Retrieval Practice with Adult Learners

I can’t ever imagine beginning a French class without some form of starter activity.

These activities predominantly focus on recalling learning from the previous week in a variety of ways and usually take 5-10 minutes. They are always a great way to focus everyone’s attention, to include everyone from the very outset, to set the lesson off in a positive way and to create a purposeful atmosphere.

Starter Activities

When I taught A level French, I always used starter activities but these focused on recalling learning not only from the previous week but also on learning from 3, 6 or even 9 months before through activities designed to repeatedly ‘test’ the students*.

When I first started teaching French to adult learners over 5 years ago, I didn’t weave this form of retrieval practice automatically into my teaching because I only met the learners once a week and I was concerned that they would feel they weren’t moving forwards and progressing quickly enough.

However, I realised that only meeting once a week made the need for focused retrieval activities even more important and the learners themselves reassured me that this was the case.

Recalling Learning

I now aim to ensure that my starter activities not only focus on recalling learning from the previous week, but that they include other vocab, expressions and / or structures that are useful to review.

For example, only recently when using a quick Listening Bingo to recall some Perfect Tense structures from the week before, I added times to the task.

Sure enough, recalling the times proved to be trickier than the Perfect Tense structures!

But this was great because the learners felt fabulous about everything that they had remembered about a very difficult structure and were reassured that deep down they ‘knew’ time but it just took longer to find the information that they needed. I could then ensure that I wove time into everything we did in that lesson and another retrieval activity including time is planned for the not-too-distant future.

Another activity I did quite recently was with a group who had worked on the topic free time 4 months earlier. The activity was very quick to prep as I just rejigged and merged two Conti-style Sentence Builders I had used to introduce the topic initially.

The aim of the activity was for the French learners to take turns to construct orally as many sentences as possible using the correct ‘chunks’ from each row. It worked really well and highlighted that the trickiest part was not remembering the vocab but recalling which verb to use with which pastime.

Learning is more than just remembering words

This highlights Dr Gianfranco Conti’s salient point that retrieval activities in language learning have to be more than just remembering words. They also have to encourage learners to remember how and when to use them correctly.

I hope that the activity is useful for you and I’m going to post a retrieval activity each week throughout the month of June on our Facebook page.

So if you are looking for French worksheets for adults, GCSE or A level groups please follow us or sign up to our Resource Centre.

* Evidence shows that repeated ‘testing’ can enhance retention more than repeated ‘studying’, and that this has been demonstrated by Karpicke and Roediger in the context of language learning.