Skip to main content

Parent-child pairwork scenarios


I thought I'd share an old lesson idea I used on occasion with Y13 students (A-Level, CEFR B1/B2). Once your class has got a good deal of fluency with a wide range of language, as is usually the case with your students doing the second year of A-Level, you can have fun just letting them loose on conversational scenarios such as those below. The theme of these examples is family problem discussions which parents and teenagers might have.

Have you got time to do this sort of thing during a busy A-level course? Absolutely! My usual argument is that much language transfers across from one topic to another, so any practice you do which involves comprehensible input and interaction is contributing to improved proficiency in general. This proficiency build incrementally, not necessarily in a linear fashion, and carries over to other tasks.

And what's more, this task is enjoyable for students who enjoy listening, talking and playing imaginative roles. Nothing in the content is right or wrong!

As a teacher, I'd sit back and just respond to any language questions which might come up.

So here is the worksheet which can generate at least 45 minutes of paired discussion.

Problèmes de l’adolescence                        

Imaginez les conversations. Une personne joue le rôle du parent, l’autre de l’adolescent(e)

  1. Le parent vient de recevoir un coup de téléphone du directeur de l’école. Celui-ci a dit que l’adolescent a raté quelques cours et qu’il ne fait pas ses devoirs. Il risque de rater le bac.
  1. En rangeant la chambre de sa fille, le parent a trouvé des pilules contraceptives dans le tiroir d’une table de chevet.
  1. L’ado explique au parent qu’il/elle est victime de cyber-intimidation. Un(e) autre élève envoie des SMS offensifs et le/la prend en photo sans permission.
  1. L’ado annonce à son parent qu’il/elle ne veut plus aller à l’université.
  1. L’ado veut faire un petit job tous les weekends. Le parent n’est pas d’accord.
  1. Le parent sent l’odeur du cannabis dans la chambre de l’ado et décide d’aborder le problème avec son enfant.
  1. Le parent rentre en fin de soirée pour trouver que la maison est très en désordre après une fête.
  1. Le parent et l’ado discutent si l’enfant devrait étudier les langues ou les sciences à l’université.
  1. L’ado a décidé qu’il/elle veut faire le tour du monde avant d’aller à la fac. Le parent n’est pas d’accord.

10. L’ado rentre tard dans sa voiture en état d’ivresse. C’est la deuxième fois que cela s’est produit.


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 language).
Post a Comment
Read more

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,
4 comments
Read more

The 2026 GCSE subject content is published!

Two DfE documents were published today. The first was the response to the consultation about the proposed new GCSE (originally due in October 2021) and the second is the subject content document which, ultimately, is of most interest to MFL teachers in England. Here is the link  to the document.  We are talking about an exam to be done from 2026 (current Y7s). There is always a tendency for sceptical teachers to think that consultations are a bit of a sham and that the DfE will just go ahead and do what they want when it comes to exam reform. In this case, the responses to the original proposals were mixed, and most certainly hostile as far as exam boards and professional associations representing the MFL community, universities, head teachers and awarding bodies are concerned. What has emerged does reveal some significant changes which take account of a number of criticisms levelled at the proposals. As I read it, the most important changes relate to vocabulary and the issue of topics
5 comments
Read more