Coming soon! Let's Get Them Talking!

What do we want our students to be able to do in class?  Maybe you think, like me, that it’s about understanding and communicating meanings. This involves listening to what other people say, responding appropriately, expressing ideas and opinions, asking questions and sustaining interaction at an appropriate level. Knowing grammar and vocabulary matters, but it is not the main goal. A student may know how to conjugate verbs or complete written exercises successfully yet still struggle to understand spoken French or take part in a simple conversation. Our lessons therefore need to do much more than teach students about French: they must give them regular experience of using French to communicate.

The 50 lessons in my new book are founded on this communicative principle. They place speaking (with listening of course) at the centre of classroom activity and give students a reason to talk. The lessons may be about identifying information, playing a purposeful game, solving a problem or making a decision. Students may be interviewing a partner, exchanging missing information, expressing preferences, constructing a story or reaching an agreed outcome. In each case, French is being used as a means of communication rather than being practised for its own sake.

Contrast this with a grammar-led lesson where the grammatical structure often determines the content and sequence of the lesson — the teacher presents a rule, students practise it and a communicative activity may be tacked on at the end. In the lessons in this new book, communication is the organising principle. Vocabulary and grammar practice are a by-product of understanding messages and saying something worthwhile. So instead of saying "I'd like a lesson on the perfect tense", this is more like "I'd like a lesson which gets students talking about what they did recently". It's not a subtle difference, in my view.

This type of communicative approach doesn’t mean asking students to speak without adequate preparation. Successful interaction depends on accessible input, secure vocabulary, useful chunks of language, careful modelling and appropriate scaffolding. The lessons therefore often include activities that prepare learners for communication. These may involve listening, repetition, reading aloud, retrieval practice, sentence building, structured questioning or rehearsal with a partner. In lessons of this type, support is gradually reduced as students become more confident and independent. Accuracy may be valued, but in most cases fluency and comprehension are key.

The book has two purposes. The first is practical: every lesson is ready to use. Teachers can follow the sequence as written, adapting the language, timing or level of support where necessary. The activities require no commitment to a particular coursebook and can be incorporated into different schemes of work. The emphasis throughout is on procedures that are manageable in an ordinary classroom and that encourage high levels of participation.

The second purpose is about helping new teachers or trainees learn the craft of lesson planning. A successful lesson is more than a collection of appealing activities. Its stages need to connect. Each stage should prepare students for what follows, control the level of challenge and move them towards greater independence. Repetition, a key to acquisition, is built in. For this reason, every lesson is described step by step. The instructions explain what the teacher does, what the students do, how the activity can be organised and how support can be provided.

The lessons can therefore be treated as templates as well as complete resources. Once teachers understand the underlying structure of an information-gap activity, listening sequence, interview, ranking task or collaborative problem, they can reuse it with different vocabulary, grammatical features and cultural content. A lesson about holidays might become one about school, healthy living or the environment. The surface content changes, but the communicative architecture remains.

There is no single formula for a good communicative lesson. Some lessons begin with rich listening input; others build towards pair work, role play or a decision-making task. Some place greater emphasis on fluency, while others deliberately draw attention to vocabulary or grammatical form. What they share is a clear communicative purpose, careful preparation and an expectation that learners will actively understand and use French.

The book will be A4 sized, with many photocopiable pages. It is accompanied by support materials (slides, images, an MP3) available on this page which is already up and running. The book will be available later this month or early September.