Bonjour! Welcome to my blog. I have been teaching French in one way or another for years. I hold a masters degree in French literature, and I am a self-professed grammar nerd. Unfortunately, when I started teaching, not all of my students were as thrilled about conjugation and drills and discussing the many grammar rules in my beloved language.
When I started as a junior high and high school teacher at a CI school, I was initially panicked when I realized THEY DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A TEXTBOOK! Luckily, the school who hired me sent me to a couple of trainings to learn different CI strategies. I have been fortunate to attend conferences with Blaine Ray (who completely changed the way I think about teaching language), Carol Gaab (who gave me so many tools to enliven reading in even the novice foreign language classroom), and even Stephen Krashen himself. My approach to teaching French has shifted from stressing grammatical perfection to stressing COMMUNICATION (isn't that why we study langauge in the first place?). I use any comprehensible input strategy that works with my students: movie talk, TPRS, special person, story listening, card talk, readers--basically anything with which I can deliver CI in an engaging way to my classes. My goal is for students to acquire the language through fun stories. I rarely force output, but the results in my class show that these methods work and have higher rates of success across all students. My intention with this blog is to share ideas of what works in my classes. I have found, that while they are slowly and steadily increasing, the CI materials available to French teachers are very much behind those of our Spanish colleagues. I look forward to collaborating with other CI teachers and growing the online community of CI teachers in French and other languages!
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AuthorI am a secondary French teacher committed to Comprehensible Input. ArchivesCategories
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