Whether teaching a foreign language or using most students’ native tongue to discuss texts or other cultural productions, inciting discussion can be a surprisingly difficult task. Successful group discussions require both planning and flexibility to accomplish the goals you set for the class. Just last week, for example, I had a stack of sheets...Read more »
It was in a graduate course on advanced French grammar topics that I had an ahha! moment: one of the most simple and easy exercises to create to improve writing is to closely study and reword sentences that students have already written. There is no better way to tailor a writing workshop to the...Read more »
Many instructors of French shy away from literary analysis in elementary and intermediate language classes. To be sure, discussion of literary theory can be difficult even in advanced courses. It can be daunting to aim to read texts and analyse them when even the basic verb tenses are still unclear. But it is important...Read more »
Need a quick activity idea to get students speaking to each other? Bonus if the activity is a quick review of some grammatical terms? Enter Mad Libs, that fill-in-the-blanks game that most students will be familiar with from their childhood. Mad Libs has seen a recent comeback among adults and I’ve even spotted them...Read more »
This is a quick warm-up activity I use to review comparative adverbs (plus, moins, autant). It’s in the format of one of the most successful kind of oral exercise: a table to “find someone in the class who…” You can download the pdf here. The single-page file prints two identical tables, which means half...Read more »
