French the natural way: the only cure is more input!

Coucou les French learners,

Last night, I was tutoring a 12 years old French student and she had to learn a list of vocabulary about all the different rooms in a school: la cantine, le gymnase, la salle des profs, le laboratoire… Instead of having the learner memorize each word and repeat them after me,

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French the natural way: voyage au Portugal

Coucou les French learners,

Je suis de retour à la maison ! I am back home! J’étais en voyage au Portugal ! I was travelling in Portugal!

Viana do Castelo au Portugal.

Portugal is such a beautiful country and les portugais sont très hospitaliers,

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French the natural way with the one essential ingredient: comprehensible input

Coucou les French learners,

today I want to share with you my own experience with teaching and learning another language and why facilitating French input which is comprehensible is so dear to my heart.

My personal story and why I teach French the natural way

I have always loved grammar.

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French Story listening

Acquire French the natural way by listening to stories:

The natural way to acquire another language is to first listen to the language. You already did it when you were a baby. You did not talk first and your parents did not force you to talk, they kept talking to you and telling you stories.

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Language game to provide more comprehensible input: Guess Who?

https://goo.gl/photos/JPio26rjA9UosKXR7

As I mentioned in my previous post about story listening, I am part of an amazing group on Facebook called “CI Liftoff” where educators around the world are discussing about how to use pure comprehensible input in the language acquisition process.

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Story listening is powerful!

To me, developing listening skills are vital in life, yet not practiced enough. As teachers, we are told to let students learn by doing (which is valuable too in some cases) and that classrooms should be students led. As a consequence the skill of listening is being put aside,

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From story-telling to story-asking

I am reading TPRS with Chinese characteristics: making students fluent and literate through comprehensible input by Terry Waltz and I am learning a great deal! I definitely recommend this book if, like me, you want your learners to truly develop fluency and proficiency in another language and on the other hand you do not consider yourself advanced in TPRS and comprehensible input,

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