At the moment, I am teaching a class who have lost their mojo, their love of French and their confidence in their ability. Each lesson I have to be the energy in the room, the person who has to encourage my students to believe in themselves. I am Mrs Motivator! I believe in them so they should believe in themselves too.
After the first term (first half-term in old money), this is where we are at.
I am delighted with the progress the class have made. However, how have we got there? This is the process we have followed over the first seven weeks.
Focusing on content
From the first lesson my students have had access to the content I have wanted them to be able to reproduce by the end of a series of lessons. I have framed this content in a Sentence Builder (SB) and it has been our focal point for our activities.
As we work using Microsoft Education's Class Notebook (you can read more about how I use Class Notebook here) we do lots of activities using the SB where students can see at a glance model sentences that they can use and reuse with confidence. They are not spending precious time trying to work out their sentences but instead they are learning what has been put together for them. In time they can adapt what they have learnt - but that will have to come later.
The activities we do are many and varied:
- listening and repeating
- listening to me read the text and highlighting the words.
- listening and finishing my phrases
- rip bingo (especially of small chunks of the SB)
- loto (this can be played with words, chunks or whole sentences)
- guess what I'm thinking
- Quizlet games/Blooket games
- Textivate games
- Sentence Builder (receptive games)
We will also do many of the above in pairs giving the students the opportunity to speak and pronounce the words. This is an important part of learning the structures.
I have added a box underneath my SB (see left) which enables the students to lengthen their sentences and provide some contrast and really gives them the sense of ownership.
Another activity I model with the students involves me reading the English and the students saying the words in the target language. They do this in pairs too.
Varying the activities
Our Class Notebook page has numerous activities that target the main skills. For example:
- Listen and find the errors
- Where are the vowels? (I use lingojam for this)
- Lie Detector (thanks to Stefano Pianigiani for this idea)
- Tangled Translation - see below, this is a good opportunity to use some other vocabulary not found within the SB. In my opinion, it is important to keep alive the skill of working out the gist of the text.
- Finally, I used a Flippity spinning wheel to give the students the opportunity to produce language in a guided manner so that they feel safe and capable of achieving the task. This later is essential; if they feel that the task is beyond them, they will give up.
The importance of varying tasks is that it means that I can cover all skills and help my students to embed knowledge freeing up thinking space and from the students point of view they love to keep things moving; they love variety.
Moving on but looking back
After this first series of lessons we moved on to some more content via our second Sentence Builder but always keeping our eye on content we had already met. How did I do this? A few simple ways:
- Starting the lesson with a quiz (this one can be duplicated) which concentrates on previous content.
- Creating a competition in the Sentence Builder website (thanks to all the folk behind that - Gianfranco Conti, Martin Lapworth et al). I run a competition over a two or three week period and reward time spent working on the tasks I have set. The constant repetition helps embed the vocabulary and structures.
- Interleaving old content with new content via translation activities, or repeating key phrases in the SB
- Using a previously made Flippity at the start of the lesson to practise orally or in writing the previous SB content.
- Using a wheel of names like this one in pairs, or individually to finish off some sentences.
Here, for example, are some narrow reading tasks and two translation tasks.
Building confidence
Through all the work we completed it was important that the activities my students undertook were all manageable, that they were all within their abilities but with some elements where they need to extend themselves a little and could do so by finding what they needed in the SB. For example a short 50 word writing - modelled first in class, of course - or some translation into French. Indeed, the SB provides the opportunities to scaffold productive tasks because more able students can manipulate the SB and go beyond the confines of the SB and this is especially the case once the basics have been embedded.
Practising all skills
With the onus on SB it would be easy to neglect the other main skills. With SB I feel we can build student confidence in writing and speaking but comprehension skills remain for many students a seemingly impossible task. As a class we do complete listening and reading tasks. For listening - the toughest nut to crack for my students - I make sure we scaffold tasks with step by step activities that build students knowledge of relevant vocabulary. Tasks pan out as follows:
- List words they think they might hear based on a title.
- A Quizlet based on vocabulary
- Listening to me read the text and asking students to tick off words they hear that have been listed in French (these words will have been tested in the Quizlet)
- Listening again for various words listed in English.
- Listening and filling in the gaps (as in the example below). For this activity I choose words they know really well and it is only at this point that they get to see the full text.
So, that has been my process and I am super delighted with the outcome so far. I have managed to keep motivation levels quite high, but I know that there is still more to do. Let's see what this term brings.
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