Skip to main content

The latest resources on frenchteacher

La Paz Waterfall Gardens, Costa Rica
In our semi-retirement my wife and I extremely luck to be able to work and relax as we please. After a fantastic holiday in Costa Rica with our son Joel and his girlfriend Amy, and with upcoming trips to Spain (for a barbershop singing convention) and France (to spend time in our house in Puyravault) I've been using the last couple of weeks to write some new resources for frenchteacher.net.

Here are the latest additions, with the emphasis on resources for near beginners up to GCSE (intermediate level).:


Near-beginners

  • A PowerPoint on furniture and other household items.
  • An easy sentence builder frame. Weekend activities (present tense). Translations given on the grid. The frame is accompanied by a possible teaching sequence. I think these frames work particularly well with relatively lower attaining classes.

 Intermediate

  • The Price is Right listening game on PowerPoint. 12 items with their prices. Feel free to ad or replace with your own. Instructions for teachers on the first slide.
  • A narrow reading task (i.e. six paragraphs with some common language in each). Favourite lifestyles YouTube channels, adapted from a French blog. With matching, vocab to find and sentences to complete. Designed for intermediate (Higher GCSE) level.
  • Audio listening. Delphine talking about having a baby. Gap-fill, questions and translation into French. Focus here on use of imperfect tense.Linked to an audio-lingua.eu authentic recording.
  •  Audio listening. A house in Normandy. Higher GCSE, with gap-fill, oral summary and conversation. Via audio-lingua.eu again.
  • Audio listening linked to a short text from the very useful site audio-lingua.eu. This is a Foundation Tier extract about holidays in Corsica. Multi-choice and easy gap-fill.
  •  Audio listening. A one minute, easy recording with multi-choice and gap-fill for careful listening. Topic: things to do in town. GCSE Foundation Tier (low intermediate).
  • Intermediate level reading text (Higher Tier GCSE) on alcohol and health in France. Vocab to find, true sentences to spot, sentence construction and translation into English. Answers provided.
  • A paired listening activity - aural gap-fill. The sheet contains and explanation of the task and two examples each of which would take around 10 minutes or so. You could easily make up others of the same type.

 



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