Lisons!

I'm new to the French Teachers of the U.S. Facebook Group, and it is turning out to be a phenomenal resource and virtual professional community.

I want to collect the wonderful ideas I'm learning about!

One excellent resource of comprehensible readings is 1jour1actu. It has news articles, infographics and videos that are designed to be understood by French speaking children. I can't wait to find ways to incorporate these texts into my units.

For example, I found lots of texts that would be perfect for a food unit. Articles and infographics abound on subjects ranging from "La Semaine du Goût" to the food groups to obesity.

Enseigner les vêtements: "Elizabeth devant sa garde-robe"

http://notrepetitepause.blogspot.com/2013/05/une-chanson-pour-apprendre-les-vetements.html

Lien à une chanson fabuleuse pour enseigner et pratiquer le vocabulaire des vêtements!

Pret-a-ecouter: Podcasts

A quick Google search for podcasts in French turned up some fantastic resources.
GabFLE is a fantastic resource for interviews with native speakers of all ages on a wide range of topics that will suit your objectives and students' interests. In addition to podcasts, there are ready made games and questions to support comprehension and bring in an element of reading and writing. I am always on the lookout for resources for beginning French students, and this is really a goldmine. The transcripts are also available below each interview, which means that you have a perfect built-in resource that will not only work for you, but bring a smile to the face of your school's ELA chairperson as you address the CCSS in your content area. Colloquialisms such as "euh" and "quoi" can heard throughout the podcasts (particularly when teenagers are interviewed) and this is a great way for students to hear how French teenagers really speak.

A collection of links to podcasts by theme can be found at Le Point du FLE. You might find topics that interest you, but the bigger discovery is that you will also find a huge source of blogs and web sites filled with the kinds of authentic resources you have been searching for.

Bonnes recherches! Et bonne ecoute!

Web 2.0 Test Kitchen...Featuring Yabla!

My latest discovery, thanks to a Google-sponsored ad that appeared on the bottom of the NY Times today is http://french.yabla.com. Okay, so it's a little weird that the interwebs can track my every move, but they did a great job this time.

Yabla features videos in lots of different languages that are fairly short and that star native speakers talking about all kinds of very common topics, such as food, music and fashion. You can watch the video, go backwards, forwards, or repeat the same phrase over and over by clicking "loop." You can even slow down the pace of speech in the video! What an ideal feature to include learners of all levels! What's more, you can choose to read subtitles in French and English. Following the video, you can play a game which closely resembles a Cloze (fill in the blank) activity.

I'm thrilled about the subtitles feature because these videos instantly become not only an excellent resource for listening comprehension, but it can also serve as a reading activity. Indeed, treating it as a reading activity FIRST, and as a listening activity second, would be a great strategy in order to increase aural comprehension. The teacher could transcribe the subtitles onto a worksheet, including supportive pre-reading activities that will lead to vocabulary and comprehension-building. I have been trying to find texts and videos that are relevant to my students' lives and interests and that are at the appropriate level for YEARS! Whereas a high school beginner French student would probably be well suited for a T'choupi book in terms of vocabulary, that would be way to juvenile for their maturity level. At the same time, Le Monde is way beyond them in terms of required vocabulary even if it is appropriate to expect that teenagers would want to read the news. My approach as a teacher has always been that a foreign language has to be fun. So I am thrilled to find videos on Yabla that will challenge my students at just the right level, exposing them to fun themes and native French accents.

Web 2.0 Test Kitchen

One of my goals while I'm home on child care leave with my son is to expand my repertoire as a French teacher. I find web 2.0 activities to be fun, funny, fascinating, and generationally relevant ways of playing with a new language. Project based learning is fully compatible with web 2.0, and there are both large and small activities that can be made using tech, from a French-speaking avatar on Voki to a digital story on VoiceThread.

I recently came across the wiki of Toni Theissen who presented at an AATF conference and who generously published her materials and presentations on her own wiki: tonitheissen.wikispaces.com. She has a fantastic PowerPoint from her 2013 AATF presentation called "Activating Communication" that lists applications that will get your students communicating in the interpersonal, presentational and interpretive modes. I will go through the list and make/share a model of each one she mentions, along with my thoughts on each one.

Got Books? Reading in the LOTE Classroom

For years I have been on a hunt for texts that are appropriate for the skill level of my students, but that are also really interesting and fun to read. I think that, in all honesty, unless you have the undying passion for a language that a French teacher has, you aren't willing to read just anything simply because your teacher thinks it's good for you. It has to grab you. I once tried to introduce extracts of Le Petit Prince to my students, but my best attempts crashed and burned. Was it that the text required a higher reading level than my French 2 students could reasonably manage? Probably. Was it that they hadn't had enough reading practice in my class prior to this attempt because I had such trouble locating suitable texts? I'm sure that was a factor. Was it that the subject was kind of alien and maybe kind of boring for them? Likely. 

I recently had a brainstorm: What about young adult fiction in French? When we used to have DEAR time once a week, even some of the students who were most resistant to reading got really into urban fiction. What if I could find something with relevant characters and plots, something that addressed the concerns and realities of teenagers lives today while still being an educational challenge? 

I think I finally hit pay dirt! Thank you, Brooklyn Public Library. In a recent search for "French children's books" for my son, I came across pages and pages of hits. I found the Kinra Girls series by Moka, in particular, Naïma et le Cirque de New York. I love it. I can't put it down! Although this series is likely geared towards tweens and young teens, I think it would be perfect for middle or high school French 3 and up or to be used as an independent project for heritage language students. This book fits the bill because it is written in French, of course, and especially because my students could definitely connect with the characters and the context of the story. I am a Brooklyn public high school teacher, and the title character Naïma lives in Brooklyn with an American dad who works at Coney Island and a francophone African mom from Benin. Naïma worries about encountering gang members and about being able to achieve her dreams in spite of her family's limited means. While her family doesn't have a lot of material wealth, they have a lot of love. Although I would enjoy bringing in a text that is situated in a French-speaking country, I think this story is a fabulous way to make a book in a foreign language feel a whole lot less foreign. It reflects the reality of many urban students while providing an accessible yet challenging opportunity to increase their vocabulary and ability to engage with a text in French. 

And do I even need to mention the Common Core? Although we still don't have standards for world language under the Commom Core, I'm sure that there would be a lot of happy English and Social Studies teachers if you could pull off some really top notch reading comprehension, map work and extension activities. Even better would be to adapt structures that they use to serve your own purposes. Reduce the need to reinvent the wheel...Reuse the best ideas from successful colleagues...Recycle them to achieve your objectives. 

"Ad" it up!

Ads, whether they are in print, on the radio or on the TV, are a great way to bring in an informational text for analysis. The Common Core Content Standards emphasize the analysis of non-fiction primary source documents of all kinds. You can address ACTFL's 5 C's as well as the CCCS by having students analyze and interpret ads.

French McDonald's ads became a fascinating topic that students wanted to discuss with me both during and after class. This ad incorporates the theme of teenage homosexuality while promoting burgers and fries. This delicate subject matter is unheard of in American TV ads, and the fact that such a mainstream company treats it so matter-of-factly really blew my students away.

Some ideas for how you might use ads such as this one in a mini-unit for your course:
-Have students compare and contrast menu offerings in McDonald's chains in the U.S. and France.
-Have them write and present dialogues with partners about the menus in order to get them using the grammatical funtions you are teaching (imagine ordering, discussing which menu they prefer and why, what they would try if they were in France, etc.)

-Do a little pre-planning with an English or Journalism teacher in your school to teach about the role of advertising and what makes an advertisement powerful.
-View the commercial. Depending on the level fluency of your students, spend a class focusing primarily on the language or on the themes in the commercial.
-Students write a draft of an essay summarizing their thoughts.
-Organize a Socratic Seminar in order to promote analysis of the commercial and comparing and contrasting it to American commercials for the same product.
-Students revise their essays following the Socratic Seminar. Perhaps their thoughts and opinions changed when they heard others' commenting on it!

For my part, since I had a strictly one year language course for juniors, I found this kind of work to be most useful when conducted in English and used to support my goal of cross cultural understanding and comparisons while also supporting the non-fiction interpretation goals of my peers in the English and Social Studies departments. The beauty of the 21st century is that these kinds of ads are so accessible and you can get a lot of value out of one 30 second resource.