French the Natural Way

I am fully convinced by Michel Thomas and to me the key is for students to be able to build sentences in small steps by learning its components parts. I am not interested in my students remembering long lists of words which I know they will not retain in the long run anyway. I want my students to become confident in the language they are learning by making connections. I do believe that once you fully understand something, you internalise it and you truly remember it.

Going back to my weekly French lessons, we already learned how to use the structure "c'est/ ce n'est pas…" with food by saying: "c'est / ce n'est pas bon" and also how to use it with words ending in -ible like "possible". To review and reinforce this structure, I introduced words ending in -able which are also cognates or near-cognates like "confortable" and I taught a new common French expression "comme ci, comme ça" which is used to describe something as "ok" or "so-so". To this end, I created a Google presentation in which I colour coded words according to their grammatical belongings: nouns are blue, adjectives are green, adverbs are purple and verbs are red:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/embed?id=1a0bVJoajy33WK8KuPqDktzNTZgHjpMMue7hzNiZNBEY&start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000" frameborder="0" width="480" height="389" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

When going through the presentation, I didn't focus on the grammar but on the reading and pronunciation skills. The last slide enables students to speak freely by starting to build sentences on their own. After going through this presentation by reading each sentence in turns, I asked my two pupils to create their own little books with their own opinions about anything they could think of. The objective was to use the structures in the presentation but adapted by the students themselves. I got largely inspired by Clare Seccombe's post about creating your own concertina book. I showed the post to my two students as the pictures on it are self-explanatory. They loved the process of folding their own little books and of being able to write their own sentences. At the end of the task I asked Louis to show and read his book whilst I was recording him. Here is the video of his little presentation:

What about you? How do you teach your students to build sentences?

Other posts you may enjoy reading:

• How to improve speaking skills when learning a language?
• Fun speaking task in Spanish
• Teaching adjectival agreement in French!
• How to implement communicative tasks
• End of year projects: poster conversations

I am still testing recipes from Lorraine Pascale's cookbook Fast, Fresh and Easy Food! and this vegetarian main course caught my attention: Pan-fried mascarpone gnocchi with dreamy basil pesto. In the past I tried home made boiled potatoes gnocchi and not only did it take me hours to prepare them, but the final result was a complete disaster. My gnocchi ended up as a potato gruel that we forced ourselves to eat!

Reading Lorraine Pascale's recipe, I liked the fact that no boiling process was involved but instead was pan-frying. I also appreciated that the main ingredient was mascarpone and not potato! I skipped the making of the pesto and used pesto from a jar. I also doubled the amount of ingredients so that I could freeze half of the gnocchi raw for another day. Then, the other night, I cooked the other batch of gnocchi I had prepared with a tomato and parsley sauce (made with a tin of chopped tomatoes, some balsamic vinegar and chopped fresh flat leaf parsley). My boys loved both styles!

Ingredients:

• 100g parmesan (or a similar cheese alternative like gruyère), grated
• small handful of fresh thyme sprigs, leaves picked (or 1 tbsp of dried oregano)
• 350g mascarpone
• 300g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
• 2 eggs

Tip the parmesan into a medium bowl.
Add the thyme (or the dried oregano) along with the mascarpone, plain flour, eggs and salt and pepper, to taste.
Mix together to give a soft dough.
Tip the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead together to form a smooth ball.
Divide the mixture and roll each one out into a sausage.
Cut each "sausage" in pieces.
As you can see my little boy is already licking his lips!

Halfway through, put a large frying pan on a medium to high heat with a drizzle of olive oil.
Leave the gnocchi to cook on one side for a minute, before carefully turning them over with a fish slice.
Cook for a further four minutes, continuing to gently turn them every so often until they are crisp and golden all over and warmed through.
If the gnocchi didn’t fit in your pans then tip the cooked ones in a bowl, cover with tin foil to keep warm and cook the remainder, adding more oil and butter as necessary.
Once all the gnocchi are cooked, stir the pesto or tomato sauce (or any sauce of your choice!) through until evenly coated.

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The thought of watching a Spanish or French movie with my classes has always appealed to me. It develops listening and comprehension skills which are keys to then improve pronunciation and speaking skills. By watching a moving in the target language you can acquire a lot of vocabulary and you can also learn so much about the culture, especially if the movie is linked to a cultural or historical event.

However, when I intend to show a movie to my students, I usually put the movie on and sit at the back of the class until the end of the movie. Sometimes, I pause the movie to check understanding in English or to see if students have picked up some specific expressions. At the end of the movie, I have a list of questions to ask to the students to again check understanding. Somehow I have never felt right with this method and I have never felt my students were gaining as much as I wanted them to.

 

The other day, a post entitled “MovieTalk” caught my attention. At last, a productive method when watching a movie? Well, yes according to its official website: “MovieTalk is a powerful, enjoyable technique that you can use to boost your students’ second-language listening comprehension. All you need is a collection of suitable movies on DVD, equipment for showing them to your class, and knowledge of the technique itself.” The website explains in details how to deliver “MovieTalk” from choosing the right movie, to preparing it, to finally presenting it to the students.

I have not tried the technique yet but I already like the fact that teachers can use movies with students who are below the intermediate level, and even with beginners. The teacher narrates the scenes as they occur in the movie. Narration is key in MovieTalk and “it involves naming objects, describing actions, and talking about the characters and their emotions. We can think of narration as the kind of running description we might give to a person who could not see the movie but wanted to know what was going on at all times. For example: “There is a man on a horse. It’s a white horse. He’s riding very fast. His face looks angry.”
There is a lot of repetition and rephrasing which is perfect for language acquisition.

What about? How do you use films in your lessons?