Ideas on how to use a worksheet (1)

15 May

In this article I’ll be talking about the free worksheet that you can download from the shop, entitled La Télévision. In it, you will find 3 different activities, but how else can you use the worksheets?

Here are some ways I use activities like this and I hope it will give you some ideas and maybe save you some time:

Tip 1 : Translation

Simply ask the students to do a translation exercise of the whole text or part of the text. Then ask them to note down the words/chunks that they didn’t know/forgot/need to remember. To take this further do a Q&A on the gender of the nouns they have written down or that you have chosen to highlight. You could put them into teams to make it more challenging for them.

Tip 2: Reading out loud

Ask the students to read out the part of the text and then record themselves on their phones as they are speaking and then listen back. Are they happy with their intonation and pronunciation? Could they go back and do even better?

Tip 3: Summarising

The learners could summarise the text by pretending that they have to tell another friend about the conversation that they have just had. This gives the opportunity to use the 3rd person and change tenses: eg elle m’a dit que…Of course, you can choose whether they should recount the text in the present tense (as this is the focus of the text) or if you want to stretch them, they could use the perfect tense.

I usually ask the students to summarise in English first to ensure that they know what content they should cover. I always reassure them that they don’t have to remember word for word, that a general overview is great.

Tip 4 : Useful vocabulary

Highlight interesting/useful structures such as j’ai horreur de…/je dois admettre que…

Tip 5: Reconstruct the text

Take a couple of copies of the text and cut them up, then ask the students to put the text back together again. To help them, you could allocate one student in the group who has the whole text and they could be the person who gives clues (but not the answers!)

Tip 6: Using the audio recording

Play the whole audio recording again, ask the learners to follow the written text while listening the first time – this is to ensure they have understood the text.

Then you could play it again and ask the learners to put the text away, see if they can understand it this time.

Play it again, stop the recording – can they remember what comes next?

Play sections of the recording again & ask the students to listen to the pronunciation & intonation of the recording. Can they imitate ? Are there any words which are tricky?