Nifty sites for French teachers

Just a mention for a few really good sites I've been using with classes recently.

The Oxford University Press site i-café has some lovely reading material with interactive quizzes, games, crosswords and gap fills to do. It worked well with my class of good 13-14 year-olds. It would be fine for slightly older and better students too.

http://www.oup.com/uk/i-cafe/main/index/fr/issue_24/01/

The magnificent Languagesonline by Andrew Balaam and colleagues from Royal Grammar School High Wycombe has attractive Hot Potato and Spellmaster tasks on Christmas (as well as masses of other stuff). My younger classes used the Noël pages and A-level students have used the Faits Divers.

http://www.languagesonline.org.uk

My Y10 set used the video quizzes from the Ashcombe School in Surrey. Sound quality is a bit iffy, but pupils work well on these gap fills.

http://www.ashcombe.surrey.sch.uk/Curriculum/modlang/index_students.htm

My sixth formers enjoyed listening to and watching the news clips from MonJTQuotidien. The clips are short, interesting and varied.

http://www.monjtquotidien.fr

My A-level students made good use of the Lafrancebis site which has interesting listening passages with interactive questions to the side.

http://www.lafrancebis.com

And finally... I enjoyed using the Mômes site with its Comptines section with words and music for French Christmas songs. I even got my Y9 class to sing along.

http://www.momes.net

I have to say that the internet has fundamentally improved the variety of tasks we can set and resources we can exploit. They are a blessing when you are feeling a bit cream-crackered at the end of term too.

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What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought. ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a langua...

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Longman's Audio-Visual French

I'm sitting here with my copies of Cours Illustré de Français Book 1 and Longman's Audio-Visual French Stage A1 . I have previously mentioned the former, published in 1966, with its use of pictures to exemplify grammar and vocabulary. In his preface Mark Gilbert says: "The pictures are not... a mere decoration but provide further foundation for the language work at this early stage." He talks of "fluency" and "flexibility": "In oral work it is advisable to persist with the practice of a particular pattern until the pupils can use it fluently and flexibly. Flexibility means, for example, the ability to switch from one person of the verb to another..." Ah! Now, the Longman offering, written by S. Moore and A.L. Antrobus, published in 1973, just seven years later, has a great deal in common with Gilbert's course. We now have three colours (green, black and white) rather than mere black and white. The layout is arguably more attrac...

Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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