I teach French at an arts magnet middle school in New Haven, Connecticut. Students who start a language in fifth grade generally continue to study that language during all four years there, but some join the class in sixth or seventh grade. So while the majority of students in seventh grade will have had two years of French (focusing on oral communication, vocabulary building, and simple language patterns), some will have had only one year, and a few will have had no previous French experience. The combined seventh and eighth grade curriculum is the equivalent of the high school ninth grade curriculum, so that students who are successful in middle school language study may enter into second year high school language courses. As such, the demands of the seventh and eighth grade language classes are increased from fifth and sixth grades, most notably in terms of the level of writing proficiency pursued and expected. The challenge is to make the increased written requirements of the seventh and eighth curriculum as engaging as when the focus was more squarely on oral communication activities. I believe that combining oral communication via spontaneous role-plays grounded in new learning, and written communication via letter writing based on those role-plays and that new learning, will effectively lead to increased engagement and improved written proficiency for students.
The World Languages curriculum for seventh and eighth grade in my district is written by a committee of teachers; it used to have a component during the first marking period of seventh grade called
Global Awareness
, which served as an introduction to the entire francophone world – geography, people, culture. It proved to be quite a challenge to address all areas in a meaningful way, and so the curriculum was thoughtfully revised for the 2012-2013 school year to allow for more freedom in exploring themes of global awareness over the course of the two years it spans, calling for a different global awareness focus each marking period. This allows us the opportunity to go deeper into aspects of culture and place as we teach the required language functions, so that we are not merely front-loading a bunch of names and images of people and places at the beginning of the year, hoping that some stick.
In the first marking period of the seventh grade curriculum, students learn to introduce themselves by giving their name, where they are from, what their nationality is, what they like to do, etc. Last year in another Institute seminar, I wrote a unit to reinforce those skills that asked students to take on the roles of famous French-speakers. (Although now of course I will reflect the afore-mentioned change in curriculum by focusing on those who live in and around France, which is the global awareness focus area for the first marking period.) (1)
In the second marking period, students transition from talking about self to talking about others, family members in particular. The global awareness focus is now "France and the Americas: Explorers, colonization, slavery, and immigration – how French wound up in Canada, New England, Louisiana, and the Caribbean Islands." As a bridge between the first-person language skills practiced during the first marking period and the third-person language skills of the second marking period, we will revisit the personalities introduced in marking period one to talk
about
them instead of
as
them. Then we will use the same structures and format to introduce some famous French Canadian personalities, so that students get more practice and can learn about these people without struggling to learn more than some relevant new vocabulary terms.
Then
we will be ready to go forward with this curriculum unit. So the language structures of talking about others will already have been introduced and delineated; here we put them into more varied practice.
My students generally have a vague sense of spatial relationships in geography. They also have a hard time keeping track of dates and facts and synthesizing that information into a solid conceptual understanding. While some are quite skilled at fact recall and others are quite skilled at reasoning through causes and effects, many have a tough time doing both, and some are turned off by and thus tune out from that daunting task. Add to this the challenge of doing so in a different language, and the very thought can be enough to intimidate many students at the outset. So while planning and creating every activity in this unit, I (and you) must constantly consider these two questions:
How can we make this a fun linguistic challenge, like a puzzle or a game rather than a task to complete?
And how can we make this more visual, more tangible, more actively participatory?
Students need to interact with the geography and the dates, heavily using visuals and tangibles whenever possible. We must keep these two questions or goals in our minds as we move forward with this unit.
In order for my students to better conceptualize French Canadian immigration to the United States, they need to be reminded of the way the French even got to North America in the first place. There has long been a multiple-choice question on the quarterly exam for the first marking period of seventh grade French class that asks students the country and continent where the French language developed. Every year I think this will be the question that everyone gets correct, yet it is often one of the most-missed responses. Between our drive to convey to students where
else
French is spoken, students' hazy conceptualization of world geography, and their distrust of what seems like too easy of an answer, many students will not confidently mark that the French language developed in France, Europe. This past year I was more explicit in class about discussing this concept, and the same student who laughed when I asked the question because he thought it was so obvious selected
Morocco, Africa
on the multiple choice test. Although this could easily springboard us into a conversation about the merits and disadvantages of multiple-choice tests, let's leave that debate for another arena on another day and suffice it to say for now that my students need some simple, clear, explicit instruction and practice with geography, especially in connecting the path from France to North America, so that France is always clearly the point of origin.
Role-play is used in this unit for several reasons. First, it allows students to practice oral expression within a context, which hopefully makes it more fun, interesting, and meaningful, by giving them a "reason," however artificial, for speaking. It also helps lighten the mood and loosen things up as we are learning aspects of history and geography that can sometimes be challenging in the target language. And it provides opportunities for repetition of language skills while limiting the threat of getting stale, as students continue to take on new roles.
We all have a range of language proficiency and preparedness levels in our classes, which will necessarily affect what we teach and how deep we go with it. The content needs to be something that can remain engaging even when stripped to very basic language, so that students newest to the language will not only understand but will also find value in the work. At the same time we must be able to convey enough interesting and advanced aspects of the content, using enough new language structures, to challenge the more experienced students. In this unit I present a selection of content and activities to engage students in a meaningful way toward a worthwhile end, using language structures largely already in most curricula.