New Higher Tier GCSE units on TES

Updated 12th October 2016

Gianfranco Conti and I have been working on a set of resources for GCSE French. There is some emphasis on translation which, as you know, now features in the exam specifications. The first three are now available on the TES site. We have adapted the model of the A-level resources which have been selling well.

Here is where you can find our shop:

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/spsmith45

Here is the description of the first unit we wrote.there are two further units now posted, on volunteering and holidays. More will appear soon.

"This is a densely packed eight page unit of work with a focus on reading and translation into French. The theme is healthy living. The level is Higher Tier GCSE. You will find pre-reading tasks, a set of reading comprehension paragraphs, pre-translation activities and short, graded passages for translation into French. These tasks enable students to build up their skills by recycling language in various ways (matching, translating, synonyms, antonyms, true/false, questions etc). They are based on the concept of "narrow reading" whereby similar language is used across a number of reading paragraphs enabling students to have repeated exposure to the similar language. A detailed answer key is supplied. This resource is primarily for independent work to be done in class or at home. There is a pdf version and editable Word document."

We are charging £3 each. We would anticipate selling a bundle of 10 for £20 in the future and will be covering a full range of GCSE topics/sub-themes.

I should stress that these are aimed at Higher Tier and would make a very good supplementary resource for quite capable students (probably aiming at grade B equivalent or above - Progress 8 level 6?). Regular users of Gianfranco's resources will recognise the style and format of this first unit. He is writing some of them and I shall write others. The first unit is Gianfranco's baby.

If you have not yet discovered Gianfranco's TES resources you it's worth mentioning that he has published well over 1500 of them. The vast majority are free. He can't stop writing!

Comments

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It’s an added challenge for students but has significant value, I think. It reminds me of a phenomenon in music called audiation. I use it frequently as a singer and I bet you do too.

Audiation is thought to be the foundation of musicianship. It takes place when we hear and comprehend music for which the sound is no longer or may never have been present. You can audiate when listening to music, performing from notation, playing “by ear,” improvising, composing, or notating music. When we have a song going round in our mind we are audiating. When we are deliberately learning a song we are audiating.

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This is how it works:

Display around 15 sentences on the board, preferably ones which show language patterns you have been working on recently or some time ago.Hand out four cards or slips of paper to each student.On each card students must secretly write a sentence from the displayed list.Students then circulate around the class, approaching their classmates and reading a sentence from the displayed list. If the other person has that sentence on one of their cards, they must hand over the card. The other person then does the same, choosing a sentenc…

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To remind you, here is a typical sentence builder, as found on the frenchteacher site. The topic is talking about where you live. A word of warning - formatting blogs in Blogger is a nightmare when you start with Word documents, so apologies for any issues. It might have taken me another 30 minutes just to sort out the html code underlying the original document.

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By the way, I'm not getting into the use of tech here, as I have no great expertise on that. In any case, I imagine for younger learners especially it may be a question of setting other types of work.

ADVANCED

For advanced learners the job is not so tough. There is a plethora of listening, reading and grammar material they can use, whether it be from their textbooks, other resources shared electronically or online resources. You may have your favourites, but for a selection for French you can check out my links here and here. You may want to stick with topics on the syllabus, or free up students to read and listen more generally to what interests them.

One idea I used was to ask students to c…

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This type of lesson plan excites me more than many, because if it runs well, you get a classroom of busy communication when you can step back, monitor and occasionally intervene as students get on with listening, speaking and writing.

Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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