Oui French Teachers

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If you are teaching French in a part of the world where French is the minority language you may find it difficult to find authentic resources for your classes. With the help of the Internet, there are so many resources available to language teachers and our students. No longer must all our resources be a hardcopy in our hands.

How does one begin to search for resources? First and foremost, understanding your literacy goals for your students are is important. This may direct you to one form of resource over another. Below I have listed some resources I have used with my students with a brief description of how I have used them.

Romans/Livres: Some romans are available with an audio file that has a native French speaker reading the book.  This is great for having students read along with the audio clip. In doing so, students hear native French speaker pronunciation, as well as an appropriate pace and tempo for speaking and reading. Here are two books I have used with my Core French 10-12 classes

Bebey, K. (2013). Enfin chez moi. Les Éditions Didier.

Marrama, T. (2021). Zeinixx. Independent.

Balados/Podcasts: Often podcasts have transcripts available on their website that students can read along with while listening to the podcast. Podcast can be short clips of information of 3-15 minutes, which is a good length for keeping student interest and attention.

French Bla Bla

Journal en français facile – rfi saviors

Nouvelles en français facile

Youtube videos:

Audrey D – From Québec, Audrey covers culture, to accents, to food. A great way for students to hear different accents in Canada.

DocSeven – covers a wide range of topics from history, to culture, to geography. Its creator is from French Guiana.

Easy French  – This is a great channel to provide authentic French resources to your students! The pace of the speakers is usually slow enough so students can follow along and you hear a number of accents (mostly from France).

OIFrancophonie – The channel of the Organization International de la francophonie has a number of useful, and eye catching, videos about the Francophone world. They also have a website (https://www.francophonie.org/) where you or your students can go to keep up to date with the Francophone world.

I am always looking for new resources that will show the wonders of the Francophone world, are relevant, and catches the interest of my students. If you have any to suggest, please share!

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So often in life, naming and identifying something makes things easier, more manageable.  Someone says, “Come see the new car” and no one looks in the pantry, but someone says, “This is an example of a robust culture”, and you may find people looking around wondering what exactly is meant by culture.

So, let’s run down a short list of words often used when discussing language and language classrooms:

• culture (small ‘c’), refers to “shared patterns of behaviors and interactions”.  These behaviors and interactions then help the group share in an identity and distinguish between groups. (CARLA, 2020)
• Culture (capital ‘C’), while this once referred to art and literature, now includes “a shared way of life” (Byram et al., 2002, p.5)
• Linguistic identity is a person’s identity as a speaker of one or more languages. One’s identity is formed as we interact with other people, whether from the same culture as ours or different.

Culture, small ‘c’, and identity are not static entities, they are constantly being shaped and changing based on the experiences we, and our students, have.

What impact does this have on our teaching and our classrooms? This means that each one of our students has a linguistic identity, each one understands themselves as being part of a culture, and each student’s linguistic identity is constantly changing and growing based on what happens in and out of our classrooms. As teachers we do not need to be the centre and distributor of all information, but rather, our students are sharing and growing, with each other and with us. Even more beautiful is that each student brings with them a bounty of knowledge to share from their linguistic and cultural identities.

Gone are the static worksheets.  Here are the interactions, the discoveries, and the projects that encourage us to learn with our students and help them to grow in the skills they will use when they meet new people in new places.

References

Byram. M., Gribkova, B., & Starkey, H. (2002). Developing the Intercultural Dimension in

Language Teaching: A Practical Introduction for Teachers. Strasbourg: Council in

Europe

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Centre for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. (2019, April 9). What is Culture?

 The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA): Culture (umn.edu)

European Parliament. (2020, February 4). Linguistic Identity and Language Portrait. Terminology

Coordination. Linguistic Identity and Language Portrait | Terminology Coordination Unit (termcoord.eu)

I’ve been a language teacher for 16 years now, and I will admit that two words that automatically come to mind when I think about language learning are ‘grammar’ and ‘vocabulary’.  I often share with my students that I was never very good at remembering vocabulary on quizzes.  I dreaded those quizzes; I still do when I am taking a course and there is vocabulary to memorize. Having said that, I also share the importance of broadening our vocabulary. Grammar on the other hand, when not being tested on it, I love! But should these two items take centre stage as we plan and teach our lessons? After much research by myself and others, I would say a firm ‘no’.

The centre of our lessons should be curiosity, discovery, and patience. Understanding a language goes beyond knowing how to conjugate verbs and identify random nouns, rather, it is understanding a people, valuing their perspective, and ideally, being able to interact with people from a different culture than one’s own.

In fact, this idea of being able to interact between cultures has been called ‘Intercultural Communicative Competency’ or ICC. A researcher by the name of Michael Byram is known as the originator of this theory in 1997, and it is his research on which many other researchers have based their studies.  In this theory, there are 5 ‘savoirs’.  You can often see and hear Byram being cited in podcasts, on websites, and in articles. See below for a list of these.

ICC is “the ability to navigate intercultural differences in order to communicate successfully and can be defined as a set of knowledge, skills and attitude which are considered essential for successful intercultural communication”. (Byram, 1997). ICC has been successfully used in both K-12 schools and post-secondary schools around the globe. I have personally been looking at my units for my high school Core French classes to see where I can put less emphasis on the grammar and vocabulary and more on the discovery and inquiry of other Francophone cultures. I’ve included below a well written article by Byram, Gribkova, and Starky (2002) which explains ICC well and gives examples to frequently asked questions about implementation in the classroom.

As always, please reach out should you have resources to suggest or questions about today’s blog topic.

Mme. Drew

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References

Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Byram. M., Gribkova, B., & Starkey, H. (2002). Developing the Intercultural Dimension in Language Teaching: A Practical Introduction for Teachers. Strasbourg: Council in Europe