Teaching adjectives in French

The title of this post feels a bit odd to me, since I never really ‘taught adjectives’ to a huge extent during my career. Sure, we did some practice with agreements, I told classes a bit about word order and how adjectives could change meaning and we did work on comparatives and superlatives (see below). Overall, however, adjectives just come up a lot in input language and get picked up over time, implicitly, as the research calls it. That said, when it comes to getting students to understand and use adjectives successfully, it seems to me that we could consider the following aspects, in rough order of importance:

1. Which adjectives to teach.

2. The meaning of the adjectives

3. What they sound and look like

4. The order they appear in relation to nouns

5. Agreement

Let’s consider each of the above in turn.

1. Which adjectives to teach

Your school’s syllabus may dictate adjectives you need students to know. Keeping in mind the need to prioritise high-frequency vocabulary (words and chunks with high ‘surrender value’, you might like to know the 50 most frequent adjectives in French (according to Chat GPT, based on recognised corpora - frequency lists).

bon, grand, petit, autre, même, premier, dernier, seul, tout, long, nouveau, vieux, jeune, beau, gros, haut, bas, vrai, mauvais, meilleur, important, possible, différent, certain, public, général, simple, difficile, facile, clair, plein, libre, sûr, présent, propre, prêt, fort, faible, rare, unique, national, social, politique, économique, international, principal, récent, ancien, humain, local

Beginners would need a subset of those, or other adjectives altogether, depending on their communicative needs. So if they are beginners talking about pets they would need colours, words like mignon and méchant, or calme, or paresseux. So keep in mind both frequency and communicative need - which goes for all vocabulary.

2. Meaning

This is a priority, so students need to hear and use adjectives they understand. The adjectives need to appear in aural and written texts, sentence builders, dialogues, classroom conversation. In some cases images and gestures will help embed meaning. Students need multiple encounters with the adjectives over time, respecting the principles of spaced repetition and retrieval practice. If the input is stimulating or relates to personal interests, the adjectives will be better retained. Implicit (unconscious) learning, helped with explicit teaching (getting students notice) will do its job. In lay persons’ terms, students will ‘pick them up’. Avoid teaching the adjectives as isolated words - chunked language is better. Use translation to help fix meaning.

When it comes to meaning, we can’t ignore comparatives and superlatives. Practising these provides ample opportunities to hear and see adjectives in context. Doing comparatives can be fun too - comparing animals, places, buildings, people, school subjects and so on. You can also have fun comparing items from different categories, for example the Eiffel Tower with a cat.

Adjectives are also revisited when you look at adverbs, of course. This is an opportunity to revisit agreement when you explain that a common pattern is to add ‘ment’ to the feminine form of the adjective (e.g. ‘silencieusement’).

3. What they sound and look like

Knowing vocabulary is more than just understanding meaning. As well as being exposed to common collocations, with beginners especially, there needs to be a focus on sound (phonology) and spelling. Students need to hear the adjectives many times in context, say them out loud and say them while reading them, to support their phonics skill (sound-spelling correspondences). Hearing and seeing them in sentences, short texts, sentence builders and dialogues is a must. Use them in question-answer, sentence builder-based activities and games, stories and information gap games like Battleships. Transcription tasks (eg mini dictations) will help embed spelling and sound-spelling relationships. Matching tasks and picture descriptions are other candidates for adjective practice.

4. Adjective position

We know that there are rough rules for adjective position in relation to nouns. I won’t list them here; you know what they are, and you know the rules can be bent. You also know that certain words, such as ‘ancien’, change meaning depending on whether the precede or follow the noun. You might spell out what the rules are, but a sense of position will emerge over time without explicit instruction. Through implicit learning, students will rarely or never say ‘Un vert pull’ even though adjectives precede nouns in English. In short, students pick up word order through use. So yes, mention the rules, but I wouldn’t bother with practice exercises on this (e.g. word reordering).

Agreement

The final one is the least important one, yet the one to which we may devote too much time. Adjective agreement is largely easy to explain, even though the concept is alien to L1 English users. But it is extremely hard to acquire for a couple of reasons. The first is that for L1 English speakers adjective agreement is not ‘salient’, namely we don’t naturally notice it or look for it owing to its absence from English. Secondly (and not unconnected) is the fact that agreement has no effect on meaning. If you make an error, for example not pronouncing or writing a feminine agreement, no one will misunderstand you. A teacher or French speaker will probably notice it, but not be offended or fail to get the message. Because of those reasons and the fact that you need huge exposure to adjectives in context (for implicit learning to happen), adjectives are hard. Even I, as a pretty fluent French speaker, make errors or have to pay extra attention (bringing in explicit knowledge to ensure accuracy - Krashen’s ‘monitor’, if you like).

Once the rules of agreement are explained, there is a case for some specific practice with some classes. Gap-fill or word completion is an obvious way to go here (students choose the ending). If you can plan this sort of task within more communicative work, so much the better. Dictation is another possible activity here, but even with high-achievers, keep transcription easy. 

At A-level attention to adjective agreement becomes more important since exam boards view adjective agreement errors as ‘major’. I find this inconsistent, since their general view is that a major error is one that creates ambiguity of meaning. I struggle to think of an adjective agreement error which affects meaning. Even if any exist, they are surely so rare that they are not worth considering.

In sum, ‘teaching adjectives’ covers a whole range of classroom activities. Adjective, like all language,  are largely acquired implicitly through usage - input and interaction.