CAPES & agrégation anglais 2003
Chris' exam preparation site – a drop in the ocean of online resources

 

Teacher & pupil wookcut

Preface

This site is bound to be temporary, modest in scope, and mostly personal. Its main goal is to be useful for people in a situation similar to mine, i.e. studying for the 2003 edition of the French national teacher recruitment exams in English ("CAPES" and "agrégation").

The idea emerged when I was meditating the problem of how to study more efficiently for the upcoming task:

  • Online resource sharing among candidates is an extremely effective tool for successfully tackling these long and nerve-racking exams. Links, tips, and ideas, though, tend to get buried in mailing list and personal archives.
  • Typing up whatever material we are working on helps to give our efforts a shape. Whether to use a word processing package or an HTML editor doesn't make much of a difference; and writing (partly) right in the public eye adds an incentive to do more thoroughly.
  • I'm a great fan of annotated bibliographies and even get lost in my own bookmarks. What better place for comments and links than a web page?

While editing this site is certainly furthering my own discipline, I will obviously be happy about any additions its readers or other comrades-in-arms provide. I am, indeed, indebted to all those who have provided links or ideas that feature here (or soon will).

Obviously, the site is not trying to compete with any of the much richer sites dedicated to one of the topics from the syllabus, or with other compilations of exam material. This site is meant as a slowly growing collection of material underpinning the learning process that takes place in online communities, and also on the desk at my home.

It went online in July 2002 and is supposed to grow given time.

Chris W.

On online communities

In France, the number of mailing lists and online forums (web based or not) seems to be growing exponentially at the moment. Quite a few are hosted by by Yahoo! Groupes France, where you can use the search feature to find a group that corresponds to your area of interest (or the exams you're planning to sit).

For a general overview on online communities for teachers and prospective teachers of English in France look here.


William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels

The Anglo-American Special Relationship between myth and reality (1945 - 1990)

Organized crime in the city and on celluloid (USA, 1929 - 1951)

Linguistics

Translation

Phonetics

Institutionalia and miscellanea

More on this site and its author

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And then there are ...

... all the other exam subjects that may or will not receive the attention they deserve: those on the syllabuses of exams this site's author is not sitting. This concerns in particular the "agrégation interne" and part of the optional syllabus of the "agrégation externe".

Still, below, a number of outside links to sites that will provide at the very least some valuable starting points:

First and foremost, la page d'agrég (in French, English, Franglais and, sometimes, Creole), compiled by Jean Sahaï from Guadeloupe. This is an inexhaustible mine of information. Jean's site is ever-changing and well worth taking the time to explore it.

For students of John Donne's Poetry: Darren Rigby's site Atlanta's Balls. This is another site that tackles the issue of "agrégation" preparation. Lots of links, of course, but the special feature is a collection of mp3 files of the poems up for download. You're intrigued by the title Atlanta's Balls? Go look it up on Darren's site, even if you don't study Donne. It's good for culture générale.

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is required reading for the 2003 "agrégation interne" and optional for the "externe". A hypertext edition plus timelines & introduction & critical resources is made available by the University of Saskatchewan's English department.

The searchable full text of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays and English Traits ("agrégation externe" civilisation option for the orals) is available on bartelby.com.


© 2002 Chris Waigl. Last modified 21th July, 2002.