French Reading Passages for Tutors and Teachers

Key Facts About the French Language

Speakers

About 312 million speakers: roughly 74 million native and 238 million second-language speakers (2012–2024 estimates). The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie's own counts are higher, depending on how speakers are counted.¹

Did you know?

A written final consonant that is normally silent can be pronounced before a word starting with a vowel. This is liaison: les alone is /le/, but les amis is /lez‿ami/, and liaison after a determiner is obligatory.²

The main challenge

Silent letters make spelling from sound hard: parles, parle and parlent all sound the same. Reading aloud is fairly predictable; writing what you hear is much less so.³

CEFR exams

• DELF tout public (France Éducation international, for the French Ministry of National Education; one diploma each for A1, A2, B1 and B2)
• DALF (France Éducation international; diplomas at C1 and C2)
• TCF tout public – Test de connaissance du français (France Éducation international; places candidates on the CEFR scale from A1 to C2)

Where students struggle

• tu or vous: tu is informal and singular, while vous is both the plural and the polite way to address one person, so learners must choose a register, not only a number.⁴

Teaching notes

• Teach each noun with an article that shows its gender (un livre, une table), not with l', which hides it: l'arbre is masculine and l'ambulance feminine.⁵

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_(French)
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_personal_pronouns
5. https://francais.lingolia.com/en/grammar/nouns-and-articles/gender

About the French language

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_grammar
4. https://www.un.org/en/our-work/official-languages

French reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR & DELF/DALF)

The DELF and DALF are diplomas of the French Ministry of National Education, run by France Éducation international, which publishes one diploma per CEFR level: DELF A1 to B2 and DALF C1 and C2. A0 sits below the first diploma, so it is shown as Pre-A1. The column is a rough guide to reading level, not an official equivalence for Stichos texts.

Reference corpora

French has open lexical databases built from large corpora.¹

• Lexique: Boris New and Christophe Pallier’s open database (Lexique 3.82) lists about 140,000 French words with spelling, pronunciation, lemma, syllables, part of speech, gender and number, and frequencies from both a book corpus and a film-subtitle corpus.¹
• Vocabulary: Stichos uses words understood in both the French of France and Canadian French unless a story is set in one region, and avoids slang and verlan. From A0 to A2 it also avoids idioms and figurative phrasing, preferring plain words such as chemin over itinéraire.

1. https://openlexicon.fr/datasets-info/Lexique382/README-Lexique.html

Readability design principles

French readability formulas run from recalibrated versions of Flesch to machine-learned models.¹

• Kandel and Moles: Kandel and Moles (1958) adapted the Flesch Reading Ease formula to French in “Application de l’indice de Flesch à la langue française”.²
• French as a foreign language: François and Fairon (EMNLP-CoNLL 2012) built a readability formula for French as a foreign language from 46 lexical, syntactic and semantic features; their best model, based on support vector machines, outperformed earlier formulas for learners.¹
• Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a single readability score.

1. https://aclanthology.org/D12-1043/
2. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_de_lisibilit%C3%A9

Script & grammar scaffolding

• Tenses and moods: A0 uses the present (présent) plus the polite formula je voudrais. A1 adds the passé composé and the near future with aller + infinitive. A2 adds the imparfait and reflexive verbs such as se lever. B1 adds the futur simple and the conditionnel, while the present subjunctive (subjonctif présent) and the plus-que-parfait wait until B2.
• The literary past: An automatic check flags plural endings of the passé simple, the past tense of written narrative, such as -èrent and -âmes, in A0 and A1 texts.
• Object pronouns: Unstressed object pronouns go before the verb (je le vois) except in an affirmative command (regarde-le). Chains of two pronouns, as in il me le donne (“he gives it to me”), arrive at B1.
• Subjects and address: French does not drop subject pronouns, so every verb has a stated subject. Strangers, staff and elders are addressed as vous; friends, family and peers as tu.

Related academic & framework resources

• DELF tout public (France Éducation international): The official page for the adult DELF A1 to B2 diplomas, issued by the French Ministry of National Education and run by France Éducation international.
• DALF (France Éducation international): The official page for the DALF C1 and C2 diplomas.
• Lexique 3 (OpenLexicon): Documentation for the Lexique 3.82 database of about 140,000 French words, by Boris New, Christophe Pallier and colleagues.
• An “AI readability” Formula for French as a Foreign Language: The EMNLP-CoNLL 2012 paper by Thomas François and Cédrick Fairon.
• Test de lisibilité (French Wikipedia): An overview of readability tests, including the Flesch adaptation for French.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is included in the free preview?

You can try an A0 or A1 story generated live in your browser with tap-to-translate words. Every line offers a translation in your students' own language. You can also receive 3 sample stories as a PDF without creating an account when you join the Reading List.

Which levels will be available when Educator Studio launches?

At launch, Educator Studio covers every level from A0 to B2. You can also paste your own word list, turn specific tenses on or off, choose any topic, and adjust any sentence or translation before sharing a text with your class.

How do I share stories with my students?

At launch, teachers can share any story they generate by sending students a link, with no limit on how many share links they create. You can also lock the text to a specific glossing mode or print reading sheets as PDFs with line-by-line translations and a glossary.

Do my students need to create an account to read?

No, students open a shared story directly in their browser without making an account. They are invited to create a free account if they want to save their words and stories, but it is never required.

How can students listen to the audio for a text?

At launch, students reading a shared story can tap any word to hear a standard computer voice pronunciation. With the Premium Audio add-on, teachers get natural-sounding voices for word pronunciation, full-story narration with distinct voices for dialogue speakers, and an MP3 export option.

How accurate are the AI-generated stories?

Stories are generated by AI and checked automatically against grammar and vocabulary rules for the chosen level. Because this check is automated rather than a human editor, an occasional slip can get through, so you should review a story before sharing it with your students.

How does Stichos handle French grammar challenges like articles and silent letters?

French spelling from sound can be tricky because silent letters make words like parle, parles, and parlent sound identical. Additionally, since words like l'arbre hide gender, teaching nouns alongside full articles like un or une helps clarify whether a noun is masculine or feminine.