French exchanges and performance at A level

It is certainly true to say that I would not have got into French in the way that I did had it not been for the school French exchange .  Most newspapers actually grasped that the draconian new parental CRB check would be a death blow to many established exchanges-one more piece of paper work too far after risk assessments and the demise of the group passport.  

My sister began exchanging with Marilyne from a small village near Orléans in 1970 or 1971.  Marilyne's parents were small farmers like us and the father had a second job like ours.   This was a meeting of hearts and minds and Sue my sister is celebrating 40 years of friendship next year.   I joined in when in the sixth form when we went co-ed and went to live in the village after finishing my A levels in 1974.

At the time the  exchange was full fortnight and was more or less total immersion, except that Marilyne's parents were so hospitable that there would be exchanges there from the whole world at any one time.   Experiencing the boum du samedi soir in their out house, the leek and potato soup, watching Pierre go down into the mud hole covered with a rusty metal lid which served as a cellar-all these memories  implanted a deep seated love for France.

They used to say, back then, that the exchange would make at least a grade's difference to your result.   Certainly that kind of exchange would make a huge difference now with the more communicative type of examination.    We had exchanges going to France and German at all the three schools I worked at and particularly where students went back year after year you could more or less guarantee a good result.  

In fact I think that it is possible to improve some skills considerably without being in the country.  I personally think that watching approachable TV in the foreign language for half an hour a day can improve listening comprehensive at least 50% over three months.    The accessibility of diverse and motivating reading materials online must also be potentially result changing if students do this in a disciplined manner.   Access to really detailed online dictionaries must also potentially be a big bonus.  Even some of my more able A level students over the years thought that a Collins Gem that used to belong to their parents would hack it.    Have a look at using some of these online aids on Alevelfrench.com.

French literature-A la recherche du temps perdu

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?

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.

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:-

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  a summary of about 5 pages in which learners fill in the verbs-in any tense the teacher wishes
  
  
  
  
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  a set of different adjectives to describe the character traits of the more important personnages with exercises into French and into English
  
  
  
  
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  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.