Skip to main content

New A-level revision booklets on frenchteacher

This is just to make you aware of a resource which A-level French teachers might find very useful for students.

I have posted an 82 page revision booklet covering the first six AQA sub-themes (AS-level or the first year of the A-level course). These are:


  • Family
  • Cyber-society
  • Cinema
  • Contemporary music
  • Volunteering
  • Cultural heritage

The booklet is in effect a compendium of listening and reading worksheets which you can already find on the site, some of which you may have used. I have provided nearly all the answers at the back of the booklet, with a few exceptions - notably song lyrics (copyright) and a very few older sheets for which I never produced answers in the first place.

I would anticipate this booklet being handed out for revision in the run-up to exams or being used in class, led by the teacher from the front.

The listening material is mostly in the form of video listening sheets linked to online sources, but there are a couple of audio worksheets (using Audio Lingua authentic recordings as the source) and a couple of texts which the teacher would need to read aloud or record.

Reading material is in the form I usually publish: a text or texts followed by vocab to complete and a range of comprehension, lexical work, matching, translation both ways, summary, gap-fill and so on. There are opportunities for oral explanation too.

I have chosen worksheets to suit the new emphasis on cultural knowledge (AO4) so there is ample material here to support students with this.

I am about to start work on the remaining sub-themes. This should be posted in a few days.

Don't forget that there are are all sorts of other A-level resources on the site to help your students, including plenty of grammar worksheets, translations, oral booklets and vocab lists.

UPDATE: the second booklet is now complete and uploaded.




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 language).

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 of topics

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,