L'Etranger-how to teach it?

Teachers of the students I'm tutoring who are covering L'Etranger are using a variety of techniques ranging from the "let them get on and read it in class" and fill in a few themes on a worksheet and "bombard them with lots of different exercises on language".   When we read literature in the early seventies, the teacher simply went through the book with us and it was translated word for word despite the fact that translations of some of the more popular texts such as L'Etranger or La Porte Etroite by Gide existed.   This was a particularly sterile business as previous students had often already annotated the text and then of course we had to write about the texts not in French but in English.   This is why I guess it's hard to compare standards from one generation to the next with such differing approaches being taken.  

I'm thinking that ebooks would be really good to use as they can easily be annotated-if it were possible to make the teacher version accessible to students.  Surely some way of doing this could be found.   Then students could read without notes and then with-or maybe first version would be tagged up for vocab.

I'm kind of wondering about doing a visual guide to L'Etranger or exercises which encourage students to think of the book visually.  One of the most interesting things about the book is the amount of lines Camus writes in relation to particular topics.  He spends practically a chapter on Salamano and the scabby dog something he finds "intéressant", where as poor old mum only merits a couple of sentences.   His student career from which he cannot be very far from also only merits a line.  I guess maybe that's the point.   L'étranger, the person, is the anti-person.    Most novels of the 20th century would have made something of the relationship with Marie but of course it's an anti-romance.  It's a one sided romance for which only we can guess how Marie Cardona feels. 

How to make something of all this visually?   Keep your eye on www.alevelfrench.com resources to see what I come up with! 

Grammar and range of language

With the students I'm tutoring I'm preparing them in the subjunctive, the passive and the present participle to help improve their range of language.  To this end I'm doing a set of PowerPoints (groan) taking the student right through what the concepts mean, how to form them and then when and where to use them.   The difference is I'm putting in a page each for the main topics for AS with three or four examples on each.   The idea of this is to put in something reasonably controversial which can lead to to discussion where active/indicative sentences can be contrasted with the examples.  At the moment they are a bit powerpointy but I'm hoping to add graphics to give visual learners a  better lead in and to make it more attractive.  So like all A level French resources at www.alevelfrench.com these tools are work in progress.  There is a sample PowerPoint on the passive to kick off with.    For each of the films of the WJEC syllabus I've produced an A factor worksheet with each of the subjunctive, passive and present participle represented.   I'm now thinking of all the other things that would benefit too...pronouns, si clauses...it goes on and on!

Working out whether examples of grammatical structures in practice are correct or not

I'm currently working on grammar guides to accompany the WJEC A level exercises I'm doing for www.alevelfrench.com.  One of the most frustrating things for me was getting everything checked out to make sure the sentence sounded alright to a native speaker.  We all know that there is quite a lot of disagreement among them so it is rare that you ever feel 100% "correct".    With google (and presumably) other such search engines now offering such an immense corpus of material putting sample sentences into it to check their accuracy is now reasonably safe, judging from my experience.  

I was doing some exercises on the use of the passive for my new Alf a mots grammar exercises and wasn't sure of the right constructing for letting off fireworks for le 14 juillet topic.   This was quickly revealed as were some other useful passive constructions.  Very useful.

My first example comes from an explanation of the passive I tend to use in English.   "Oh, I see the washing up hasn't been done yet!"   An indirect accusation where the agent is not explicitly mentioned.   I put in "la vaisselle est faite" and "la vaisselle a été faite" thinking that that problems sounds very stiff and unusual in French.  On googling the La vaisselle a été faite several examples came up from French product review sites  particuarly with "La vaisselle n'a pas été faite" from people complaining about the antics of their dishwasher.  So presumably you can say it!

Increasingly I guess more or less anything you would want to say or write will be searchable which doesn't really give authority about whether it's a "desirable" thing to put in writing-it just legitimises to the extent that "some French people/say or write it".

If you want to use these dodgily legitimised A level French resources just click here.

Entre les mur -French schools

It's arrived!  I've just received a copy of Entre les murs to watch and am looking forward to seeing the classroom dynamics.  I went into a couple of French classes in ...er 1973.. and the teachers were just teaching a small number of kids sitting at the front which I found a bit shocking.   We tend to be very critical of our own system and obviously schools are all different.  Our exchange school in the Paris suburbs which I visited in 1999 was very interesting;  food-cordon bleu for all, toilets- well 1 toilet for the whole staff with no toilet seat. What's that about?  

Here's the trailer for Entre les murs

Entre les murs - La classe - Trailer

The Talk Project

Getting students talking spontaneously about things they want to discuss is a key aim of the language teacher and one that in KS3 and KS4 often is overlooked.   Janeen Leith who ran the Talk Project has just made an interesting contribution on the TES MFL forum with 12 points to encourage student autonomy.   http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/356414.aspx?PageIndex=2

Many people find that sixth formers are short of things to say.  This is the point of the WJEC A level film exercises on www.alevelfrench.com.    In order to talk about a film it has to be watched very carefully to glean the little details which add up to a big message.  In a film like Le Dernier Métro there are several themes going on at the same time with say the hatred of the Germans.   The mother making her child wash his hair contaminated by a German soldier, the same boy reciting the unflattering nicknames of the Germans...all these contribute to the ambiance of the film. 

The bigger things are more obvious such as the Anti-semitism and are almost constant. For the student to capture and articulate all of these www.alevelfrench.com offers very detailed summaries of the film to give the student a good head start in really knowing the film to the level required-then there is a very good chance that the type of "spontaneous" conversation we want can be achieved.

Text to speech convertor

The apple text to speech convertor was pretty good even a few years ago.  This new text to speech convertor which will work in many common languages including French produces a very good accent which you can hardly tell from a natural voice apart from liaison issues.  This is one of the French A level resources I shall be recommending very strongly to my tutees in future so that they can move forward with their pronunciation even when I'm not there.  Simply copy some digital text in-it could be from word or from a news report online and paste into the editable box.  Select your language, choose your speed and click Say it and you're off.  The pronunciation sounds a bit like a high class newsreader. 

This deserves a place alongside the other tools I am featuring on www.alevelfrench.com and which I am sure will make learning the language more appealing to those people who like a technological approach.   Amusez-vous bien avec Text to Speech.

L'étranger Camus

Well it's arrived.  I ordered the CDs of Albert Camus reading his own L'étranger and I've heard the first part.  When I studied the book at A level as a 17 year old I had no idea such a thing was available and now it is 35 years later.  Not being an actor maybe he's not the most fantastic reader-no Steven Fry-but the authenticity is giving me a real tremor of excitement.    I also search out Camus and found him on the www.ina.fr site.   I am certainly going to do some resources for www.alevelfrench.com but am not yet sure in what format.   I still can't decide what to make of L'étranger although I can confess to some bizarre behaviour when revising for the exams when I was doing A levels.

I used to get a psychology mag and it was when contextual memory was being talked about perhaps for the first time.   That's to say that if you were under a tree wearing a straw hat when you learned something-the next time you were there you would be in a better position to remember the same facts.

I reread the whole of L'étranger in a hot bath which I had to keep topping up to simulate the effect of the heat issue.  I didn't try to get the dazzling light side of things going.   Just one of my little pecadilloes.     I sat in the middle of a field to revise my Wilfred Owen war poetry.  I guess I'd better stop there!

France 3

With the BBC restricting viewing of its bbciplayer content to the UK it came as quite a surprise to me today to find out that France3 is making most of its material available online in a simple unfussy menu system.  This is exciting news for me as I was getting fed up of the kind of content I was having access to.   One of my favourites on UK TV is Coast - France has had Thalassa for years and you can now watch it.  Fantastic.

I would reiterate my opinion that you can improve your listening comprehension 40% over 3 months by watching TV regularly.   Go to France3 video

Multicultural France Kiffe Kiffe Demain

La haine is all very well as a film if you're wanting a dramatic statement but it doesn't offer much in the way of hope apart from the cool patience of Hubert which is tried to the n'th degree.   I've used the much less dramatic but probably more realistic humdrum account of daily life by Faïza Guène Kiffe Kiffe Demain which I found on the bookshelves in Cambridge a year or so ago.   The rather sarcastic voice of the author is amusing in a similar way to that in Les Petits Enfants du Siècle from the 60's when the HLMs were just going up.   In actual fact that pairing of books would make a very good cultural topic-I wonder if anyone has done just that or has found other accessible books on multicultural themes.    I did Née en France with one student but because it was written some twenty years ago it doesn't feel very up to date.  Anyway I've put up a vocab list for Kiffe Kiffe Demain on the front page of my A level French resources site www.alevelfrench.com  which may be of some use if you decide to get any students onto it.   The Guardian has also taken Faïza to its heart and has a number of articles profiling her and her work.  See article

Histoire de l'immigration

Getting students to understand the historical perspective of immigration and the sheer diversity of the situation is very difficult.   The Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration website has an excellent presentation on the history of immigration into France from the year dot.  The sequence of pictures and audio summarizes what has happened since 1945 very well although parts of it could easily be supplemented by others articles or video from the ina.fr website.

I have been wanting to work on this history for ages and this week have finally gritted my teeth to get this done.  Alongside the A level French resources for the WJEC films I want to include background material and thought that this would be a good meaty addition for La Haine and to a lesser extent for Le Grand Voyage.  Of course it will also be a very useful introduction for the immigration side of the social and political topic.

Because there is a lot of difficult subject from the vocabulary point of view as well as the history I would suggest using Interlex (see details on www.alevelfrench.com  right hand column) which can be downloaded for free.  The Interlex file I've created can be added to the French folder in the Program Files folder (usually at the root of the C drive on your computer).    Students then select the history of immigration file and study the words and expressions in isolation before having a crack at the exercises in the program (multichoice and type in the right answer).

I have created a range of types of exercise to help maximize the benefit of the listening side althought teachers could exploit the excellent graphics on a white board first.     I will be making an answer file available shortly and also going back over the tape script-there are some difficult bits I'm struggling to catch with my dodgy hearing. 

I hope the work is useful to at least someone.

Francoscopie

Back  in the early 90's Francoscopie was the best way of getting access to the latest statistics about France and it is still an extremely interesting book, covering all the latest topics for A level.   You'll find a link to it on www.alevelfrench.com and the cost of £30 or so is a real investment.  I think using small chunks of it is the best thing to do as the language is very "statistical" although this gives the teacher a good opportunity to practise a wealth of language like "monter en flèche", connaître un déclin" and other ways of talking about social trends.  

Alternatively, an excellent way of accessing facts and figures on France is through the insee site.  Click here to go to the topics pages from where you can branch off to a world of random information.    Maybe the way to exploit statistical information is to create surveys on particular topics and then relate them to the information given in the Insee site for the purposes of comparison.   I'm going to be doing some of these for the AS level resources based on this approach on www.alevelfrench.com and there should shortly be some samples up to play with.  That should keep me busy and off the streets for a few weeks.

Increasingly it seems apparent that the AS is a bit more difficult and more students are going to be resitting the written paper in the January so maybe the year 12 sitting of the exam will need to be looked at more as a practice?   I don't know - I'd be interested to hear what other people think.

WJEC A level sample titles

This is a very specific posting relating to the Welsh board sample questions.   I've been writing an essay writing guide for each of the 8 films in the WJEC list for the written exam and have found most of them straightforward.  However the Amélie question really does need some very very specific knowledge- "Analysez les rapports entre Amélie et ses collègues au café".  Whilst there is the obvious point about her manipulating Georgette and the obsessive guy Joseph into having a relationship, the other aspects of relationship are a bit dysfunctional to say the least unless you were to talk about her being influenced into bizarre behaviour herself because her colleagues are all weird and wonderful.   You really do need to have the tapescript for the film to get the level of detail required.   

French exchanges and performance at A level

It is certainly true to say that I would not have got into French in the way that I did had it not been for the school French exchange .  Most newspapers actually grasped that the draconian new parental CRB check would be a death blow to many established exchanges-one more piece of paper work too far after risk assessments and the demise of the group passport.  

My sister began exchanging with Marilyne from a small village near Orléans in 1970 or 1971.  Marilyne's parents were small farmers like us and the father had a second job like ours.   This was a meeting of hearts and minds and Sue my sister is celebrating 40 years of friendship next year.   I joined in when in the sixth form when we went co-ed and went to live in the village after finishing my A levels in 1974.

At the time the  exchange was full fortnight and was more or less total immersion, except that Marilyne's parents were so hospitable that there would be exchanges there from the whole world at any one time.   Experiencing the boum du samedi soir in their out house, the leek and potato soup, watching Pierre go down into the mud hole covered with a rusty metal lid which served as a cellar-all these memories  implanted a deep seated love for France.

They used to say, back then, that the exchange would make at least a grade's difference to your result.   Certainly that kind of exchange would make a huge difference now with the more communicative type of examination.    We had exchanges going to France and German at all the three schools I worked at and particularly where students went back year after year you could more or less guarantee a good result.  

In fact I think that it is possible to improve some skills considerably without being in the country.  I personally think that watching approachable TV in the foreign language for half an hour a day can improve listening comprehensive at least 50% over three months.    The accessibility of diverse and motivating reading materials online must also be potentially result changing if students do this in a disciplined manner.   Access to really detailed online dictionaries must also potentially be a big bonus.  Even some of my more able A level students over the years thought that a Collins Gem that used to belong to their parents would hack it.    Have a look at using some of these online aids on Alevelfrench.com.

French literature-A la recherche du temps perdu

A recent radio programme about books they had never managed to get through inevitably produced a lady who started In search of lost time in English every holiday. She would get to a hundred pages and give and restart the next summer. Rather like the Myth of Sisyphus. I felt rather superior having read Swann's way in French in my twenties. I think I managed to make it through half of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs before finding better things to do.

I suppose I was a bit of a poseur when I was younger. Why did I get hung up on Proust? Well in the lower sixth at school at 17 we were taken on a literary holiday to France, organized by our exchange school. One of the visits was to Illiers-Combray in the Beauce between Orléans and Paris. The really cool French French teacher read us the part of Swann's Way about the aunt's dipping her madeleine cakes in her tea in the actual room in which it took place. What a thrill!

I was hooked. I think at the time Monty Python used to mention cultural icons like Proust and this heightened the anticipation. When I went back to France, cycling to watch the Tour de France with my mates I bought the 8 paperback versions. These I bungy clipped on the back of my bike only to see them flying across the road when we went round a corner in central London. Half the collection ended up with tyre marks on and screwed up.

If you've not read Proust you need to be on good form and concentrating. it's very hard to get through 10 pages in a sitting, the tortuously long sentences requiring a huge effort to retain the impetus and effort of comprehension. Luckily most of the books I'm covering in www.frenchalevel.com are a few hours read at the most, a quick sprint compared to the treck across the Andes that Proust's master work represents. Have any of you tried it? Did anyone enjoy it?

Using a VLE as a website

When I was setting up www.frenchalevel.com I tried out a couple of content management systems such as joomla and drupal but decided that, despite making some progress, it would be easier to use moodle with which I'm much more familiar. The Aardvark theme by Shaun Daubney at Newbury college allows you to use tabs so moodle immediately looks more like a website. I'm sure there are some other tweaks I could make too as time goes by. I liked this one from a school I visited today http://vle.shuttleworth.lancs.sch.uk/ It would be interesting to find out which vle is being used by visitors to this blog and whether they are using the it for MFL. I have a lot of experience with different vle's including uniservity, digitalbrain, serco, fronter, moodle, kaleidos and talmos. Anyone out there using It's learning. That's always looked very good and straightforward to use.

Finally finished covering the 8 films on WJEC prescribed essay list

When I decided to set up http://www.frenchalevel.com/  I thought that providing thorough materials for students and teachers to help mine the content of the films to explore grammatical structures would be a good thing.  Approximately 100 hours later I am still convinced that this is a  good approach-the three areas I have covered for each film are:-

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  a summary of about 5 pages in which learners fill in the verbs-in any tense the teacher wishes
  
  
  
  
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  a set of different adjectives to describe the character traits of the more important personnages with exercises into French and into English
  
  
  
  
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  an exercise concentrating on actual extracts of the film and converting them into indirect speech
  
  
  

I'm planning to produce further exercises on each film including obviously on the themes, learners' opinions on the motivation of characters and finally how to plan and write an essay-but not full essays which the more "dependent" might learn by heart.

I am going to make these available at a modest price with a view to funding further development such as recording French people giving their opinion on all kinds of aspects of the films.  I don't want to have advertising on the site apart from the Amazon video and book shops.

Good TES discussion on tackling the WJEC A level French spec

People will be agonizing over their choices of topics the first time round.  This TES forum post has some good posts about the way people are thinking.  Go to TES forum

Funding for MFL projects

This looks very interesting.  Groups of schools can join together to put together a project funded by Link into Languages.  It would be very interesting to see what could be done to collaborate on the production of new courses at GCSE, A level or one of the vocational specs.  Anyone up for this?  Content could be made printable or so that it would work within VLEs.