French Basics

Language Room

French Basics – Course outlines 2026

Fridays 9.30 to 10.30: AIM to learn the basics

AIM stands for the Accelerative Integrated Method, distinguished by its use of gestures or actions. This series of 10 weekly hour-long sessions will start anew at the beginning of each quarter and is intended for absolute beginners in French. Participants with some prior knowledge could think of themselves as being ‘trained to teach French’ using gestures. Think charades with a structure! Compared with traditional methods, the AIM has been shown to be highly successful for increasing fluency among school age learners and its effectiveness with adults is now beginning to emerge.

Fridays 11.00-12.30

This course will enable you, as a relative beginner, or experienced but perhaps ‘rusty’ user of the language, to rapidly get your French ‘on track’ towards a more than satisfactory level of fluency. The most effective elements of recently developed programmes will be used, more often than not in an immersion setting, embedded in a flow of fun classroom interactions. In keeping with the needs of participants there will be an emphasis on listening and speaking.

About the Tutor:

Oj Rugins – user of two languages (English and Latvian) from birth, had the ‘blinkers off’ when exposed to French in Primary school, and a second modern language (German) in high school. He brings experience from a teaching career of forty years; 13 in Physical Education in the UK, the remainder in Languages with Education Queensland.