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.