Keeping A-level classes communicative

When I reviewed the three most popular A-level French text books aligned with the latest A-level specifications, one aspect struck me more than any other. To satisfy the requirement to cover Assessment Objective 4 (AO4) (cultural knowledge), written texts usually contain a good deal of information about the sub-themes, whether it be cinema, immigration, family or diversity. Texts, therefore, are now more fact-based than discursive or narrative. This can pose a problem when you are thinking; "How can I exploit this text?" Why? In my experience the best texts were ones pitched at the right level, interesting, but which also invited discussion of an interesting issue or students' personal experience. A text containing primarily information about a topic may not meet the last of those three criteria. It may be interesting enough, but how do you make it a source of communicative work? This means that lessons risk becoming less communicative, with the focus moving towards textual analysis and the memorisation of factual information and concepts.

Keeping in mind that acquisition best occurs when there is interesting comprehensible input and communicate interaction, I would be wary of this danger and look for ways to make factual texts a source of enjoyable communicative activity. How can this be achieved?

Here is one classroom activity which should work well. It's the "Ask and move" communicative task I described in my last blog and for which I gave a French example for GCSE level. For it to work you would need a group of reasonable size, say a minimum of about 12 students.

Write or obtain four paragraphs about the chosen sub-theme, each of which includes different factual information. For example, if the theme were the occupation of France during the Second World War, each paragraph could contain different aspects of the issue. These might be rationing, the Resistance, the division of France into different territories and collaboration. Four members of the class are given a printed TL paragraph each to read and keep. These for students are the "experts". The remainder of the class are each given the same set of TL questions. These students are the "information seekers".

The information seekers have to approach each expert and ask their questions. Now, they can either take notes from each expert, or, if the group is large enough, report back what they learn to a partner who acts as scribe. For the latter option I think you would need a group of at least 16 students.

Once all the information has been collected, you can then have a whole class discussion of the information, writing up key information and language on the board. A follow-up written task could be to do a write-up of the information. Remember that each expert only sees a quarter of the information, so the experts will need to listen carefully in the feedback part of the lesson. Almost the whole lesson would be conducted in comprehensible target language while incorporating AO4 material which can be reused at a later date.

A whole lesson could last about one hour, I would suggest.

This could be a relatively low preparation lesson if you have a ready-made written source. But even if you write the paragraphs yourself (possibly glossed with vocabulary), it would not take too long with some copy and paste and reworking, and could be reused a number of times. I intend to write a few examples for frenchteacher.net in the coming days.

Addendum: I have posted two examples on the topics of family life and internet use in France in  (lots of statistics.