For the advanced beginner or intermediate-level learner, reading offers you the most convenient way to practice and sharpen your French and monitor your progress.

Better Reading French brings you short passages that reflect French history and culture as well as contemporary issues and situations taken from magazines, the Internet, books, and newspapers.

Covering such topics as cuisine, love, music, travel, technology, politics, and history, each chapter features reading selections that become more challenging as the sections progress. Here you will find a feature on Alain Ducasse's favorite recipes, a letter from nineteenth-century actress Juliette Drouet to her lover Victor Hugo, descriptions of France's many museums, and more than fifty other selections to help you improve your reading speed and understanding.

Following each article is a set of exercises that help your comprehension and develop invaluable reading skills including:

• Skimming material for general meaning
• Scanning for details
• Using word formation, cognates, and context to determine meaning
• Understanding idioms and artistic expressions

An appendix provides suggestions for further reading.

Better Reading French will not only help you improve or revive your language skills, it also will open up the enjoyable and exciting world of reading in French.

While the world produces more and more reading material each year, from magazines to newspapers to websites, why are most language learners still relying on contrived texts and classic literature for language acquisition? Providing entertaining contemporary texts in the original language, the Better Reading Language series is for those who want to brush up on a foreign language.

With the authentic materials provided in this series, readers will be able to peruse a Latin Grammys write-up in Spanish, a feature on Alain Ducasse's favorite recipes in French, or a review of a Milan fashion show in Italian. Readings on everything from music and sports to cinema and contemporary family life are arranged in increasing difficulty within chapters. Along the way, learners will find instruction and exercises to help develop improved reading speed, comprehension, and vocabulary.

While the world produces more and more reading material each year, from magazines to newspapers to websites, why are most language learners still relying on contrived texts and classic literature for language acquisition? Providing entertaining contemporary texts in the original language, the Better Reading Language series is for those who want to brush up on a foreign language.

With the authentic materials provided in this series, readers will be able to peruse a Latin Grammys write-up in Spanish, a feature on Alain Ducasse's favorite recipes in French, or a review of a Milan fashion show in Italian. Readings on everything from music and sports to cinema and contemporary family life are arranged in increasing difficulty within chapters. Along the way, learners will find instruction and exercises to help develop improved reading speed, comprehension, and vocabulary.