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.
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