A really useful exercise to give advanced level students is sentence combining. This means giving students two, three or more short, simple senetnces which students meld into one longer, more grammatically complex senetnce. In A-level exam terms, this means increasing the mark for Assessment Objective 3 (AO3) which is all about range and complexity of language. Not only is skill in building complex senetnces useful for essay writing, it can also transfer to more complex and interesting oral delivery. The results may be a somewhat formal spoken style, but in exam terms it pays off. Steve Glover and I wrote a good deal about creating complex sentences and paragraphs in our book Teaching A-level Modern Languages . So here is part of a worksheet I just uploaded to frenchteacher for students having to write about the film La Haine - by far the most popular A-level choice. I used Chat GPT to produce the examples once I had worked out the principles. You could do the same for other works...
I’ve been writing classroom materials for nigh on 50 years, as a classroom teacher for around 33 of them. When I was teaching I did so for a few reasons: The textbook resources didn’t match what I wanted to do with a particular class. I enjoyed the creative side of it. To share with colleagues - not so much as a prime reason, but it was a desirable outcome. In the old days we used Banda machines and Gestetners, OHP transparencies, flashcards and, later, the photocopier. Nowadays I work mainly with Word and PowerPoint, sharing with teachers around the world via frenchteacher.net. So I now have a pecuniary reason for writing materials, as well as enjoying it. So what things do I know about resource writing, and - by extension- what principles do I apply? I often come back to the foundation of second language learning, i.e. interacting with comprehensible input. So a fundamental consideration is: does this resource supply input and the opportunity to use it for communication? T...