50 Lesson Plans for French Teachers

Update: 11th June. The book has been proofed by Steve Glover and Nathalie Kaddouri of dolanguages.com, then re-proofed, edited and formatted by my wife Professor Elspeth Jones and we should be ready to publish on Amazon in a few days. We have around 185 pages of step-by-step lesson plans, some of which are linked to PowerPoint slides in a free page if frenchteacher.net. 20 lessons are for beginners or near beginners (CEFR A1), 20 for GCSE level (A2) and 10 for advanced level (B1/2).

I’m pleased that the book covers a range of teaching methodologies, procedures and techniques. You’ll find elements of lexicogrammar (sentence builders and narrow reading/listening), oral-situational, communicative, task-based, audiolingual, even a touch of grammar-translation. There are plenty of photocopiable resources, as well as the PowerPoint slides I mentioned.

I really hope this will be useful to French teachers learning their craft. The lessons are “oven ready” (sorry!) but can also be seen as models for others. I shall do a screencast about the book when it is out.

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Update: May 25th. The book is now written and being proofed. Looking forward to publishing soon.

Update: May 17th - I’ve written around 40 lessons so far.

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This is just to make you aware that I have begun working on a practical book containing descriptions of 50 French lessons. I was intending to start this project early next year, but with the Covid confinement I've had no time for travel and more time for other things, including reading and writing.

So I've made a start on this new book. My idea is this:

Target readership

French teachers in training (although, as is often written, more experienced teachers might find it useful)

Content

Step-by-step descriptions of 50 lesson plans with their accompanying resources. 20 will be at near-beginner level (roughly first two years of learning), 20 will be for students who have done between three and five years (up to Higher GCSE) and ten will be for advanced level students.

Where the resources are non-printable (PowerPoints), these will be made available on a dedicated, freely available page on my frenchteacher.net website.

The style of the lessons will vary so may appeal to varying tastes. I aim to include examples featuring "traditional" oral-situational style lessons, task-based lessons, written text-based lessons, listening text-based lessons, chunking and narrow reading-style lessons (à la Gianfranco Conti and as referred to in our books The Language Teacher Toolkit and Breaking the Sound Barrier), as well as communicative lessons featuring information gaps.

Some of the lessons are more like sequences which could take more than one period to do. At the start of each section there will be a rationale - the thinking behind the lesson and why it might make good pedagogical sense.

In addition, some of the lessons will be based on existing resources on frenchteacher.net, while others will be brand new.

It's important for me to say that I am not aiming to describe wildly original lessons; it's more about helping new teachers establish a rationale for lesson planning and some basic tools of the craft.  The book will offer a set of templates and immediately usable resources new teachers might find useful. Descriptions of the lessons will suggest variations for different classes, depending on their proficiency.

Format

Because the book will be in A4 format and not too thick, pages will be photocopiable. A gew lessons have accompanying PowerPoint slides which will be freely accessible on a dedicated oage of frenchteacher.net.

I plan to self-publish the book at a low price on Amazon, probably around £10.

So far, I've written around 15 lesson plans and hope to have the book finished in around three months. We'll see, since I shall also be devoting time to working on the cognitive science book I am co-writing with Gianfranco. That's a work in progress.