Innovative language teaching

California-born Elizabeth Ezra accepted a lecturer's job at Stirling University in Scotland five years ago after taking her PhD at Cornell and teaching in New York. She was attracted to Stirling because of the interdisciplinary nature of many of its courses.

Her speciality is cinema, but not at the expense of literature. "Nothing," she says, "can replace the study of well-written texts, which will always be a component of any serious language degree."

Ezra has recently teamed up with other European language and film and media studies departments to offer a degree in European film and media. She is the course convener for two units within this programme, which is attracting students from across the university.

Ezra, who believes she is the only scholar in the UK doing research in early French cinema, also teaches specialist options on French film; she is about to add to her course on French cinema a unit on French silent film.

"I incorporate film into theme-based courses in which students examine both literature and film. I am able to do this largely because we introduce all our students to film study in years one and two. In the second year we do a unit on the French experience of the second world war, which combines the study of film and literature with the study of history. We use films such as L'Armee des Ombres, Lacombe Lucien and the more recent Lucie Aubrac to analyse changing interpretations of the second world war."

Chris Johnson, 41, spent seven years at Keele University before moving to Nottingham University as professor of French. One of his most popular courses is a one-semester module, called "Representations of the exotic", which is about the French perception of other cultures from the 16th to the 20th centuries.

Johnson believes this course, which is taught thematically and examines, for example, Michel de Montaigne's representation of South American cannibalism, illustrates the way academics have had to adjust to student demands for courses that are differently packaged. "It is based on literature, but sometimes we look at paintings, sometimes ideas and philosophy. As well as Montaigne, we discuss Denis Diderot, Francois Rene Chateaubriand and Claude Levi-Strauss."

Another third-year course is "Intellectuals in society in post-war France". Students look at intellectual movements such as postmodernism, as well as French thinkers in context, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Levi-Strauss (on whom Johnson is writing a book) and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

"Some of the questions we cover are what is an intellectual and what functions does he/she perform in society. When I did my degree everything was chronological, but this method makes students think much harder."

* Modern Language Association: www.mla.org/

* Nuffield Languages Inquiry: www.nuffield.org/language/index.html.