Anatomy of a French Class (1)
I thought I’d let you in on how I organise my French classes - I have 8 classes plus some one to one students, amounting to 80 or so learners. I’m based in the North East of England and I teach mainly adults, through my teaching company Lingua Forme.
So, what do we get up to in our French classes?
Well first of all we have fun!
In a lot of groups we start off with a chat in French for about 10-15 minutes. This is to get us into the swing of the language. We usually do a warm up activity to get going and then I pair up learners so that they can have their conversation together. I provide prompts to help the conversation flow and to avoid the learners running out of subjects to talk about.
I mix the learners up each week
This is so that they get to work with a different partner each week. This gets them out of their comfort zone and also varies the type of conversation they’ll have each week. It also enables them to work with people of a different level to them.
Our next activity is our verb of the week.
Each week we focus on one verb - I’ve been doing this for a year now and it’s been a really valuable addition to the group classes.
We start by conjugating the verb in 6 tenses (or 3 for the less advanced groups) - present, perfect, imperfect, near future, simple future and conditional. I go over this on the board and highlight any particular points that I think relevant (spelling etc).
The next stage is for the learners to work in pairs to translate a set of sentences that I prepare in advance in all 6 (or 3) tenses. The sentences are both into and out of the TL. We then go over the translations together and discuss any particular issues that arise. I tend to put a short vocab list on the sheet as I found that several learners spent more time looking for vocab than concentrating on the verbs.
The next stage is to issue some cards that I prep, print and cut out. These cards have the personal pronouns and tense printed on them. The task is to take a card at random from each pile and conjugate the verb in that tense. E.g. the learner takes ‘il’ and perfect tense and conjugates the verb accordingly.
As the weeks pass I add in the verbs that we’ve studied previously so that I issue another set of cards with each week’s verb printed on it plus (for my TL) the 4 key verbs of avoir, être, aller and faire. They then have to conjugate the verbs in different tenses.
This part of the activity enables them to practice all of the verbs we have studied and keep them in mind.
You can get an example activity from the shop here.
These activities are now a fixed point in all of my groups (apart from beginners) and I can repeat at all levels.
This enables me to dramatically reduce the level of planning and prep that I do while still setting an appropriate level of challenge in my classes.
In my next blog post I’ll tell you about the other activities we do in class.