Improve the quality of your students' writing.

Teaches advanced writing skills for AS and A2 levels. Practical exercises prepare students in essential areas to attain high grades.

Bien lire, bien écrire gives students everything they need to improve their grades — whatever level they are at.

The units in Bien lire, bien écrire are grouped into text types as follows:

• Descriptive texts
• Informative texts
• Narrative texts
• Formal letters
• Persuasive essays
• Argumentative essays

Students are guided step by step to write these progressively more difficult types of texts. Each unit in the book is based on a topic related to the AS/A2 syllabus.

Most chapters contain a final Web exercise, which acts as a springboard that enables students to go off in different directions once they have worked through the exercises. Through the suggestions that we provide they can do further research on topic, style, vocabulary and phrases and learn to use the Internet as a language-learning tool and resource.

The aim of this book is to train students in techniques that will enable them write clearly and coherently at an advanced level. By introducing them to a variety of text types and by giving them the opportunity to analyse and work with these texts, the authors help students to develop the skills to write in a variety of styles and registers. Students’ learning is guided and supported step by step throughout the book, so that their skills acquisition is carefully structured, and practice is built in at each stage.

Writing is a process, but not necessarily a linear one. Planning, drafting, re-writing, moving blocks of text, changing words, re-drafting, discussing the text, deleting, adding – all these form part of the process. In Bien lire, bien écrire we encourage students to work together on the writing process. Sometimes students will work alone on an aspect of a text and then come together to compare their findings, or work to produce two sides of an argument. In some sections we invite students to edit the work of others, which is then re-drafted. Re-drafts may form the basis of yet further discussion before a final written outcome is produced.

This collaborative approach not only helps students verbalise and reflect on the processes that they are using in drafting a piece of writing, but also makes the difficult task of writing long pieces of written work in French much less daunting. A level and I.B. students need to master not only the writing of the conventional formal essay, but also a whole host of other types of writing, formal and informal, for different purposes. To this end, we expose students to different text types, and actively involve them in analysing what characterises each type of text. Once the student becomes sensitised to the structure of different text types (s)he is then much better placed to begin writing in a style which is appropriate to the task set in terms of structure, register, grammar and content.

The authors

Isabelle Rodrigues is Principal Examiner with the Cambridge Board for IGCSE and currently teaches French Language at Exeter University.