What are we doing in class?

Communicating in French

If it has been more than ten years since you were in a Core French classroom, you need to know that things have really changed. Here are a few things that will help you understand what we are doing and why we are doing it:

  • Learning to communicate in a new language happens in the same order as students learned their first language. We start with lots of listening and speaking, then move to reading, and finally, we do a small amount of writing. There are no more worksheets!
  • Our goal is for students to develop of sense of the language as a way of expressing themselves correctly. They do not need to know the grammar rules to be able to communicate well, so these are not explicitly taught. Instead, examples of grammatical differences show up in the context of real listening, speaking, reading and writing activities.
  • Our focus is on learning language structures. Even if the same subject is taught again, students will be learning more complex ways of communicating. The language structures are carefully chosen to give students lots of ways of building on what they already know.
  • The focus is on meaningful communication in authentic situations. This is done by creating opportunities, through a wide variety of interactive activities, for students to communicate with one another.

Oral Communication

Each day, we start the class by asking the same six questions. This helps the students to tap into what they already know, drawing on the French that is familiar. While the questions are always the same, the answers are always different. There are six cards that have images on them to remind the student about what questions to ask. The student whose turn it is to ask the questions is given cards and then asks the questions to other students in the class.

Click here to open the presentation that shows examples of the questions being asked and answered. Click the arrow for it to play. Once it has loaded, click on each image to hear the question and sample answers that go with the image. To move to another example, you can use the > button at the bottom of the screen to take you to the next video. You will need to click > more than once.

Introducing a new language structure starts with lots of oral modelling, which means that what I want students to learn is repeated many times. For example, if I am teaching students how to introduce themselves, I start by saying, "Je m'appelle Madame Ells." I then ask individual students, "Comment t'appelles-tu?" Before I ask the question, I give my answer each time so that students know what a good answer sounds like. Of course, they aren't expected to be perfect, especially in the beginning, but with many oral models, students get more precise and more fluent with their answers. Once students can answer the question, they then learn to ask the question to one another. The next step is for students to tell me how another student answered the question. All of the oral learning activities focus on these three aspects of communication: giving personal information, asking for information, and reporting on what they were told by another person.

Click here, then click each image to hear examples of some of questions being asked and answered by students. You can move through this presentation in the same way as the one shown above.



Here is an example of a question with sample answers:

Reading

There are three kinds of reading activities that happen in class:

  1. The daily message (le message du jour)
  2. Simple books related to the theme we are exploring
  3. Student writing that is read to others


Every day, as a part of our routines, we read "le message du jour".

Watch the video to see an example of the daily message being read by students.

We also read books that are related to the thematic units being taught in class.

Watch the videos to see examples of the type of books that we read in class. These are narrated by students.

Writing

Writing in Core French is different than writing in the student's language arts program. Because students do not yet have the vocabulary to express themselves, they are not being asked to complete creative writing. Instead, writing is an opportunity for them to reinforce the language structures that they have already practised orally.

Before students begin their individual writing, we create a written model that they can use for their own compositions. Students provide suggestions for a title, an introductory sentence, several informational sentences that model the language structure that we have been practising, and a sentence that concludes their composition. The students are taught that these are "les parties de la bonne ecriture", the parts of good writing, no matter what language they are using to write their compositions. The students then use this model to write their own compositions, which they read to other students once they are finished.


Here is an example of a composition created from the ideas of students and recorded by the teacher.

By including all of the parts of good writing, this collective composition can be used as a model for students as they created their own compositions in French.



This is an example of individual student writing that was written using the collective composition as the model.

After all of the students have completed their individual compositions, they are provided with opportunities to read what they have written to other students, either in small groups or to the class. After all, all writing needs an audience.