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Connexions !

I recently discovered the New York Times game called Connections. If you don't know it, you get a grid of 16 words and have to find four groups of four words which are somehow connected by meaning or usage. It's quite fun. Just like Wordle, you get one a day if you are not a subscriber. With my language teacher brain, the obvious thing was to take the same idea and design grids for my own language - French.

Almost inevitably I enlisted the help of Chat GPT, though to be honest I could have done it nearly as quickly myself. I produced five grids for beginners and three grids for advanced level and uploaded them as slides on to my site. (Update: I have now added examples for Y9.)

For the beginner slides, two of them consisted of three-word phrases, since I try to favour chunked language where possible - you must know the reasons by now! I found I had to edit the Chat GPT suggestions to fit with what I know about the sequence Y7s tend to learn new language. Also, Chat GPT made the odd non-linguistuic error (and also corrected itself more than once). At first I let Chat GPT come up with the categories, then I suggestde my own, for example pets, family, weather, numbers, places in town, the classroom and likes/dislikes.

For the advanced level examples, I chose single words since by this stage the learners are proficient enough to use the words as the basis for discussion and sentece creation. Indeed, I would positively encourage this as part of the activity. Once the four semantic groups are agreed, students can create sentences including each word. If there are any debates about which category the words fit into, this in itself is a great basis for communication. Another way to take the game further would be to explore morphological relationships. Fot instnace, if the worsd in the grid are nouns, students could try to find associated verbs and adjectives - a great way to develop deeper vocabulary knowledge.

I hardly need to show you an example, since the game is so obvious. I suppose you could adapt it to inlcude fewer words or more words. But anyway, here is a grid of 16 words for advanced level followed by suggested answers.





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