A touch of ... class!

Abstract

Television programming has always held some appeal for language teachers. Some people use television shows to teach target culture, others prefer its use for linguistic purposes. This article looks at the Québécois TV show Un gars, une fille used in a university French course in order to 'teach the socio-cultural reality that underlies all linguistic utterances in a university-level French course' (De Carlo and Aquistapace, 1997, p. 22). In studying episodes of the show, we attempted to identify what makes them more authentic than the videos and CD ROMs that accompany most language textbooks for French.