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My new book is out!

Well this is jolly exciting! My new book called Let's Get Them Talking: 50 Communicative French Lessons is now available. The last three weeks have been all about tweaking and copy-editing (thanks to my wife and editor Elspeth Jones). I always find this is the fiddliest part of self-publishing. But the huge advantage is that I get to make the book immediately available and that, to be candid, royalties are much fairer than going with a publisher. This is how I have always published, except for my Outstanding Languages Teacher book with Routledge.

So what can I say about the book? It costs under five flat whites in the UK, it's on Amazon and it's almost 190 pages long. It's A4, with photocopiable pages, and comes with slides and Word docs freely available on my frenchteacher site. Just choose the tab Let's Get Them Talking!

Here's summary based on the introductory material from the book

...............................................................................................................................................................

What do we want students to be able to do?

  • Understand and communicate meanings in French.

  • Listen and respond appropriately to what other people say.

  • Express ideas, information, preferences and opinions.

  • Ask and answer questions and sustain interaction at an appropriate level.

  • See grammar and vocabulary as tools for communication, rather than as ends in themselves. Grammar is sometimes a by-product of the lessons.

  • Have opportunities to use French for a genuine purpose, not simply practise language forms.

  • Take part in purposeful activities such as:

    • exchanging missing information

    • interviewing a partner

    • solving a problem

    • playing a communicative game

    • making choices and decisions

    • expressing preferences and opinions

    • constructing stories

    • reaching an agreed outcome

    • talking about a text

  • Experience lessons in which communication is the organising principle. Rather than “a lesson on the perfect tense”, think “a lesson where students talk about what they did recently.”

  • Be well prepared before being expected to communicate, through accessible input, modelling and scaffolding.

  • Build up useful language through listening, repetition, reading aloud, retrieval, sentence building, structured questioning and rehearsal.

  • Benefit from plenty of repetition, while encountering familiar language in meaningful contexts.

  • Move gradually from supported practice towards greater independence.

  • Develop fluency and comprehension, while continuing to improve accuracy.

  • Participate actively: communicative lessons should aim for high levels of student involvement and language use.

What does this mean for lesson planning?

  • Start with what students will understand or communicate, rather than the grammatical structure you want to teach.

  • Give every lesson a clear communicative purpose or outcome.

  • Make sure that each stage prepares students for the next.

  • Control the level of challenge through careful sequencing and scaffolding.

  • Build in repetition and recycling to support acquisition.

  • Gradually remove support as learners become more confident.

  • Treat activities such as information gaps, interviews, ranking tasks and collaborative problems as reusable lesson templates.

  • Change the vocabulary, grammar or cultural content while retaining the same communicative architecture.

  • Remember that there is no single formula for a communicative lesson: some may begin with listening, others may build towards pair work, role play, storytelling or decision-making.

  • Above all, expect students to actively understand and use French, rather than simply learn about French.

...............................................................................................................................................................

In sum, I think this book will be tremendously useful for teachers in training and for others looking for some inspiration. It may also fit your school's oracy agenda, if it has one. And no, AI did not design these lessons, although I used ChatGPT and Mistral Vibe for some text and exercise writing, images and the cover. The book is here.

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