This is another post in my mini series about teaching aspects of French grammar. In this post I’m going to look at the futur proche, which goes under different names in English, for example near future or immediate future. Neither of those terms are great, to be honest, since the ‘aller + infinitive’ construction does not have to apply to near future events. For example, you could say ‘Dans deux ans je vais partir en Australie’. Also, interestingly, ‘aller + infinitive’ is also used quite commonly to describe things in the present. For instance, a restaurant waiter describing the menu might say “on va avoir deux tranches de jambon avec…”, meaning ‘there are two slices…’. You hear this use of the futur proche a lot. (I’ve heard the same usage in English, by the way: “You’re gonna have…”. I have a feeling that this is more the case in American English.) Chat GPT describes this usage thus:
The speaker is walking you through what is in front of you.
It’s similar to how people narrate actions:
- “So you’re going to take the first left…”
- “Now we’re going to add the onions…”
Even if the action/state is effectively present, the speaker frames it as a step in a process.
That’s by the way. What about teaching the construction in lessons?
Typically ‘aller + infinitive’ is introduced after the present tense, and usually (in my experience) before any past tense. There are reasons for this. It’s easy to form and uses the present tense of ‘aller’ which students have already met many times. Secondly, although future action and events can be communicated with the present tense (Demain je vais à Grenoble.), the near future can express a contrast between present and future and does allow students avoid using irregular present tense verbs when talking about the future.
In addition, since, for most students it’s not worth dwelling long on the Future Tense (je serai), the near future does add some variety to verb usage in exams. Higher-attainers will happily handle the Future and its associated Conditional (je serais) but for many students you need to limit the diet and keep thing simple. Examiners (at GCSE) will accept the present tense to express future plans, as long as there is another word or phrase that clearly indicates future time, for example ‘Je travaille demain.’
To introduce the construction you have various options: slides with images, a sentence builder, a short text or dialogue containing examples, or even just translation. My preference was slides - a set of images depicting, say, sports with examples like Je vais jouer au football, Je vais jouer au tennis, etc. Students get to hear, see and repeat the ‘Je vais’ + the infinitive. I often defaulted to images when teaching new grammar or vocabulary since images grab attention and avoid having to use English. I would always make clear what the meaning was.
You could vary the infinitives used, with images depicting other activities - doing, visiting, watching, listening, eating. I’d stick with regular ‘-er’ verbs so that students hear the rhyming syllables ‘vais’ and ‘er’. I’d also just use the first person to begin with and avoid any liaison in, for example, je vais aller or je vais écouter. That’s fine. The liaison is not needed in normal speech.
In a sentence builder you would lay the language out so that the pattern is clear. You would not overload the grid with too much language. A text might just be someone talking about their future plans.
This construction is easy to drill if you and your class enjoy drills. Try simple present to future drills — Je joue au foot - Je vais jouer au foot. Or Je joue au foot - Je vais jouer au tennis (changing one other element).
After focusing on the first person, I would then practise the third person singular. With faster classes you could introduce this straight away. With high-attainers i would not have a problem introducing all persons of the verb early on. In cognitive load terminology there are not many "interacting elemnets" going on here (i.e. it's not complex) and students wil have seen all parts of the verb aller before, even if they have not automatised them. It's also handy that it is pretty much equivalent in meaning and structure to ts English equivalent (I'm going + to play).
Thereafter, it's a case of ensuring students see and hear more examples in subsequent lessons to take advantage of the spacing effect (distributed learning). A useful task would be to give pairs of sentences to students which they must judge as either present or near future. When students are ready (this will vary a lot depending on the clas) students can do some free production orally or on paper. Simple composition such as "What I'm going to do this weekend" would fit the bill, with any scaffolding as required. Weaker classes can do this as gap-fill, for example.
Orally, students could see how many near future sentences they could do in a row, in competition with a partner ("Who can keep going the longest"). To practise the second person ('vous') students could guess what you the teacher are going to do next weekend. In pairs they could parcrise the 'tu' form with a simple guessing game where each partner jots down five things they're going to do and the other person must ask yes/no questions to guess (Tu vas jouer au foot?).
A useful by-product of this verb construction is that students et to handle lots of infinitives which they will need for constructions with modal verbs and in other verb collocations (J'aime jouer, Je n'aime pas jouer, Je peux jouer, je veux jouer, etc). Watch out for any phonological confusion between Je vais jouer and je veux jouer. (To avoid this, I confess that I often used je voudrais rather than je veux, to avoid possible consfusion.)
Overall, the 'aller + infintive' construction is easy to teach and practise and gives classes some 'communicative power'.
Comments
Post a Comment