No et Moi is happening on alevelfrench.com

We're off.   Well I've decided to start doing the vocab for No et Moi.   An evening in on my own so I've sorted out the first 20 or so pages.  Some would say you shouldn't give so much help but my opinion is that A level French resources should be comprehensive so that the student can read the page without looking up then just double check any words/expressions he has guessed.  If everything is there this will increase confidence.  Also it is intended that students should not need to use a translation-once they have a translation most aren't going to read the book again, thereby losing out on the benefits of familiarising themselves with the language.

I have also identified a sequence of text for reading comprehension for each of the 12 AS topics in the new Attittudes French course which will be coming out at the end of spring.    My theory is that reading a straightforward book at AS will bring students on much better than a succession of journalese.   Alevelfrench.com is built with the aim of improving the attitude to French culture and books such as No et Moi particularly if accompanied by a film can give a much deeper insight into the essence of being French.

So watch this space - a combination of lit and film for improving students' appreciation of language.   "No way" you may say and I respond no, "The No Way"!!

Attitudes

No et moi

No et Moi

In my meanderings through the web I came upon details of a new film due out shortly called No et Moi based on a book by Delphine de Vigan.   I read the blurb and it looked very interesting so I have purchased it;  about a bright girl who befriends a homeless girl called No it seems to have much to recommend it being rooted in the present.    Infact it is so rooted in the present that it is literally written in the present tense with perfects etc but definitely no past historic.   I've started reading it and am very optimistic that this is going to be a winner in terms of a related book and film which really will help A level students identify with modern day France.   While Entre les murs/La Classe is interesting sociologically I think this may be more engaging as a story.   Having said that I thought that for La Rafle film which turned out to be a bit flat.

So I think we shall see before long a comprehensive set of A level French resources on the site.  It's another quite time consuming book to do as it's about 250 pages but it should be rewarding.    Link to film on ImDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1600428/

Candide Voltaire

A teacher from Lincolnshire contacted me to ask whether I would be doing Candide by Voltaire in the series of book resources on www.alevelfrench.com.  This is very tempting-I read the book many moons ago and I decided to download it to read in the kindle app on my smartphone on holiday at the same time as downloading the free mp3s from the http://www.litteratureaudio.com/ site.  This site has lots of well known novels read by amateurs and recorded in mp3-lots of de Maupassant particularly.  A great place to get audio books.  The lady reading Candide is doing a pretty good job - I can keep listening anyway!

L'étranger is the A level resource which is proving the most popular with the school teachers-it must be attracting more interest than the rest of the books put together, excluding Un Sac de Billes.   A very difficult decision which book to choose-I must say I would probably prefer the latter-I just think it's a shame that students don't still have to do four.  I'm old-fashioned and a book worm and it would suit my website for this to be the case ;-).   

AS level materials

If you've not logged onto the AS resources site www.alevelfrench.com  then it's time to email Steve at alevelfrench@googlemail.com to take a look at the great listening materials which have just gone up onto the site.   These are ultimately going to become part of a podcast but not yet-at the moment they are up as mp3s with transcripts and with some cases with exercises.  Work and education are very interesting areas with lots of authentic material and particularly the career guidance can be useful to the students for their own research.   There are templates to download int the Teaching and Learning section based on all the exam boards so that you can set your own questions in the exam board format with no hassle.

AS level resources

I've been happily sitting here for the last couple of days putting together templates for each A level examination board's different skill areas so that it will be quick and easy to put together practice material for each skill area.  A level French resources for AS will be available from the middle of September on www.alevelfrench.com covering all skill areas.  The sample material will cover education and future careers and my collaboratrice and I are having great fun putting it together, learning many new skills along the way.   I have to say that from being a hater of using MS Word I am now really appreciating the things it does-it does seem to be a bit more user friendly than it used to be although I've realized that to get the configuration on a page I really want I do need to create tables which helps the layout stay together.  Any other way of doing it and I'm going to need to do a week's course I'm afraid.

I'm certainly glad I chose the Silence de la Mer to do resources based on a colleague's request.  There seems to be a lot of interest in it-I guess I hadn't seen it as a subtle love story the first time round so when you take the perspective on it it gets a whole lot more interesting.

I'm also glad I decided to do Le Blé en Herbe by Colette as the tension within it is so colourfully depicted despite the sometimes annoying omniscient narrator moralizing in the background.   

The reason I would be increasingly promoting the literary texts is that reading seems to be becoming more prominent than writing, particularly in the WJEC spec.   Without a background of developing deductive reading skills in a sustained way I would think a student may be disadvantaged.  It doesn't seem the same to me somehow to be reading around the life of film maker or whatever.   Then I am a confirmed book worm and am totally biased. 

The series on literature of the 20th century on BBC has been very interesting putting a range of the most popular authors into context.  It was good to see people like William Goulding of Lord of the Flies and Doris Lessing of the Golden Notebook in conversation.

Launch of A level French.com

Well it's been a long haul but www.alevelfrench.com is finally launching.  It will be a whimper more than a bang as the 575 letters gradually hit the French teachers' pigeon holes.   I originally thought two or three books would get done to go out to the market but with Natalie's help and encouragement this has climbed to eight which gives a wide choice.  Resources to enable the average student to tackle A level French are few and far between and I hope that the materials will help teachers give their classes activities which will build language capability at the same time as enjoying the novel.

With the decline in both A level and GCSE entries alevelfrench.com has the mission of trying to arrest the decline in the study of French.  If the site is successful we will move onto other languages which are in just as parlous a state.  The shame is that schools are letting very able kids get away with not studying a language; no wonder that French, German or Spanish young people are being hired above our own kids who are being deprived of the change of getting to a good standard in an MFL.

So whether the A level French resources on this site are going to make a difference or not will soon be decided.  Well if literature doesn't do it then maybe the AS materials will!

Colette-le blé en herbe

Well  how many people are going to be doing Le Blé en Herbe next year?  More I hope if they find the A level French literature resources on www.alevelfrench.com.   By watching a film we look at the target language culture; by reading the literature we literally go inside that culture, into the minds of the protagonists.

What is it like to venture into the mind of middle class teenagers in the 1920's?  Are they so very different to young people of today?  In my opinion the emotions of the young people with all their interpersonal uncertainties are very similar;  however the world around them is on the cusp of change-women are coming to realize that blokes are not the paragons their mothers make them out to be.  It's not full on 70's or 80's feminism but it's on the march.

So is the book worthy of study?  There's lots to discover in it for sure and the exercises in www.alevelfrench.com will help in this direction.  In some ways it's good that there is no film to ruin the book also!    French literature is one of the cultural wonders of the world and all A level students should be doing some in my opinion.   This book is as good a start as any.

Le Blé en Herbe

Well there are 7 titles on www.alevelfrench.com so I thought to balance things up I'd better add another book to make 8.  I chose Le Blé en Herbe as I did kind of commit myself to the Welsh board a while back.  I read this book ages ago but haven't ever done it with a class.  So yet another summer romance by a young writer.   Colette's life story is fascinating as is that of Françoise Sagan-either would make excellent studies for AQA.   Colette's life style makes your eyes water and apparently Le Blé was published as a serial and was a scandal.   Certainly from what I've read of Colette the sensuality of Le Blé is very strong for the 20's.   I've finished what is possibly one of the most useful parts for teachers, the vocab list, yet another 20 hours of hard work but haven' started the summary yet.  I love the role nature plays in the novel-I've never had to look up so many words for types of flower, fish and tree.   I'll report back soon-would I study the book?  Yes, I think so if I was study the author too.   So this should be on the site within the next fortnight then I'm concentrating on the AS level developments.

Le Silence de la Mer

I read Le Silence de la Mer getting on for twenty years ago and didn't particularly enjoy it.  I picked it up again recently as it's on the Welsh board spec and thought it would be a good one to do for the A level French resources website.  This time round I enjoyed the story, a quick, but interesting read and one maybe to read as extended poetry, or a prelude to a theatre play than a traditional novel.   There is a certain amount of repetition during at the end of each section and the cumulative effect of this is to make the reader feel like there is an unwelcome visitor standing in their room-you wish he would either sit down and shut up or clear off!    I doubted at first whether it would be possible to actually write a character guide or direct/indirect speech exercise but there was plenty of meat so the standard set of exercises I've been making available on the site are all now ready (just being proofed).  

On my first fairly superficial reading of the novel I hadn't cottoned on to the love story sub-text which on close inspection is obvious from very tiny nuances of behaviour.  Shame on me.   So 40 pages of densely packed political, behaviour and romantic interest to feast on all supported by the new resources on alevelfrench.com.    There are various film/TV versions of the book but personally I think students should battle through and appreciate the poetry of the novel before viewing a film which will distort their understanding.

This is a good example of how the film distorts the orginal.  In the book he is immensely tall, muscular and blond haired and the normal meeting place is in the fumoir infront of the log fire with the German bent over due to height.   There is none of this subtlety here.  Would I study the book with a class?    I think I would do this and something else like Un Sac de Billes if I was looking at the occupation period to give a broader perspective.

Le silence de la mer (2004) - 9/10

Novel or Films or both

Following the first round of A2 examinations I wonder which route teachers think has proved the more profitable-film or novel.  I know the intention is to read material about the film maker and the back ground to the film in the foreign language but there is an essential underlying difference.  To read a novel from start to finish is a differing experience to viewing a film, particularly if the subtitles are switched on in English.  In my opinion the later experience is skating over the surface of the water whereas reading is like getting into the water.  

The A level French resources I have just been creating on Un Sac de Billes by Joseph Joffo remind me just how much difference there is between novels.  The word list for Un Sac de Billes is three times as long as some of the books.   Is there an implication here for how much vocabulary a student could take in and inwardly digest?   Certainly by the end of the 260 pages scribing down the vocabulary there was not much left that wasn't repetition of what had gone before. Looking at this scientifically would be interesting to see what the final effect was for students on depth of vocabulary and ability to understand idiom.

The other issue is the breadth of vocabulary.  In the course of Un Sac de Billes every part of the body, internal and external is mentioned, every form of transport with its nuances, every type of food..the list is endless.   Surely the experience gained by tackling a book like this must give greater benefit than simply watching a film..I would advocate a mixed economy.  That I'm sure is what people are doing.

The summary of the book that will be on the site alongside the vocabulary list are the key elements for giving students the feeling of success they need.   By having the page-numbered vocab list they can feel confident they will not get out of their depth in the novel, while staying in the target language as far as possible.  Full vocabulary lists have not existed before because they have been such a pain to produce.   I have put in probably 20 hours on Un Sac de Billes and I have been using two online dictionaries Collins and Reverso.  This is much faster than using a paper dictionary by a factor of x10.  As I touch type I guess my conclusion would be that it would unlikely that a practising teacher would have time to do this.  I produced a list for un Sac de Billes ages ago but there was no way it was as comprehensive as this.  Also it is so much easier to find the idioms on line-all kind of nuances became apparent.   If you haven't read Un Sac de Billes prepare to be impressed-and yes there is a film of it.  Cheapest version 199 euros!

Kiffe Kiffe Demain

I know it's not now generally considered that reading a novel is appropriate at AS but the more I look at the AQA syllabus the more I think that reading appropriate parts of Kiffe Kiffe Demain (maybe there are other equally good texts) would complement the topic side of things very well.
I have produced a wide range of resources to accompany the book on the A level French resources site and the matching up exercise with this spec I am going to do as soon as possible.

I think reading or hearing journalistic language is one thing but that reading a third party's experiences in a literary way adds a lot to the mix.  By using one text such as this for relating a range of topics to makes for building up empathy. 16/17 years olds are not noted for having loads of opinions so using a character such as Doria in Kiffe Kiffe Demain gives a focus.

The locus in Kiffe Kiffe Demain is around a differing culture with Doria's background being Islam.  It is also about poverty.    Many of our students particularly those studying languages will not have much experience of either of these phenomena so the results could be interesting.

Quatre bouquins de finis

I've finally finished all the exercises for each of the four books I decided to take on to provide A level French resources for teachers who would prefer to do literature.  I believe that it is only by really getting stuck into a book students get fully immersed in the language.  When I was a students in the early seventies the teacher simply went through every word with the class and we scrabble down the vocab as we went-the idea of the guides I've produced is that the full vocabulary will help the student work through at his/her own pace without having to have a massive dictionary. The four books done so far are L'Etranger, Les petits enfants du siècle, Kiffe Kiffe Demain and La neige en deuil.

The summaries of the book are in simple language and the vocab for this is given too.  The twist in the tale is that only the infinitive of verbs is given so students have to check out all the different types of verb form.

Other exercises are:-

Character guide with full range of adjectives appropriate to each book's main characters with translation exercises
The A factor exercises in context of the relevant book, practising the present participle, passive and subjunctive
Direct and indirect speech
The tensinator a multi-tense exercise putting each tense in context
ThemesRus, an exercise requiring that quotations be classified into categories
An exposé preparation guide
An essay planning tool with sample
A sample essay based on the plan

So everything need to get the best out of students is there.   The resources can be used either in AS or A2 as there is plenty of language practice of the basic concepts.   Just contact Steve at www.alevelfrench.com  for more information about subscribing.

Direct Nice newspaper with downloadable pdf

The recent trip to Nice was punctuated with several newspaper reading sessions our favourite cafe on the Cour Saleya. The new (or new to me) Direct Nice paper is a bit like metro but smaller and apart from nice short articles on Nice related and national themes it also has some meatier ones from the bigger papers. It was perfect for reading between gulping coffee and people watching.  Go to the Direct Nice site-you can also get the Direct papers for many other towns.

Lo and behold there is the pdf version which can be downloaded. These go right back to February 2009. I don't know how much longer this is going to last but it might be worth a look for some good meaty comprehension material. I guess for those lucky enough to have an ipad it would be nicely readable on there.

I don't doubt that there will some be frequent references to this in my A level French resources site. 

Resources galore from Nice

A beautiful week in Nice in a flat overlooking the harbour with plenty of balcony time has reminded me of all the things I love about the country after staycationing last year.  Having now got back into creating resources for alevelfrench.com of course I was on the hunt for good stuff to recommend or convert and picked up some good dvds particularly.    Number one was a TV series I hadn't heard of and which I hope is going to be good Un Village Français Series One and Two.   It cost me 35 euros from Carrefour-although it's 4 dvds and 10 programmes I think. It also has some pedagogical stuff on it too on a number of areas.

Second very interesting film is Home a birds eye view of the history of our world which brings current environmental issues into perspective.  It's absolutely beautiful down to the use of language and a high level (literally!) scientific overview.  I think many students would get a lot out of this especially if they haven't been watching all the BBC scientific epics.

The third video is a four part series "Musulmans en France" taking the long view of Muslim influence in the country.    Unfortunately there isn't a trailer for this online.

Solutions locales pour un désordre global

Well I've been looking for a film that will really deliver the goods linking globalisation and the way we produce our food-in French of course and the new film by Coline Serrault fits that gap perfectly.  I heard an interview about it on Europe Un's excellent environmental podcast and have included a link to it in the VLE in a page on environmental issues on the A level resources site.   A wide range of people from across the globe talk about how the move away from a local/regional approach to farming and the food market has led to enormous problems for small food producers and for the fertile land on which our food depends.  So I'm looking forward to this film coming out on DVD.  In the meantime the site has some pretty good extracts from the film as well as enough background text to get a topic going.

View the youtube.com extracts and other related ones to get a flavour of the site. 

Solutions locales pour un désordre global - Bande-annonce

New Environmental issues with literature and film focus

Many people have asked to find out more about the Social Issues related literature approach, to the extent that I have decided to create A level French resources which bring together the environment in its broadest sense in literature with the environment part of the A level specifications.   For the moment I have selected "La Neige en Deuil" the novel by Henri Troyat and "Home" the recent film starring Isabelle Huppert.  Whilst the first doesn't deal with the environment as we see it as an issue today it offers a perspective of what many people would see as French culture at its most raw, the peasant life style in an authentic regional environment, namely the Alps. 

The novel centres around one mans struggle to retain his life style inherited across the ages from the ravages of a brother who wants to join the rural exodus (exode rural) a painful process which was endured in France over the 19th and 20th centuries.   We see a tiny village which has few links to the outside world, lives pretty much sustainably looking at outside developments pretty much suspiciously.   Food is still produced and stored in the traditional way despite electricity just having come to the area from the power station in the valley.  So "La Neige en Deuil" gives us a tantalizing point de départ from which to examine the way we live now, rich in colour and in insights. 

Home, involves a family living right next to a partially completed motorway which ends up being completed so the film emphasizes the way in which environmental change occurs in a very much more concentrated way than La Neige en Deuil.  It therefore offers an interesting contrast both in tone and emphasis. 

As with other content for A level French my emphasis is on helping the less confident to average student to access A level French resources which help build up knowledge of language within the context of the literary or cinematic work.   By bringing together the literary and the non-literary in the "VLE on a page" approach I want students to be able to see the big picture of what they are trying to learn.   This should make it easier to explain to them what they're endeavouring to achieve which should improve take up and in most cases final results.

Home Trailer

Four literary texts sorted

Well, now I'm course for getting four literary texts completed and what a labour of love that has been.  On the alevelfrench.com site there will shortly be courses for the following literature resources based on a similar approach to the film guides.  The four texts I have done are

L'étranger by Camus
Kiffe Kiffe Demain by Faiza Guène
Les Petits Enfants du Siècle by Christiane Rochefort
La neige en deuil by Henri Troyat

Remember the pass guides they do for English texts  well there's never really been anything to tackle the language side of things-or not that I've seen so here goes, in my pass guides for the texts you get:-

• Complete French - English vocabulary running to some 25/30 pages in three columns
• Complete summary of the text with gap fill for verbs and vocab to give the basic vocab of the summary
• Multi-tense exercise to help students identify all tenses of same verb in context of the book
• Direct speech matching exercise and reported speech activity
• Character adjective list and translation exercises
• The A factor contextualized exercises using passive, subjunctive and present participle
• ThemezRus exercise where students link quotations to themes
• Guide to planning exposé -the Tracbuster
• Essay planning tool and worked exemplar essay

OK it's very corny but the exercises are meaty, serious and designed so that teachers can give students materials which  make them feel confident with the literary texts.   There is still plenty of room for teacher creativity;  questions can be written in French according to level of abilty. Creative writing where students adopt roles of various characters and empathize with different view points...the sky's the limit.

I'm interested in developing other titles and would be interested to hear what people would like.  Just get my email from the A level resources site   And don't forget you can buy the film guides from there too.

Blending the old and the new

Well things are going well with the banlieue topic. I've finished the exercises which go with the book Les Petits Enfants du Siècle and I shall be starting Kiffe Kiffe Demain shortly.  I'm going to create a kind of work guide which picks out relevant bits from each book which relate to the topics covered under the social issues for each board.  This will make the course a lot easier to follow for students.

The links to my film guides from the A level French resources site are getting hit a lot and there have already been some sales.  Stephane of Linguascope shifted several at the ALL conference in York on Saturday.   This is a great inducement to keep working on the materials.

I think I shall be starting the environmental sides of the A2 topics before long using Jean de Florette as a source book as well as the Isabelle Huppert film Home.  I don't know if anyone knows of any other books with an environmental/sustainable living type of outlook.  I'd be interested to hear if they have.

Social issues and lit all in one hit

On my A level French resources site I'm trying to blend resources together so that both teacher and student can have a clear idea of where they are going in the course. Whilst I've had a blind faith over the last decade that teachers are going to see the light and cotton onto VLEs (moodle, fronter or whatever) I am slowly beginning to realize that there are other equally valid ways of doing things that can pack a punch.




The A3 "VLE on a page" idea on the Alevelfrench.com site is a first go at making an accessible course which presses all the buttons to achieve success at A level. It's by no means finished but kind of feels right to me. The main social issues are covered by all boards but it is hard to give students a feeling of engagement without going into the soul of French/French speaking people going through them. I feel personally that it is important to get students reading and to study some of the books that really pull you in. Hence I've chosen Les Petits Enfants du Siècle which I've always enjoyed and Kiffe Kiffe Demain.



These books bring in the early days of what we now consider to be the banlieue with the latter days - both are first person novels through the eyes of young girls. In both we have to do much of our own interpretation of how social issues are impinging on the protagonists. I guess it would be perfectly valid to just do certain extracts from the novels to highlight aspects of the social issues. I just feel that the more humdrum daily routine written in a ironic, humorous tones does a lot more to enlighten us than the violent point of view we see in La haine.



I don't know whether you could do the history of the Banlieue for an AQA topic. In terms of history I thought there are some key individuals who could be brought in -L'abbé Pierre, Le Corbusier, Harlem Désir, Le Pen and Sarkozy, to name but few.



For the Welsh board one of the books could be studied for the oral maybe alongside La Haine for the essay paper. I'd be really interested in what people think with regard to the OCR and Edexcel boards.



I'm intending putting in language powerpoints using the social issues as exemplification and also a student study plan although I guess that would depend on the board. Let me know what you think! To get at the VLE on a page just go to my A level French resources site.

Les petits enfants du siècle

Les petits enfants du siècle duly arrived and I've been spending the last few days doing a summary of it.   I studied it with a couple of classes but had forgotten that it is actually quite a hard book due to the high level of slang.  I shall be doing the vocabulary for it which will be a mammoth task.    The voice of the author coming in through the mouth of Josyane is very strong with lots of strong adult irony. 

The native French birth rate was quite weak for most of the 20th century with all kind of financial inducements to have more and the book I suppose makes the point that by having loads of kids you can't look after is not an unalloyed advantage.   Jo aludes to many of these children ending up as cannon fodder but of course we see in the book that with the level of care many are simply ending up as a burden on the state being carted off to the Arriérés or various other institutions.

The emotional deprivation caused by cynical parents having children simply to add to their list of material goods is one of the  main threads of the book and Jo's thirst for attention is satisfied by Nicolas her younger brother and Guido the romantic Italian with his inappropriate but welcomed advances.     Guido clearly feels guilty about his desire for Jo and it is probably no accident that he disappears off the scene.  We are left to make up our own minds about the effects of parental neglect on a young and vulnerable child.

The perspectives of  the increasingly quick urbanisation is cleverly done and we see childrens' natural playground being replaced by trees behind metal rails predating the huge shift in what we consider childhood to be about. There will be lots of A level french resources on the history of the suburbs for use with the AQA syllabus and to back up the content of the A2 topics.   Hopefully by the time I've finished these will all fit cunningly together!

AQA historical topic La banlieue de 1960 à 2010

I am a great admirer of Les Petits Enfants du Siècle by Christiane Rochefort a book which traces part of the life of Josyane during the early days of the new suburbs in the north of Paris.  The book is very humorous yet contains many truths about life for young people in France and elsewhere.  Having also been won over by Kiffe Kiffe Demain by Faiza Guene I have decided to do an AQA topic in some detail on "L'évolution de la banlieue et de ses habitants de 1960 à 2010"-actually that could be 50 ans de banlieue  or something like that couldn't it?

I've already done a transcription on the history of immigration from the French Musée de l'immigration site so I am shortly going to be adding this and summaries and exercises for the books to the my A level French resources site.     The two books will provide a very good cross generational perspective on the era which can include links to how the early hopes for much of the banlieue have been dashed and why.   Anyone interested in gaining access to this material to test should contact me. 

This material should be ready by June so that it is ready for next year's teaching.

BETT show 2010

Going to the BETT show at Olympia for the first time as a punter with my 14-19 hat on and also the languages side of things too was very interesting. Stéphane Dérone's Linguascope stand was there although as with everything else apart from the BECTA stand I found it hard to find never having learned to navigate Olympia in 10 years of visits. Task Magic was also there as was Boardworks. I first saw Boardworks resources nearly 10 years ago when I thought they were very raw. The design of the Boardworks PowerPoint pages is now superb with lots of effort having been put into making the resources look clean and crisp which is what you need. There A level French resources look good as do their materials for other languages and levels.

What else inspired me? I liked very much the E2BN stand's offerings including the new "Learning Landscape for Schools whereby a school can purchase a site with huge potential for a range of web 2 processes for only £300 per year. This includes hosting of streaming video and recording of video from a web cam as well as blog, wiki, a file area and all sorts of other things. It's not intended to be a VLE but would make a really good collaborative school for use with partner schools. You can find it at www.ll4schools.co.uk where you can set up 20 free generic accounts for a school. You can also test out here http://www.ll4education.co.uk

Helen Myer's talk on the Saturday ran through a myriad of resources many of which I hadn't heard of and want to try out. Second Life sounds particularly appealing although when I signed up to it I seemed to spend most of my time crashing into walls and drowning. I also didn't realize that it now has an audio feed not just text. It was also great to meet Joe Dale again-although as I said to him he doesn't look like his TES pic much.

I suppose one of the big things it did was encourage me to keep plugging away at keeping working on the A level French resources: after all many of the organisations at BETT this year started off as cottage industries!

Introduction to A level French.com film materials

 Introduction to www.alevelfrench.com  film guide  (go to the site to find more out about the resources now for sale)

Whilst tutoring a student for WJEC French A2 who was studying Amélie it occurred to me that despite the fact that she was enjoying watching the film in linguistic terms she wasn’t getting a lot out of it and could only talk about it in the most painfully GCSE oral way.   I girded up my loins and decided that if I summarized the events of  film, not an easy thing to do with Amélie, it would give her something more tangible to hold onto.   I decided at the same time that if I sprinkled the summary liberally with the more common verbs as a gap-fill  the exercise could serve as a giant revision exercise which was more than overdue.  And why not put slightly less familiar vocabulary in while I was at it.

The student received the exercise very well and enabled her to begin speaking fluently about the film, encouraging her to add her own feelings and opinions.    The progress made quite quickly was astonishing-I don’t think I exaggerate.    It then occurred to me that this was just a first step towards getting her to feel confident enough to write a 300 word essay or produce her own oral presentation on the book and I began to feel tired at the prospect.    So why not do all eight films on the essay list for WJEC and make a worthwhile A level resource…  I don’t know at what point this idea came to me..oh yes I do it was when I decided that the 2009 summer was a write off and I might as well put my skills to good use.

The concept was to create  the worksheets so they could be editable by teachers- the summary is in the form of a table and a teacher can easily use it with the vocabulary first time through, then delete the vocabulary and ask the students to talk about the types of cinematographic  shots  and effects being used, noting them down on the sheet.   The summaries gap fill can be completed in the present tense, in perfect/imperfect or be used for demonstrating a range of enrichening constructions such as Avant de/après avoir    At least you have the language there to kick off with.

So my starting off point was not to provide a full lesson plan for the teacher but provide the linguistic underpinning for the films for which more detail below.    I was partly inspired to continue by my discovery that Word 2007 enables the author to create more attractive worksheets more easily hence have made the sheets available in this format as well as previous versions of course.  Do I want to make them available on paper?  No, we live in a digital agent and anyone who wants to print them off can do.

Distribution and advertising was my next problem.   However this was quickly solved.  I have been working with virtual learning environments since leaving full time teaching in August 2000 so making the content available in a VLE was a natural decision.     Moodle is an increasingly popular VLE and easyish for people to access so I decided to set up my own (£100 for 2 years on siteground) and buy my own domain names.   Amazingly or perhaps unfortunately not surprisingly alevelfrench.com , frenchalevel.com, alevelfrench.co.uk and frenchalevel.co.uk were all available so for another £36 I was set up.    I have a really pleasing number of enquiries just through forums and google and am maintaining a blog to promote the site.  I’m hoping to build a community of use around the films and other topics-despite the technology being there this has not really happened in the past and I’m hoping to bring off what would be a creative coup!

Here we are in January 2010 after most weekends, holidays and late evenings spent writing content and I am ready to go to market.    I have lots more ideas in the pipeline most of them already piloting and so look forward to a good take up so that I can finance further progress.

Listening exercises-Europe un

The quantity of listening activities which can be accessed is so huge that's it's important to make a sensible selection in my opinion and concentrating on building resources around these.   I've found some of the Europe Un Environment slot podcasts promising from the point of view of being up to date and relevant-there is plenty of a seasonal nature and they are shortish-only a couple of minutes. 

 I am planning to build up a set of exercises based around exam skills for the Environment podcasts.  This will rely on people using the A level French resources from my site getting their students to subscribe to the relevant podcast so they have got it available-unless I can come to some agreement with Europe Un.  I shall also be searching out linked reading resources of various kinds which I think I will adapt so that they are not the original.   Students will then be able to build their language use up out of a combination of the listening and the written resource.

Grammar and written/spoken exercises will then be triggered by these comprehension-phew this sounds like hard work although if I limit myself to the best two podcasts of the week this should not be too strenuous.   Also, some French national teachers might be interesting in coming on board to share the work/income from the site as it goes commercial.  Over the next day or two I'll make some examples available on the front page of www.Alevefrench.com to get feedback on.

I also intend to use the Interlex progam to build up new vocabulary sets to go with the exercises.   I guess the biggest challenge is to do listening exercises which complement the most commonly used exam boards ....so not much to do!