Skip to main content

Comprehensible input on frenchteacher

I'm one of those teachers, like most I would think, who place a high value on providing what Stephen Krashen christened "comprehensible input". That's why I always wanted to teach primarily through the target language with a strong emphasis on listening and reading for meaning. As a child taught in the 1960s and 70s I also value the "skill-building" approach and as a teacher was happy to do lots of target language structured practice, occasional translation and some explanation.

My website reflects both of those strands, with numerous grammar practice sheets and some grammar explanation handouts, but in fact the bulk of the resources are there to provide meaningful language through texts and listening. The staple resources are articles with exercises and video listening from authentic sources.

With comprehensible input and reading for interest in mind I began last year putting together a set of parallel reading resources for beginners and near beginners which I know many teachers have used. Reading material can, of course, be read aloud to provide useful listening.

So, on the Primary/Year 7 page of frenchteacher.net I have a good range of short texts laid out in landscape format, with French on the left, English on the right. To make them exploitable they come with a range of simple exercises and vocabulary lists to complete. The exercise types still focus on reading rather than writing - true/false, or true/false/not mentioned and ticking correct sentences (all in French) are the exercise types I use most since they provide even more input.

These are the topics covered: the Eiffel Tower, Channel Tunnel, meerkats, kangaroos, whale, sharks, spiders, ladybirds, dolphins, tigers, vampires, my dog, my family, my house, Cinderella, becoming a vet, Brazil, my friend, my mum, my family, planets, a weather forecast, a simple poem, the boy who cried wolf story and asking directions.

I could envisage these being used as a change from the usual work when you want a filler lesson. There is no grammatical focus, it's all about meaning. With stronger classes you could even use them without the English translation.

I have also posted a cover/front page in case teachers wish to make a booklet of the texts for their classes. This could be for extension work, for example.

If used in class with the whole group, I would read them aloud while the class follows and glances across at the English. With the right classes I would get them to read aloud to the class or in pairs. They could then work on the exercises in silence. At a later stage you could get pupils to fold the sheet in half and try translating back without reference to the English text provided. I'm sure you could come up with other ways to exploit the texts.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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,

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).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,