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Another look Languages Resources by Samantha Broom






Samantha Broom has had her website online for quite a few years now. It had a refresh some time ago. Many teachers and pupils must have benefited from her work over the years. If you haven't come across it, do take a look. There are resources for five languages, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. I'll concentrate on the French materials in this post.

From the home page navigate to French from the drop-down menu at the top, not the Babbel "Practise French" advert.

Although there are a few A-level resources on Maupassant and Molière, the bulk of them are for near beginners and intermediates (GCSE). Topics include: personal information, daily life, home and abroad, healthy lifestyle, basics and Christmas.

If we take just one sub-section of the Home and Abroad category, holidays, you see a menu of over 50 resources, principally Word docs, but also some PowerPoints. there is a mixture of worksheets, presentations, games, cue cards, texts, gapped texts, Titles of resources include; J'ai logé; A l'hôtel conversation; Où vas-tu aller en vacances; transport; En panne; Dans ma valise and Tu pars en vacances. This is the tip of the iceberg.


On the subject of accommodation, the J'ai logé sheet has clear pictures for a matching task and some oral and written production. You could display it for an instant 20 minute session practsining J'ai logé... and J'ai passé... You could extend it to practise pendant. The level is Y8 or easy Y9.

On countries, the Où es-tu allé(e)? sheet is clearly laid out and could be used for display to generate simple oral work and writing. It would suit Y8 pupils learning cities and countries with prepositions.

The Comment as-tu voyagé? sheet has standard clear visuals with gaps to fill. Phases are presented at the top. This would be dispalyed, again, to generate oral work and you could easily blank out the supplied vocab as a simple development of the teaching sequence. This type of resource is s staple of controlled practice in the target language, in the early stages of a teaching sequence.

In fact, many of the resources you find on this site reflect Samantha's mainstream TL approach, which makes total sense to me. It's really quite old-school, but may still be less than familiar to some teachers. I would guess she would adopt a teacher-led approach to sheets like this, then handing over to students to practise in pairs or even groups. There is so much you can do with this type of material, recycling language along the way.

The sheet entitled Le weekend dernier consists of a set of six boxes of TL words and chunks and gapped verbs, all of which will help pupils build up an oral or written description of their last weekend. You might display this for oral practice/repetition and then use it to build up a simple composition.

You can probably tell that I relate strongly to this approach. There are some little errors in some of the sheets, but since they are all editable you could fix these.

Samantha has been very generous to share all her many resources over the years. If you have missed this site, dip into it, soak up the methodology (Samantha trained at St Martin's College, now University of Cumbria, I believe)  and plug any gaps in your scheme of work. I think there is a tendency sometimes to value what is new at the risk of forgetting what high quality material has been freely out there for a while.




Comments

  1. Thanks for the write-up Steve. I've not updated the site in a while and when I first smbegan to upload materials powerpointsnwere only just beginning to be used regularly! We were still in OHT territory.

    You are right: I am St Martin's trained, and very much advocate a TL approach, but I've moved forwards in how I do this too. I've not taught as much French over the last few years but the Spanish is the main one I update as that's my main language.

    Best wishes
    Sam

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd be interested to know how you've moved the TL approach forward. Guest blog?

    ReplyDelete

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