accommodation: Why I Skipped the Host Family

There was the option, but I chose not to as I already had a friend in town. Budget is the biggest factor here, as staying with a host family effectively doubles the cost of your stay, with a room with half board costing 231 euros a week plus a 60 euro mandatory accommodation search fee. Whilst I saved money staying with a friend, the disadvantage of this option was I really lost out on immersion and the chance to practice and apply what I was learning, as I only spoke English with my friend. Given the grammar-intensive method of Alliance Française, I would say it is quite important to be immersed, so I did feel like I missed out.

Being Back in School

I often had to remind myself of the importance of making mistakes and dropping any desire to always be right. I tried to place all my focus on the effort I was putting in and not on whether or not I had answered a question correctly.

Being in an international class with students from around the world (countries represented included Saudi Arabia, Belgium and China) gave me a renewed appreciation for the background the English language has given me in French, due to the large number of words the two languages share — there were a lot of French words I hadn’t come across before but had a strong idea of the meaning of. I previously didn’t appreciate this and thought it applied to everyone.

Similar to being back at school, I had the opportunity to play a couple of football matches. During these matches, I found myself using French more instinctively. When you want someone to pass or shoot, you are prone to blurt it out. There is no time for your identity or worries to get in the way.

Final Verdict

Overall I would recommend this language school, providing you are aware that the lessons heavily focus on grammar. The staff and teachers there were all very friendly, enthusiastic and professional, and all of the lessons were planned out very well. I think a stay between two and four weeks hits the sweet spot between being there for long enough without getting fed up of the classroom format.

It did strike me as more a place for refinement than full-on learning, where the principles of vocabulary and grammar that you had perhaps already acquired through comprehensible input could be checked and polished.

Some of the students there for a longer period of time — for example, over six months — seemed to be slightly trapped in the pattern of learning for the next exam rather than truly learning the language, hence why a shorter stay may be better.