Skip to main content

Nifty sites for French teachers

Just a mention for a few really good sites I've been using with classes recently.

The Oxford University Press site i-café has some lovely reading material with interactive quizzes, games, crosswords and gap fills to do. It worked well with my class of good 13-14 year-olds. It would be fine for slightly older and better students too.

http://www.oup.com/uk/i-cafe/main/index/fr/issue_24/01/

The magnificent Languagesonline by Andrew Balaam and colleagues from Royal Grammar School High Wycombe has attractive Hot Potato and Spellmaster tasks on Christmas (as well as masses of other stuff). My younger classes used the Noël pages and A-level students have used the Faits Divers.

http://www.languagesonline.org.uk

My Y10 set used the video quizzes from the Ashcombe School in Surrey. Sound quality is a bit iffy, but pupils work well on these gap fills.

http://www.ashcombe.surrey.sch.uk/Curriculum/modlang/index_students.htm

My sixth formers enjoyed listening to and watching the news clips from MonJTQuotidien. The clips are short, interesting and varied.

http://www.monjtquotidien.fr

My A-level students made good use of the Lafrancebis site which has interesting listening passages with interactive questions to the side.

http://www.lafrancebis.com

And finally... I enjoyed using the Mômes site with its Comptines section with words and music for French Christmas songs. I even got my Y9 class to sing along.

http://www.momes.net

I have to say that the internet has fundamentally improved the variety of tasks we can set and resources we can exploit. They are a blessing when you are feeling a bit cream-crackered at the end of term too.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,