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?
Thursday 24 September 2009
Wednesday 23 September 2009
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.
Tuesday 22 September 2009
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:-
a summary of about 5 pages in which learners fill in the verbs-in any tense the teacher wishes
a set of different adjectives to describe the character traits of the more important personnages with exercises into French and into English
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.
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