This is a great article from Sabrina illustrating and defending rSF. It puts to shame any other idea in language education about how to teach lists of sports and other thematic units. THIS is the way to teach lists of sports, pastimes, etc. if it is acquisition you are after. We do not learn languages by memorizing lists, but in the way Sabrina describes below:
Ben,
It’s bad when you wake up from your deep sleep, awoken by some CI stuff! I find it happening to me a lot. Well it happened to me again early this morning around 5:oo a.m. when I should really be sleeping on a Saturday morning!
So I figured that if it’s powerful enough to come out of my unconscious and wake me up, it must mean somewhat important right, well at least for me so I thought I’d share.
I think the CI aliens have come and abducted me one night and implanted a CI chip and that’s why I breathe and dream this CI stuff, seriously!
Anyway, when I read the article on Robert’s Sentence Frames two days ago, at first I thought: “Wow, I do that already orally every Monday (and I am sure plenty of other CI teachers do that as well in some form or another).
So every Monday morning for the last two years that I’ve been doing CI, I ask my students to write in English (for my French 1 and French 2 that cannot write French yet) 3 things they did over the weekend and then I walk around the room, pick the ones I feel would be good to circle and “on y va” [off we go].
I circle and circle (often enough it’s so compelling that we do that for the entire class time). What invariably happens is someone in the classroom went somewhere or did something and when I ask with whom, then starts the fun part, that is when they pick someone in the class. This way I and everyone else in the room knows who likes who, or who is a secret admirers of whom etc…
For the most part these mini-stories are made up and it’s just part of having fun in a lighthearted way (that also goes hand in hand with what you wrote about adding a lie) because it’s all lies/wishful thinking for some of them.
I encourage them to lie/make stuff up if they don’t feel comfortable talking about themselves for real. And I always tell them I am the nosiest teacher they’ll ever encounter in their lives… (they know it’s a joke and we smile about it).
Anyway, from my experience: doing that orally is great but I just am thrilled about the thread started by Robert and you with others’ suggestions because it will add the writing component, which as we ‘ve seen is on everyone’s mind, especially around finals.
And looking at the verb list Robert first offered I just thought, yes some of these are the verbs I use every Monday with my kids in our PQA but one is definitely missing and I think that’s because it is so idiosyncratic to French ( and Spanish to a certain degree) – that is the verb “faire” – to make or do.
So, invariably some kid “a fait” (did) something. And you know that this verb is so incredibly versatile in French.
So this is the list I can remember that comes up all the time in the last 2 years I’ve done it:
Il/elle a fait du shopping (went/did some shopping)
- fait des courses ( ran some errands)
- fait la fête ( partied) this comes up every week
- fait du sport (du basket, du foot, du baseball, du yoga, du jogging, du combat (wrestling), du skateboard, de la musculation (des pompes,etc..) de l’escrime( fencing), du tir à l’arc (archery), de la natation, de la danse, de la course), de l’aérobic
- fait du babysitting (girls always do that)
- fait du volontariat (volunteered) also typically girls
- fait mes devoirs (did my homework)
- fait du piano/violon/de la guitare (played/practice)
- fait du dessin/de la peinture ( drew/painted)
- fait du théâtre (acted)
- fait du vélo
- fait de la cuisine (cooking)
- fait un apprentissage en…(had some training in)
- fait de la photo/vidéo amateur
And the list goes on and on. These are the examples I’ve received from my kids and I’m sure I’m forgetting some and also that there are others usages that are geography dependent like faire du surf/de la planche à voile in places with beaches.
Anyway this verb I have experienced with my kids (anecdotally) is kind of hard to acquire and needs tons of reps b/c it is pronounced totally differently in the present/passé composé than in its imparfait version which makes it challenging for us French teachers. Yet we need all three. So I thought I’d let you know and maybe you want to add it to the list.