Intercultural Classroom: Table/ Group Signs

On my quest to incorporate more interculturalism in my core FSL I have created little things and activities to add a cultural component to my classes every week at least.  One thing that I incorporated was group names; and those group names are different Francophone countries.

Each of the groups in my classroom has these frames (Tolsby frame from IKEA) with some information cards in it.  As a group, students would read the cards the first day with their new country, and as a group learn the statistics on the card.  (I changed the countries throughout the year so students get to know more than one.)

Through out the month, I will do different activities with that information.  Two activities my students like the best is the running dictation, and the scavenger hunt.

Running Dictation:

Take the additional stats from the students table country and make several copies. Put the copies up around the walls of the classroom (or even the school building).

Put the students in small groups. Each student has a role: there is the runner, the recorder and the checker.  The aim is for one of the students in each group to walk to read the passage on the wall. They remember some of the facts and walk back to their group. They quietly dictate what they remembered to their partner, who writes it down. They pass it to the checker to look for errors. Each trip to the wall must be done by a different student than the previous turn.  Over several turns they will build the page of information. This means they really do have to run back and forth because students will only remember three or four words at a time.

The winning group is the team that finishes first - although you need to check for mistakes (Or have a judge/ judges with the fact sheet to look for errors!). If there are mistakes, they must keep walking to check!  It is a great reading activity-- it gets students to think about the structure of the sentence to try and remember more and more of the information.  

Scavenger Hunt:

I hide additional facts about the countries around the room (or school) and students have to collect the additional facts about their country.  They know it is a fact about their country because I have the flag for the country on each fact.  Students go in pairs or groups to collect the facts around the school.  The first group to find all 5-10 facts, wins. (I made a trophy for the groups that win. Each time we do a group activity, that's what the "countries" win.)  

Sometimes the activities are smaller, like this one: I have the students look up a house in their group's country.  Draw a house from that place (for example Senegal) and a house from your neighbourhood.  Some students label parts of the house, others list differences-- it all depends on the the students abilities.  That comparison is really important in intercultural understanding- it is important to humanize the "other" so that we can see the similarities in contrast with the differences.  These are successful activities too.  

In order for the students to win at these games, they have to be at least a little familiar with the information on their table.  It's not a big cultural focus, but its a good way of incorporating la Francophonie into my classroom.  

In case you want to try this out, here are the cards I made for you to print out and use.  Please let me know of other activity ideas you use them for!  (They are double sided for use in the TOLSBY frames.)

**The link for these cards is also added to the printables page, for easy sharing.  

French Beyond France: Intercultural Resources for La Francophonie

It has been a while since I have posted-- but with good reason!  I have been working with a group of teachers on a TLLP, a Teaching Leading and Learning Project for the past 8 months.  The title is French Beyond France: Intercultural Resources for La Francophonie.   In essence, it is a document that catalogues free resources that teacher may want to use to support their teaching of intercultural awareness and understanding in FSL class.

There are some really great free multimedia resources out there, but who has the time to sort through it all to see how it can be used in class, and whether or not it supports the curriculum?  So, part of our project was to look at those free resources and make them useful to teachers.

This weekend our team will be presenting our findings and our project at the OMLTA spring conference in Toronto.  We are presenting on Friday, so if you are at the conference, and are interested in learning more about teaching intercultural understanding, come on out!

With permission, I have created a page for our TLLP on my blog.  It is under the tab French Beyond France.  On that page, you will find a brief introduction to what our project entails, and a PDF viewer and download to the actual document.  If you do read or use it, please let me know.  I would love to hear your feedback!    

CEFR Practice Centres

I use the CEFR to guide my teaching practice, quite a bit.  And even though many of the elements included in the CEFR are practiced through my own lessons, sometimes students need some extra time to fine tune their confidence and abilities in these skills.  Most of my student fall into the level A1 category, a beginner speaker who needs highly structured interactions with a fair bit of support.

Some of my grade 8s are approaching a level A2, still a beginner, but with a little more skill and confidence to converse in French, still with some support and preparation.

In order to give them a little more independent practice, I created some practice centres using the amazing and free resource found here.  This document was created for FSL teachers in Ontario, when we were just beginning to use the CEFR to guide our practice in earnest.  Not only is the explanation of how and why using the CEFR is a great idea, there are resources for level A1 included in the doc.

I took the resource, and printed it out in color, and then created practice centres by separating the activities and housing them in page protectors in a box, so students can grab an activity and go somewhere to work on them.

Above is an example of a reading practice activity.  Students take the cards out of the bag and have to match them to a headline.  To assess this skill, I cut up a real French newspaper and magazine, and the students had to match the headline to the photo.   To make the centre, I printed out the descriptors from the online package, printed the graphics from the package, and I made a quick cover for the centre to show students the expectations of the activity.  I made the covers to help students choose centres at their level.  

Most of the activities are meant to be done in partners with and interviewer and an interviewee, so students got a chance to be both roles, but there are a few that can be done individually.

For the partner activities I created peer evaluation sheets, so that students could give constructive feedback to their partners.  Students kept that feedback to give to me when assessing them, and I could see if they used the feedback to improve.  It was a great tool.

For the writing activities, I laminated some postcards and greeting cards I bought that were in French.  Students then wrote their notes in wet erase marker, documented their writing in a photo and sent it to me and their partner for feedback.  Then they erased their card, and it was ready for another student.

The students enjoyed the activities, and got some good practice doing them!  I will be using them again this year!  (If you are interested in any of the handouts I created for this activity, contact me and I can post them. )

How are other ways you use the CEFR to guide your teaching practice?

Book review: Other Cats to Whip: The Book of French Idioms

Summer's a great time to catch up on some reading!  Its also the time that I get to look at new books and resources that come out and think of how I can use them in my class.  This book review is for the book Other Cats to Whip: The Book of French Idioms by Graham Clark and Zubair Arshad.  The book is about 45 pages (closer to 85 in PDF), published by Idiomatic Publishing, Ltd. and was published this year, May 2015.

Other Cats includes over 50 French idioms, and cartoons that accompany the phrases.  Most helpfully, for each idiom, the authors provide an example of how to use the phrases in conversation, as they would be used by native speakers. 

The book is illustrated with funny drawing of the literal meaning of the idioms, like "pulling worms out of someone nose."  I think that these images are memorable, and if I use it with my students, I believe that there are several images that they will remember.  I think that this would lead to them trying to use the idiom that went with the image they connected with.   Since I had read the book, I know that I have use a couple of the idioms, because of the visual memories of the illustrations. 

The best part of this collection, is that all the idioms that are highlighted, seem like turns of phrases that would be useful to know-- that is they readily relate to some English idioms that we use.  Metaphoric language can be difficult for students to understand in their first language, being able to highlight similarities in their L2 would be a great asset in introducing and using more colloquial French including idioms.  Oddly enough, I use a few idioms that were in the book-- the main one being "C'est chouette!"  I say oddly, because I wasn't aware that was an idiom!  Just another symptom of learning French from living in a French country! 

While there were some of the idioms I had heard before, there were others I was not familiar with at all nor were my Franco-friends that were from Southern France and Senegal.  That's doesn't mean they aren't useful, just that I'm not sure how commonly they are utilized.   What I would have liked to see is some explanation of where the idiom is used, how it came to be, which idioms were more common than others... a little more information for the questions I had and I'm sure my students will have.  Also, the illustrations for the idioms are in greyscale, and I would love to see them in full colour. 

One concern I would have reading this to some of my students is a few of the jokes and one of the idioms included a rude word-- "cul" which translates loosely to "ass,"  so that is one idioms I wouldn't read in class.  Also, in the introduction, the author alludes to a rude word in a funny story about how the book came to be.  Probably more appropriate for the high school kids in those two instances.

Overall, I think that this could be a useful resource to bring some of those more authentic pieces to your students conversational skills.  There are a couple of ways that I would use this book in my  class.  If the illustrations were in color, they would be a great display for the wall to encourage me and students to try and use them.  I may have an idiom of the month, and display one page for the month and track students that use it.  Like a type of contest that could bring the use of the idioms to the conversations that we have in class.

Another idea that I had was to use the pages as large flash cards for the idioms.  Each idiom has an illustration, and then on the next page the translation of the important words of the idiom, as well as an example.  This would be a great set of cards to play "J'ai... Qui a..." with.  Students would read the example of the idiom, and the matching card-- the illustration would be the match.  That could be a fun game for the class to read the book together. 

If you are interested in learning more about Other Cats to Whip: The Book of French Idioms visit the book's website http://thebookoffrenchidioms.com/  for a preview and more information on the paperback version; or you can purchase the e-book on Amazon for Kindle.

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Disclaimer:  I was provided with a free digital copy of this book in order to write this book review.  The copy was provided to me so that I could write an honest review of the book and its use in the FSL classroom.  I do not receive any monetary compensation for my review of resources, and all opinions and comments are my own. 

Les notes visuelles/ Sketchnoting in FSL

Time flies when report cards are due!  I've been trying to keep up with my assessments and marking, and so my blog here has fallen by the wayside for a while.  But I'm back, and I excited to write about my newest hook for my French students!

While I was marking my students' work, I noticed a trend (that I did not like at the time:)

My students are doodlers!  One part of me was disappointed, because I had these great Oral Communication based classes, that I thought were engaging and fun.  Seeing that the students wanted to doodle instead of listen was frustrating.  On the other hand, I thought about why my students doodled-- sometimes it helped them focus their listening.  For others I think it was because they are more visual learners.  So, with this information I wanted to find something that could incorporate art/ drawing into the class in a way that would make their doodling purposeful and effective to their learning.

With research, I found out about Sketchnoting.

I've read about the trend in English speaking classroom using Sketchnoting to help students make notes of things they hear and read.  I've always been a visual note taker-- it helps keep me engaged.  I didn't know that there was a name for it specifically until I saw Mike Rohde's The Sketchnote Handbook.  I bought it, and did some research online, and there were some English literacy teachers that started using it with their students.  (Some helpful articles I found on Sketchnoting for Education are here, here and here.)  Why couldn't this work for my FSL students?  It would be a visual way of taking those dreaded grammar and vocab notes.

While I noticed there were teachers that used Sketchnotes in their lessons, there were not many FSL teachers that did so.  So finding some resources to use in FSL class was difficult.  But, since I'm a visual learner, and a creative-type, I wanted to make some of my own resources.   To introduce the concept to my students, they were to watch the video by Claudine Delfin about Sketchnoting.




Although the video is in English (I couldn't find any French videos), the students got the basics of the purpose and theory behind using visual notes.  For our first lesson, we watched the video, and then had a PCP ( Pensez/Couplez/Partagez) discussion about the important points of the video in French.  As we shared what we thought were the important points, we created our own "note visuelle" about the video.  I created on at the front of the class, and the students were welcome to copy mine, or think of their own imagery to support their points.

As we did the notes, the students were engaged with the discussion and with creating their doodles to support their note.  Some of my most challenged students were creating great notes visuelles:

While students were waiting on the next point during discussion, they added details to their doodles, shared them with each other.

The next class, students were asked to review their notes, and share which points we had already covered, so we could continue the note.  Many students were able to form simple sentences to convey their points from the class before.  More, students commented on how much they enjoyed the process of learning how to make these visual notes.  In order to support the students' learning, and maintain French as the language in FSL class, I created a couple of "notes visuelles" in French.  I photocopied them, and distributed them to the students.  This first handout is based on a page that educator CarolAnne Maguire created in English.  I loved it, so I drew a  French version (Click link for printable version:

Our first grammar based "note visuelles" was a review about our articles:

The above note I used my iPad to create.  For my student that use assistive technology, I was able to teach them how to create their NVs on their devices. 

This is an exciting project that my students and I are doing together.  As I make more resources, I will post them.  And if you start this with your studnets, I would love to know how it goes!

Would you ever try sketchnoting in your FSL class? 

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.