Moments Litteraires

Bette Hirsch is Instructor of French at Cabrillo College, California. She holds a BA from the University of Rochester and an MA and PhD from Case Western Reserve University--both in French Literature. She is a member of the original group of instructors trained by ACTFL as Oral Proficiency trainers and then testers in 1982 and 1983, and has conducted proficiency and curriculum workshops in Australia, Canada, Finland, and Japan as well as in the US (in French and ESL).Bette has been President of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) and served on the Advisory Committee for Foreign Languages and Literatures of the Modern Language Association (MLA), acting as Chair in 1999 through 2000. She has served on the College Board's Foreign Language Advisory Committee and has been an Advanced Placement Reader for ETS. She helped write a Model Curriculum Guide for Secondary School Foreign Language Programs in California, and contributed to the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF) standards project. Bette formed one of the first four model collaborative groups that evolved into the Academic Alliances project. She was a recipient of a French Government Bourse for summer study in Toulon, France in 2003. She currently is a member of the Community College Committee of the MLA.Publications include three textbooks, literary criticism, computer programs, monographs and articles. Her full biography is included in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Dictionary of International Biography, Who's Who in American Women, and Who's Who in American Education. Chantal Peron Thompson is a native of Quimper, France. She graduated valedictorian from one of the largest high schools in France (le Lycee de Kerichen a Brest) and developed a love of writing under the spell of the wind-swept coast of Brittany. At age sixteen, she was National Champion of France in the long jump. She went on to attend the University of Rennes and came to the United States to perfect her English and attend graduate school. She ended up getting married and staying! She has been on the faculty at Brigham Young University since 1973 and has earned many teaching awards. The latest is a distinguished University Professorship (1998-2008). She founded the African Studies Program at Brigham Young University and has taken several groups of students to Senegal. She currently directs first-year French courses and trains and supervises a team of fifteen to eighteen student instructors each semester. Thompson is a certified ACTFL Tester and Trainer and conducts workshops worldwide on teaching and testing for proficiency. Her speaking engagements have included keynote addresses at major conferences from Salem, Oregon, to Bangkok, Thailand. She has also presented a series of ACTFL webinars (March-April 2011). Thompson is the primary author of MAIS OUI! a first-year French text (Houghton Mifflin/Cengage Learning 1996, 2000, 2004, 2009, 2012); ENSUITE, a second-year text (McGraw-Hill, 1989, 1993, 1998, 2003); and MOMENTS LITTERAIRES, a literary anthology for intermediate-level courses (Heinle/Cengage Learning, 1992, 2006).