You can get as authentic as you like in creating the passport. I suggest doing a Google search for passport templates and seeing what has already been made that you can tweak to suit your needs. Wikipedia entries for the passports of whatever country you are looking for will give examples of what the cover looks like, as well as the identity information page. Although many passports are in French and English, for our purposes we will limit our passports to French. I have included an example that can be used for a starting point or photocopied and whited out for classroom use. It is completed for a fictional French man named John–Louis Christophe Ricard, born March 29
th
, 1981 in Avignon. See
Appendix B – Passport Template
.
Although many language teachers have their students adopt names and identities from the studied language, I prefer to have students keep their own identities. I think it is important that they get very comfortable with discussing their own true information, for practicality as well as for a strong sense of self–identity. For this reason, I want our role–playing to be intentional, done with many different identities, so that it is very obviously a tool we use, to reinforce rather than confuse our language practice. Truth be told, I also find the idea of remembering 80–100 students' French names in addition to their real names quite daunting! In any event, I want their passports to be French, but to reflect their actual place of birth. So I will be asking students to pretend that we are in an alternate reality in which the United States is a part of France, that when the French were exploring the New World in the sixteenth century, they were actually quite successful in their endeavors and as such, the United States is now a large overseas department of France.
See
Lesson Plan 1 – Introductions
. As indicated, students will ultimately "submit" a passport application form and photograph. I will type the information up and create a faux passport. It will include pages for stamps, but those pages will be modified so that each two–page spread will be dedicated to a particular Francophone area of the world. As we learn about each place, students will add some details about the place on one side (country and city names, vocabulary for nationalities and languages) and as they don the personality of different people they will "sign" those peoples' names on the other page, including an identifying sentence and/or image. For example
Céline Dion – Elle aime chanter
/ She likes to sing.
In the next section, I give information about the French passport that I culled from a Google image search. As suggested previously, to make each passport as authentic as possible, you will want to do this for each country introduced.
French Passport
The color of the cover is Bordeaux red. At the top it says
Union europé
;enne and then
République française
. Below that is an image of the emblem of the French Republic, and at the bottom it says
PASSEPORT
. The
Passport Template
in
Appendix B
is French.