Professional French Foundations

Professional French Foundations

You can already order a coffee, ask for directions and hold a simple conversation in French. Good. This course is about the next thing: using French at work without freezing up. Over twelve focused hours, one to one with me, you will learn to write emails that sound like a French colleague wrote them, survive a phone call when you cannot see the other person’s face, hold your own in a meeting, and handle that first crucial minute when you meet someone and have to decide whether to say tu or vous.

I am Xavier, from Nantes. Before teaching I spent years in logistics and operations, so I have written the “just following up on my last email” message more times than I can count, and I have sat in the meetings where nobody quite says what they mean. That is the French I teach here: not textbook French, but the language your job actually runs on.

Who this is for

This course is built for working professionals at around CEFR A2 to early B1 who need French for their jobs. You might have French clients, a French parent company, French-speaking colleagues, or a role that would open up if your professional French were solid. If you can manage everyday French but go quiet the moment work gets involved, or you write emails by translating word for word from English and suspect they sound odd, you are in exactly the right place. You do not need to be fluent. You need to be effective, and that is a very different, very reachable target.

How the course works

Twelve sessions of sixty minutes, one to one and online, at times we agree together. Every session is built around real workplace situations, not grammar for its own sake. We do the grammar you need when a task demands it, then put it straight to work. You speak a lot. You will be gently pushed out of your comfort zone every session, because that is where the progress lives, and I will never let you sit in silence hunting for a word without help.

The programme, session by session

1. Tu or vous, and the map of the French workplace. We start with the single decision that colours everything: register. When to use vous, when tu is expected, how people move from one to the other (on peut se tutoyer?), and how to stay polite without sounding cold. You will learn the core courtesy phrases (je vous en prie, avec plaisir, je vous remercie) and how French professional culture differs from English-speaking ones. We set your personal goals and I map the rest of the course to your real job.
2. Introducing yourself and your role. Presenting who you are, what you do and which company you work for, cleanly and confidently. Je travaille dans, je m’occupe de, je suis responsable de, je gère. Handling introductions of other people, exchanging details, and the small ritual of the professional handshake conversation. We build your personal thirty-second self-introduction and drill it until it is automatic.
3. Professional email, part one: structure and openings. The anatomy of a French professional email. The right opening (Bonjour Madame, Cher Monsieur), the difference between an email to a client and one to a close colleague, and how to state your purpose in the first line (je me permets de vous contacter au sujet de). We look at real emails and rewrite a clumsy one together.
4. Professional email, part two: requests, replies and closings. Making polite requests (pourriez-vous, je vous serais reconnaissant de, serait-il possible de), chasing without nagging (je me permets de revenir vers vous), attaching and referring to documents (veuillez trouver ci-joint), and the closing formulas that trip everyone up (cordialement, bien cordialement, and the long formal sign-off). You leave with your own reusable email templates.
5. The telephone. The hardest skill, because you lose facial cues, so we give it a whole session. Answering and placing calls, asking someone to repeat or slow down without embarrassment (pourriez-vous répéter, vous pouvez parler un peu plus lentement?), taking and leaving a message, spelling names and giving numbers, and handling the moment the line is bad. We do live role-play with your eyes off the screen.
6. Making and managing appointments. Proposing, accepting, declining and rescheduling meetings by phone and email. Dates, times, availability (je suis disponible jeudi après-midi, est-ce que ça vous conviendrait?), confirming and cancelling politely, and the conditional as the engine of professional courtesy. Diary vocabulary and time expressions that people actually use.
7. Small talk that opens doors. The five minutes before and after the real business, where relationships are built. Weather, weekend, travel, the coffee, mild complaints, and knowing which topics are safe. Reacting naturally (ah bon?, c’est vrai?, tant mieux, dommage) so you sound engaged rather than robotic. This is the session that makes you likeable in French, not just correct.
8. In the meeting, part one: understanding and contributing. Following a French meeting at speed, catching the thread when you miss a word, and getting into the conversation. Giving your opinion (à mon avis, je pense que, il me semble que), asking for clarification (si je comprends bien, vous voulez dire que), and buying yourself thinking time out loud (alors, disons que, comment dire).
9. In the meeting, part two: agreeing and disagreeing politely. The delicate art of pushing back in French without causing offence. Softened disagreement (je comprends votre point de vue, mais, je ne suis pas tout à fait d’accord, je me permets de nuancer), proposing alternatives, and reaching a decision (on est d’accord?, ça marche pour tout le monde?). Register control under pressure.
10. Giving a short presentation. Structuring and delivering a clear five-minute professional presentation. Signposting (tout d’abord, ensuite, enfin, pour conclure), presenting a figure, a trend or a result (le chiffre d’affaires a augmenté de, on constate une baisse de), and handling questions at the end. You prepare and deliver a real presentation about your own work, and we polish it together.
11. The vocabulary of the modern workplace. A targeted vocabulary session tailored to your sector: the meeting, the deadline (l’échéance, dans les délais), the project, the team, the budget, remote work (le télétravail, en visio), reporting lines and common workplace anglicisms the French do and do not use. We build a personal glossary for your specific job so nothing in your daily work is a blank.
12. Putting it all together. A full simulation session. You handle a chained scenario end to end: a phone call to arrange a meeting, a follow-up email confirming it, then the meeting itself with an opinion to defend and a decision to reach. I give you detailed feedback, we fix your three most persistent habits, and you leave with a clear map of what to keep practising. We review your progress against the goals we set in session one.

Resources and materials

Everything is chosen or built to be useful the day after the lesson, not to fill a textbook.

• A shared living study document, updated after every session, with the phrases we covered, your personal notes and your corrected mistakes, so you always have one place to revise.
• Reusable email templates you build with me for the messages you send most often: the request, the follow-up, the polite decline, the confirmation.
• Graded reading drawn from real professional French: sample emails, short internal notes, meeting invitations and simple reports, chosen at your level and stepped up as you improve.
• Short audio clips for the telephone and meeting sessions, including faster natural speech, so your ear trains on real pace and not just careful classroom French.
• Targeted worksheets for the tricky machinery (the conditional of politeness, question forms, register) used only when a task calls for them.
• A personal glossary for your own sector, built together in session eleven and yours to keep.
• Light, purposeful homework between lessons: a short email to draft, a voice message to record, a paragraph to read. Fifteen to twenty minutes that make the next session land.

What you will be able to do by the end

These are the concrete can-do outcomes, anchored to solid CEFR B1 for the professional world.

• Write a clear, correctly structured professional email in French, choosing the right register and the right opening and closing, and reply to one you receive.
• Make and take a work phone call: introduce yourself, state your purpose, take a message, and ask someone to repeat or slow down without losing your footing.
• Arrange, confirm, reschedule and politely decline meetings and appointments in speech and in writing.
• Take part in a meeting: follow the discussion, give and justify your opinion, and disagree politely while staying professional.
• Deliver a short, well-signposted presentation about your own work and field basic questions on it.
• Handle introductions and workplace small talk that build rapport rather than just fill silence.
• Judge tu versus vous confidently and adjust your tone to the person and the situation.
• Use the everyday vocabulary of your own workplace with far less hesitation.

What is included

• Twelve sixty-minute one-to-one online sessions, planned around your real job and scheduled to fit your working week.
• All materials: the shared study document, templates, graded readings, audio, worksheets and your personal glossary.
• Support between lessons. Send me a short question or a draft email and I will get back to you, so you are not stuck for a week between sessions.
• A recording or clear written summary of each session so you can revise what we actually said.
• An honest progress review at the halfway point and at the end, measured against the goals we set together in session one.

A last, honest word

Twelve hours will not make you sound like a native, and I would not insult you by promising that. What they will do is remove the fear. You will stop avoiding the French phone call, stop translating your emails word for word, and stop going quiet in the meeting. You will have the phrases, the structure and the confidence to use French at work and be taken seriously while you do it. If that is what your job needs, this is the course that gets you there. On y va?