Teach Primary Issue 18.6

Turn your children into language detectives… DR AMANDA BARTON www.teachwire.net | 33 Tell the children you need their help. You’ve just received an email from a teacher in France and you’re not sure you’ve understood it all correctly. Read the message aloud, using lots of gestures. It might look like this: ‘Je m’appelle Madame Rangier. J’habite dans un appartement à Paris. J’ai deux enfants: un grand fils qui s’appelle Alexandre et une petite fille qui s’appelle Amélie. Nous avons deux animaux: un hamster qui s’appelle Betty et un chat qui s’appelle Trixie.’ Point out that pupils understand more French than they realised. They can use this knowledge to help them in their French lessons. Does anyone know what it’s called it when we are just listening for the main points? It’s listening for gist. Now hand out a written copy of the text. Read the text aloud again and ask the children to follow your reading with their finger on the page. Pause several times in your reading and ask the class to read the next word aloud. Show the children some different text types, either on the whiteboard or on a worksheet, including letters, recipes, menus, adverts, a weather forecast, TV pages and school timetables. It doesn’t matter which language or languages the texts are in. The aim is to train the pupils to look at the format and work out what kind of text this is. Can they find any English cognates or other clues? Give each pupil a copy of the worksheet at tinyurl.com/tp-Detectives and ask them to write down what they’ve discovered. Ask the children to give you a thumbs up with the hand they’re not using to follow the text. This time, when you read the text aloud, make some deliberate mistakes. Whenever they hear an incorrect word, the children should give you a thumbs down and tell you what the word should be. Can they now underline, highlight or label all the cognates, proper nouns, numbers, pronouns and adjectives? Can the pupils suggest anything else they could label, such as verbs? Ask the children to put up their hands if they understood anything in the text, making clear that they didn’t have to understand every single word. Then read it aloud again. This time, ask the children to put up their hand whenever they hear a word they recognise. Ask them to tell you how they worked out the meaning. Did they see your body language and actions? Did they recognise a person’s name? Did they spot a word that sounds like English? B ut I can’t speak French, Miss.” One of the biggest problems with learning a new language, for children and adults, is confidence. Encouraging children to look for clues and patterns, using the literacy knowledge and skills they already have, shows them how languages aren’t as scary as they seem. This is a good way of getting the new academic year off to a flying start by revising vocabulary the children have already learned, as well as training their reading and listening skills. Dr Amanda Barton is a freelance writer and educational consultant who has taught MFL in primary and secondary schools. She is co-author of Teaching Primary French and Teaching Primary Spanish (Bloomsbury). F EATURE S MF L