Skip to main content

Frello



Frello ("French Listening Lessons Online") was started up in July 2016 by two young fellows from Normandy who are making a business out of online conversation lessons. The useful part for French teachers and their pupils is the videos section of the site which hosts two sets of videos, at beginner and intermediate level. The short to-camera, very home-made video clips are hosted on Vimeo and come with transcripts and short interactive quizzes. The quality of the sound is adequate and the speakers slow down their language to a suitable level.

The topics covered so far at beginner level include: likes and dislikes, food, countries, family, house, daily routine and clothes. At intermediate level (Foundation/Higher GCSE) topics include: who do you admire, breakfast, pastimes, childhood dreams, school and "Have you ever had your heart broken?" (!). More videos are being added all the time.

The interactive quizzes aren't thorough enough for classroom use, but could be used as part of a homework, though, or included in a computer room/iPad lesson..

I think these videos would be a useful supplement to classroom topic work. You might choose to copy and paste the transcripts to make more intensive lessons out of them (e.g. with gap-fill tasks) or just use them as an informal filler or plenary, for example.

Here is Théo, who seems like a jolly nice chap, presenting his site.


Présentation - Théo pour Frello from Frello on Vimeo.

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 langua...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
26 comments
Read more