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Paid-for sites for French teachers

For about 15 years I have kept on my site a list of subscription and paid-for web sites for French teachers. With so many free resources out there (I would immediately pick out Lightbulblanguages, Quizlet and the free stuff on TES as three examples) anything you have to pay for needs to be good. (Careful, though, as the quality of TES hosted resources varies hugely.) The list I have compiled over the years only contains what I would consider worthwhile resources, many of them interactive.

I get to meet quite a few teachers at training sessions and meetings, so I thought I would share the resources which receive the most favourable comments and which I would value myself the most. Don't forget, these are just resources you have to pay for.

This is Language

This is not a cheap resource but I have heard nothing but positive reviews of it. The key selling point is their archive of authentic video interviews. They send out people to conduct video interviews with young French people and you can use these interviews and accompanying materials to create very engaging listening and multi-skill lessons. They have thousands of authentic video recordings of French speakers. Videos come with exercises, transcripts and translations. They are targeted mainly at GCSE up to advanced level. Cost is £300 a year per language plus £2.40 per student.

Dolanguages.com

This is the work of Steve Glover and his colleague Nathalie Kaddouri who write extremely practical and high quality resources for A-level (general language and specific units for film and literature). Their online course is a very worthy (and cheaper) competitor to the coursebooks published by Hodder and Oxford. The film and literature units are very popular and universally appreciated and cost around £30 each.

 Atantot

This is from Esther Mercier and has been around for quite a few years. It's specifically made for use with an interactive whiteboard, with bold visuals, practical and amusing presentations. Like some of the older resources it requires Adobe Flash to make it display properly. It's low annual cost of £60 makes it a worthwhile annual purchase for a department.

 Teachit Languages

This is a popular site with a good range of resources for various levels. It costs £25 a year for an individual subscription, £125 for a department, though access the resources in pdf form is free.many teachers are happy to use the free pdfs.

Textivate

This is a self-authoring online text manipulation package, a few features of which are free. It is far better to purchase the premium features for an annual fee of £25, £50 or £120 (group rate). I like the fact that the package develops comprehension skills (reading and listening if you embed video), grammatical accuracy and vocabulary. It is therefore strong on both input and output. This almost qualifies as a "must-buy" for a department, being a super example of technology being put to effective use.

My complete list is here. And of course there is the most popular of all the French teacher sites frenchteacher.net!

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