Skip to main content

Latest updates to frenchteacher


After a long stay in our French house this summer when my work was limited to writing for the listening book Breaking the Sound Barrier we hope to publish by February (with Gianfranco Conti), I've turned my attention back to writing resources for frenchteacher.net. In the last week I've added eight new resources at all levels.

As always I'm very grateful to the hundreds of schools and teachers who subscribe and often resubscribe to the site. There are now well over 1400 resources on the site for a fee of £25. Do take a look at the many testimonial messages I have received over the years. Here are last week's new resources:

Beginner and near-beginner

Beginner alphabet fun. Two resources: (1) a list of games to practise the alphabet (2) an alphabet grid game in which you read out letter coordinates on a grid while pupils shade in boxes to create a picture. (Thanks to a teacher on the GILT Facebook group for that idea.)

Three Kim's Game PowerPoints. This is the classic game where you show some items then hide one or more at a time for the class to recall the missing item. These ones features fruit and veg and a hungry rabbit, pets and places around town. Beginners love this sort of memory game and it's a good vocab builder. Each presentation builds up in difficulty.

 Low intermediate

Parallel reading text. Why can't kangaroos walk? A short text translated from French to English with a comprehension task and vocab grid to complete. You could come up with other ways to exploit this too.

Intermediate (GCSE)

Video listening. Une balade à Porquerolles. Linked to a France Bienvenue video. Gap-fill with options plus "find the French" translation. Don't for get that there are numerous listening tasks on the Y10-11 page: teacher-read, audio and video, including some quite easy activities.

Video listening. This is a 1jour1question video about la francophonie in the world. The main task is to spot inconsistencies between the language of the video and a set of 15 sentences. Good general background on why French is such an influential world language.

Advanced

Audio listening. This is a conversation between two students, Tina and Laetitia, talking about their favourite films (from YouTube/Francebienvenue). Gap-fill to do, plus "find the French" and an opportunity to reuse some of the language in dialogue. Includes information about the film Intouchables. You could use this in Y12 or Y13. Edit to create more gaps if you need to.

Text and exercises on food poverty in France. With vocab to find, lexical work, comprehension, paired oral work, translation and summary.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

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).

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g