Phrankofonic

PREMISE

You may already know French letters, but how well do you know French sounds? Grab your pen and a piece of paper, and prove it to your friends! In this party game, you will play with the phonetics of French. 

👥 4+ ⏱️ 20-40 minutes


Game material:



Sound cards are divided into three groups based on

of the level of difficulty:

a. Beginner in green

b. Intermediate in yellow

c. Expert in red



DOWNLOAD RULES

RULES

Draw three Sound cards and place them face up on the table.


In each team, talk with your partner and decide which of the sounds on the table you want to play with.


Start the timer at two minutes, and each team writes a sentence with words that begin with the chosen sound


Count Sentence Points

You give yourself one/two/or three points (beginner/intermediate/expert) for each word in your sentence that begins with the chosen sound—items don't count!


Be vigilant! You lose three points for every five words that don't start with the chosen sound (except articles, of course)! Round to the nearest whole number.


For example, with the sentence above (in green, the letters which score points; in red, the letters which do not penalize):

Dans la tente de mon tonton et de ma tante il fait une chaleur torride et le tambour de Thomas fait un bruit terrible. Ce n’est plus tolérable !  Mes tympans !

9 times the sound [t] for 9 points

16 times a different sound for a penalty of 165 = 3.2 > 3 points

Or a score of 6 points for this round


After six rounds, the team with the highest total points wins! Good luck !

GAME SETUP

Choose together the level of game you want to play (1-Beginner, 2-Intermediate, or 3-Expert). Recognize—the higher the level, the more difficult the sounds you will play with.

Form teams of two people. You can play with several teams, the number of players does not matter. (If there are many of you, you can make teams of three players.)

Pedagogical Guide

The aim of the game

In French, we know that there are several rules on the pronunciation of letters which depend on the other letters that accompany them. For example, the letter g is pronounced [g] before the vowels a, o, u, but is pronounced [ʒ] before the vowels e and i. The goal of this game is to help students become familiar with the eccentricities of the language.


This game is for students who have an intermediate knowledge of the French language. This means that students must know how to compose somewhat complex sentences and must have a large enough vocabulary to create sentences themselves.


It would be good to put students of different levels in teams, but you have to be careful so that the most gifted students do not do all the work themselves.

Attention! Players must make sentences with the sounds that are on the card, not the letters!


Progress of the game / Variations

“Sound” cards are required for each game. Level 1 is played only with green cards, level 2 with green cards and yellow cards, and level 3 with all “sound” cards, green, yellow, and red.

 

Topic cards add another dimension to the game. If the sentences presented by a team relate to the topic, the team can score additional points. This encourages students to expand their vocabulary in particular topics.

 

The rules of the game require that three cards be drawn for each game, but if the students are very advanced the number of options can be reduced to 2 cards or one card.


After the game, ask students what they observed. To guide them, ask them to write down the new vocabulary words they have learned. It would be nice to classify them into several categories (for example: homonyms, adjectives, adverbs, etc.).

We can also ask students if they think of other words (without the pressure of time), approach the notions of alliteration and assonance, compose a story around the sentence they composed with the same constraint of sound (à la Oulipo).


With elementary level learners

To introduce pronunciation in a fun way to beginners, we can first encourage them to simply list words that begin with the sound of the card. Then we can scaffold the process by constructing the sentence a posteriori. We can also target specific sounds and brainstorm with the students before the game on a few words they know with this sound. After the game, we can return to these sounds more explicitly.

Creators: Angie Jolicoeur, Emily Sespico, Neha Joshi