I’ve previously blogged advice about teaching questions and the perfect tense in French. This time I thought I would look at negatives: the use of ‘ne’ with ‘pas’, ‘jamais’, ‘rien’, ‘plus’, ‘personne’, etc.
A first point to make is that negatives may be tricky for English language L1 speakers because we do them quite differently with our ‘don’t’, ‘doesn’t’, ‘didn’t’, anything versus nothing, and variable syntactic use of no one, never, nowhere etc. Negatives are much harder in English than in French. This is worth mentioning to classes. Negatives in French are easy, notwithstanding awkward issues such as the fact that 'personne' may be understood as 'person' and 'plus' may be perceived as either 'more' or 'no more/no longer.'
A second thing to say here is that I suspect we often see negatives as a grammatical (syntactic/word order) topic, and to some extent it is, but I would see negatives as mainly a lexical issue. The key thing for students to know is the sound, spelling and meaning of the negative words. The use of ‘ne’ is secondary. I say this because the ‘ne’ often disappears in natural speech and is not easily noticeable in moderately paced, careful speech. The main meaning is carried by the negative word. Especially when listening, students will derive meaning not from ‘ne’ but from ‘pas’, ‘jamais’ etc.
It helps, by the way, that the negatives are relatively easy to pick out phonologically, as they largely begin with consonants. They are quite ‘salient’ or noticeable. An exception is ‘aucun(e)’, which is in any case best ignored with most classes (see below).
Guideline 1
Therefore, don’t get too hung up on the syntax and use of ‘ne’. Focus on the words carrying the meaning and design practice tasks on that basis. For example, at some point, contrast sentences with different negatives.
Guideline 2
Just above I wrote “at some point” because my second bit of advice is to not introduce more than one negative at once. Start with ‘pas’, then introduce others later, one by one. One reason not to do more than one negative at once is the risk of interference between competing words. So if you introduce ‘rien’ and ‘plus’ together, students may mix up the two. At a later stage, say in Year 10, with some higher-achieving classes you might compare and analyse them.
Guideline 3
Over time, after some explicit teaching and ‘input flood’ (showing multiple examples), implicit learning will take over and many students will be able to recognise the form and meaning of negatives without thinking. So rely on input doing the job over time. Ensure students get to regularly hear, see and use negatives. Don't forget that we pick up language mainly implicitly (unconsciously) over time. Input + interaction + repetition = acquisition.
Guideline 4
Adapt the teaching to the class. Very high-achievers will handle all negatives, including the use of negatives at the start of sentences ‘Personne ne sait…’, and more unusual negatives like ‘nulle part’ and ‘aucun(e)’. With many classes it will be an achievement for them to use ‘ne… pas’, let alone others. Comprehension will be easier than production, so they might find words like ‘jamais’ or ‘personne’ easier to understand than use.
Guideline 5
Do selective drills. These are easy to do aurally and on paper. For example get students to transform sentences into their negative form. ‘Je joue au tennis’ becomes ‘Je ne joue pas au tennis’. Or do it the other way round, negatives to positives. This relies on the skill acquisition, automatisation dimension of language learning - building habit or skill through productive practice. Some would argue against drills, but my experience was that their structured, repetitive nature appealed to classes. Remember the ‘production effect’ too - the finding from cognitive science that saying things out loud or writing them down strengthens memory. Drills like this make good retrieval starters, by the way.
Guideline 6
Avoid ‘extrinsic cognitive load’ - making the task harder than it needs to be. So if you want the focus to be on introducing or practising a negative, don’t confuse the issue by incorporating new vocab at the same time. Manage cognitive load carefully, using simple language and short sentences.
Guideline 7
When you explain the position of ‘ne’ and ‘pas’, consider using a visual image to show how they surround the verb (or auxiliary). A burger works well for this, with verb (meat/fish/veg) between the two halves of the bun. Students may benefit from copying down the image.
Guideline 8
Integrate skills. This applies to the teaching of all lexis and grammar. Reinforce listening and reading with speaking and writing. In a lesson sequence, therefore, begin by letting students hear and see negatives in use before having them try to produce them. Recycle the negative in as many ways as possible.Don’t rush classes to production. Some high-achievers need less input.
Guideline 9
Games. Use simple gamified drills to practise negatives include:
- ‘What I never do in class.’
- Contradiction in pairs: ‘Tu ne fais jamais les devoirs.’ - ‘Si! Je fais toujours les devoirs’ etc.
- ‘Find someone who…’ with negatives.
- ‘What the king never does.’
- ‘10 things I didn’t do last weekend’
- A fluency game in pairs: ‘Who can keep saying negative sentences the longest without stopping?’
- ‘Guess what I didn’t do last night’ (as an info gap activity’)
- Battleships with negatives
- ‘Sentence stealer’ with negatives.
Guideline 10
I’m probably least enthused by this one, but consider sentence correction tasks, where the negative is placed wrongly and students must fix the problem. In a similar vein, ‘sentence puzzles’ could work, where you jumble up the words of a negative sentence and students must order them correctly. I think this type of puzzle-solving task can have a place, especially where word order is involved, but I’d sooner focus on more communicative activities and ones where students are getting lots of repeated input. Even drills supply this.
So there we go. I hope you found that useful. Don't forget to like and subscribe. (Joking.)
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