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'Find five facts'


I've been uploading lots of starter activities to frenchteacher.net in recent weeks. Most involve working at sentence and chunk level and involve retrieving, recycling, adapting or correcting simple language. Most of the exercises also involve time limits, to encourage the development of cognitive fluency - quick recall and usage of high-frequency language. The activities I have made have all been aimed at Y7-9, which is CEFR A1 towards A2 in some cases. 

A recent task I put on the site, and which you can view above, is focused on reading comprehension with an element of time pressure. I just called it 'Find five facts' and in this case the short texts students see on each slide contain some language students will not have encountered. The aim is to read quickly and pick out comprehension points of their own choosing. This task runs counter to the usual idea that language should be highly comprehensible (at least 95% if you accept Nation's figure, the one Gianfranco and I often refer to). But it does allow students to see interesting texts, maybe of specific cultural relevance, so caters to the desire expressed by many teachers that students should encounter more challenging and interesting texts from time to time.

An argument against less comprehensible texts like these is the idea that students lose that sense of self-efficacy because they don't understand what they are reading or hearing. This is particularly the case for beginners or near-beginners. In addition, you can't process what you don't understand. Input should be comprehensible. But if you choose to put greater focus on culture and deciphering meaning even when you don't know quite a few words, then you can easily make a case for occasional tougher texts provided the task is achievable, gives success, and the text is somewhat comprehensible.

In my task above, students are free to pick out any five things they understand from each of the ten short texts. In this way, every students should be able to find some information. In a few cases, I added translations to certain words impossible to infer.  If I were using the task I would put a time limit of, say, two minutes on each slide and use between three and five slides at a time (depending on how much time you have in the lesson). The idea is not to use all ten slides in one go.

After the short time limit is up, pairs could compare what they found, or you could read aloud facts as students tick off any that match. You could then give an instant translation of the text and discuss in English any points raised. Remember that the focus is not just on language acquisition here, but intercultural understanding and knowledge.

You could, of course, take one of the texts and do some intensive work on it if you wished. This could include tasks such as QA, 'disappearing text' (follow-up slides with bits of the text missing), true/false, translation, 'correcting false facts' and so on. But that's not really the main intention of the slides.

By the way, I took and adapted the texts from my Y7 and Y8 collection of parallel reading tasks.

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