Laurent C. Patenotte teaches all levels of French at St. Paul's School, New Hampshire, in the USA. In this article he shares the way he introduced the EU flag and the Member States, following a discussion in an American school.
The author says: the wording chosen by Europeans in all the documents, including the official web site for the Union, as well as in my own paper, the word “State” is the one chosen to refer to what used to be “country” when speaking of the Member States of the European Union. If you open the web sitehttp://www.europa.eu, you will also notice that the word “country” is used appropriately to refer to the other European countries such as Russia, Norway, Iceland, etc…
Laurent C. Patenotte taught at Phillips Academy and at the University of Columbia in Paris and worked on projects for the development of teaching material. He also spent part of his summers teaching a course about creative writing at the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, a professional workshop for high-school teachers of French.
His professional development includes participation in the production of “Quotidiennement vôtre de France”, a method of French for the radio, in 1981 and he is a co-author of “Les Mots Difficiles”, 1982, Drame à Cherbourg, 1988, “Dialogues - Les Français parlent d'eux-mêmes”, 1994, and “Portes ouvertes”, an interactive first year French textbook accompanied by a CD-ROM, 1998.
