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.