Skip to main content

Listening activities on frenchteacher.net

(Updated 8th September) When I did my recent Surveymonkey survey of frenchteacher.net users, a number of subscribers said they would like to see listening activities on the site. I had been thinking about this for a while too and I have now begun to incorporate listening resources, mainly at A-level to begin with, but with a few for GCSE too.

Finding the right material online takes care, because you need source material which is interesting, spoken clearly at a reasonable pace and, preferably, which works well with exam board topics. I cannot embed copyright material, so my worksheets link to external video sites which the teacher could play "from the front" or which students could access themselves at home, in the ICT room or on a tablet. Some worksheets incorporate oral activities (pré-écoute) and other linguistic tasks.

If I were using them I would present them from the front as part of a teaching sequence. They could also make excellent listening revision material, which students often request.

Students must not be given the login to frenchteacher.net, so it's simply a case of printing off a sheet to hand out. Copy and paste the URL into your classroom computer to either present the video or let students copy it down into their own browser. Easy-peasy.

I have divided the listening tasks into "easier" and "harder", reflecting the difference between AS level and A2 level in the English and welsh exam system. Very competent GCSE (intermediate) groups could handle the easier material.

Exercise types vary, depending on the source. So far I have used true/false/not mentioned, questions in English and French and find the French.

Topics covered so far:

GCSE

Health - making vegetable soup; health/sport - hiking; a Strasbourg restaurant; family - a mum describing her daughters; holidays - favourite holidays

A-level

Easier: Tattoos, holidays (past and future), internet saftey, e-cigarettes, legalising c...bis, describing a film, speed dating, an extract from the film Etre et avoir, a song by Orelsan, national stereotypes, describing a film and talking about sport.

Harder : Humanoid robots, democracy, genetic modification, animal rights, villes nouvelles, carbon capture and storage, fracking, assisted dying, animal rights, new towns, forensic pathology, Erasmus, various songs (Cabrel, Pagny), restos du coeur, and alternative energy sources.

There will be plenty more to come.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Zaz - Si jamais j'oublie

My wife and I often listen to Radio Paradise, a listener-supported, ad-free radio station from California. They've been playing this song by Zaz recently. I like it and maybe your students would too. I shouldn't really  reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but I am going to translate them (with the help of another video). You could copy and paste this translation and set it for classwork (not homework, I suggest, since students could just go and find the lyrics online). The song was released in 2015 and gotr to number 11 in the French charts - only number 11! Here we go: Remind me of the day and the year Remind me of the weather And if I've forgotten, you can shake me And if I want to take myself away Lock me up and throw away the key With pricks of memory Tell me what my name is If I ever forget the nights I spent, the guitars, the cries Remind me who I am, why I am alive If I ever forget, if I ever take to my heels If one day I run away Remind me who I am, wha...

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...