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Frenchteacher latest


This is just a little update on what I've been adding to frenchteacher.net lately.

For any reader outside England, Wales and NI, Y7 means beginners (usually age 11), A-level students have usually opted to do French for two more years after 5 years of earlier study. So Y7 is CEFR A1 and A-level B1, bordering on B2 (CEFR).

The chunkiest new additions are two 35 page booklets, each with 17 sentence builders (plus gapped versions thereof) which could be printed off for students as an alternative source for revising vocabulary in context and for rehearsing answers for speaking and writing tests. There is one for Higher Tier GCSE and one for Foundation. 

These are lightly adapted versions of existing resources on the site. Each booklet has a cover page with suggestions for how students should use the booklets.

What I like about these is the fact that students aren't just reading and trying to memorise vocabulary (a pretty boring task), but they can read aloud sentences, record themselves and test themselves with the gapped versions. The booklets could be used in pairs in class too. For example, pupils could give sentence starts for their partner to complete or sentences to translate in to French.

Other recent resources on the site have been varied, and written for different levels from Primary/Y7 to A-level.

For instance, with Y7 in mind, I've uploaded a listening activity where students have to match one of three teacher-read descriptions of pets to pictures. Another resource is a guided parallel text-style guided translation task. There are a few of these on the Y7 page.

For Y8 I have added new sentence builder frames and a 'Climb the wall' listening task, whereby pupils listen to vocabulary definitions and race their route along and up a brick wall. Each brick has a word.

For Y9 I wrote a parallel text plus exercises based on a 2015 story. Samsung organised a stunt to advertise a new call centre for deaf people in Turkey. I also posted a lesson plan for practising the tired topic of daily routine. I pinched and adapted the basic idea for this communicative activity from a soon to be published book by Florencia Henshaw and Maris Hawkins from the USA.

For Y10-11, apart from the booklets mentioned above, I uploaded a gap-fill based on the story of Greta Thunberg crossing the Atlantic by yacht.

For A-level I posted a video listening tasks based on a news report of the daily life a single working mum. In addition, I added a couple of gap-fill 'instant listening' tasks based on existing texts. I have a quite a number of these low-prep 30 minute read-aloud tasks on the site. Don't forget that I added audio for these a while ago, if you want to give students a change from your own voice. These text to speech versions are perfect intonation-wise, but the pronunciation is authentic. I also wrote a text with exercises on the topic of teenage prostitution in France. Quite an eye-opener.

So, all in all, the site keeps developing and I always welcome requests for other exercises or topics.

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