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!