Monday 8 December 2014

The Angry Family videos


I know that I already did a post about my YouTube channel, but I wanted to talk about one channel that I subscribe to:  The Angry Family!

The Angry Family are a series of FSL videos that follow a group of bizarre characters as they learn to speak French.  There are a lot of the videos available on their YouTube channel, or on the website of the creators.

These videos were created by the Newcastle University in England, as part of the Linguacast project that provide multimedia resources for MFL programs.  The Angry Family is also available in Spanish and German, Japanese and Chinese.   The videos are designed for British schools, however, they are great for teachers who use the CEFR to guide their teaching practice.

Each of the videos covers a topic in FSL study, in an amusing way.  The videos also show the situations in which one would use the language.   The videos are categorized by grammar rules, vocabulary or phrases.  I like the phrases videos as a warm up question for my class.  We watch and then add the new question to our conversation time.  

The Angry Family (French) YouTube Channel

The first video is in English to introduce the students to the premise of the series.  The introductions of each of the characters is in French with each main character having their own video.  The vocabulary is simple, and the dialogue is slow enough for beginners to understand.

A couple of critique I have of the videos are the subtitles at the bottom in English and the English character's names.  I want my students to use their strategies instead of look at the translation.  I'm working on a quick way to cover the subtitles.  As for the character's names, we usually discuss what the character's names would be in French, which is sometimes really funny.  So its not a huge problem for me.  Other than those two things, I love these vids. 

You can get these video by adding their playlists to your own playlists on YouTube, or getting to them from the University site here.

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