Skip to main content

Skill-acquisition meets comprehensible input!

Phew!  Took a lot of work, this, both by Gianfranco and myself. Our 10 units of work for the new A-levels are complete. We shall do a similar bundle for the second year of A-level (teaching from September 2017) in the next few months.

Here is the bundle.

We think we have priced these resources generously given they will be used for several years and are photocopiable (pdf or editable Word).


So what are they? Here is the blurb from our TES page:

"This a bundle of ten AS/A-level French units of work which support the sub-themes of the three English examination boards. All AQA units (year 1) are covered. 

Each unit consists of 7 to 9 pages of densely packed activities centred around a text and with an ultimate focus on translation into French. Tasks include matching, definitions, gap-fill, grammar drills, translation both ways, questions, comprehension, speaking and writing and vocabulary list completion.

Each unit builds up in difficulty and features pre-reading and pre-translation tasks leading to three translation passages into French, graded in difficulty.

You would use these during the first year of a two year course, or for revision in the second year.

The 10 topics are: family, cyber-society, education, work, volunteering, music, cinema, literature, personal identity and cultural heritage.

Every unit comes with answers, so you could hand these out for independent work or use them in class with little preparation.

You might like to put the units together as a booklet (about 110 pages) to be kept in class or given out to students.

Separately, each unit costs £3. We are selling the bundle of 10 units for £20. Once photocopied they will last you several years.

The units were co-written by Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith and apply some of the principles laid out in their book The Language Teacher Toolkit."

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...

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 ...

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, ...