Q. My French 3 student is quite a quick learner and a straight A student in all subjects. He’s quite brilliant. For small talk we can actually have a conversation about his day, what he will do…about anything really. Of course sometimes I need to help him with vocabulary but he’s quite advanced. He’s very flexible and polite and has been enjoying and doing all CI activities but since he’s in a French 3 Honors class I was thinking I should do more “advanced” activities now after the story?
A. What is advanced? There is no advanced. There is just the language, and any perception of “advanced” is only determined by the speed of your speech. It’s not about “advanced” vocabulary. I won’t go into it but have mentioned it a lot in books and on the PLC that if a word is new to a child, it doesn’t matter if it is a big word like “phenomenological” or a little word like “book”. That’s the whole thing about what you are giving him in just conversing freely with him – the chance to enjoy chewing on and hearing THE NEXT WORD THAT COMES UP in the conversation, which is such a vastly superior way of teaching a language than the old way. Another thing in support of this argument has to do with available hours but I won’t go into that here.