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.