Skip to main content

Les Energivores





http://www.energivores.tv

Here is a super site for listening and reading material on an environmental theme. Les Energivores has an archive of short cartoon videos (under two minutes) pitched at a high intermediate to advanced level, along with supporting reading material. As the title suggests the theme of the site is energy usage.

The award-winning site is from Canopé académie  in Besançon and AJENA in Lons-le-Saunier, with support from various sources including the EU.

The video topics include the environmental consequences of eating meat, electric bicycles, recycling mobile phones, organic farming, food miles, the ecological footprint of flowers, renewable energy, re-using items and computer servers (this film won an award).

Each video is accompanied by illustrated reading matter which can be downloaded in pdf format.

I just wrote a video listening worksheet to go with the film about meat eating. It would work with a good Y11 class or A-level group. The accompanying reading material includes lifestyle tips for good environmental practice, scientific information, facts and figures about the global footprint of soya production for farm animals, ideas for teachers on how the materials might be exploited and an interactive multi choice mini -jeu.

I thoroughly recommend this as a great source of target language listening and reading input on some worthwhile themes supported by serious scientific information.

Comments

Post a Comment

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 language).
Post a Comment
Read more

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,
4 comments
Read more

The 2026 GCSE subject content is published!

Two DfE documents were published today. The first was the response to the consultation about the proposed new GCSE (originally due in October 2021) and the second is the subject content document which, ultimately, is of most interest to MFL teachers in England. Here is the link  to the document.  We are talking about an exam to be done from 2026 (current Y7s). There is always a tendency for sceptical teachers to think that consultations are a bit of a sham and that the DfE will just go ahead and do what they want when it comes to exam reform. In this case, the responses to the original proposals were mixed, and most certainly hostile as far as exam boards and professional associations representing the MFL community, universities, head teachers and awarding bodies are concerned. What has emerged does reveal some significant changes which take account of a number of criticisms levelled at the proposals. As I read it, the most important changes relate to vocabulary and the issue of topics
5 comments
Read more