We did quite a lot of work today on Knowledge about language and comparing L1 (English) to L2 (French). This is a big feature in the new CfE outcomes for Modern Languages and is part of Literacy.
We started to look at rules of pronunciation comparing pronunciation of words that are spelt and mean the same as in English. This is a useful exercise and one you could do with pupils. I dictated some words like sport, excellent. We talked about collecting word clouds or families and having one word as the example eg ballet for final -et sound or trois for oi vowel blend.
Then we talked about pre-dictionary skills like paraphrasing - thinking of other ways of saying the same thing in English eg how old are you? means the same as what age are you?
Similarly getting to the meaning of idioms like it's miles away = it's far away.
We talked about how pupils, quite reasonably, expect to be able to translate word for word from English into French. You need to demonstrate that this is not the case.
Try and break a sentence into sense groups or chunks. eg Do you like dogs? do you like is one chunk and dogs is another. In French, Aimes-tu les chiens?
Get them to count how many words you need in French and English
do you like is 3 words but aimes-tu is 2, dogs is 1 but les chiens is 2
Good morning is bonjour literally good day. There is no literal translation of good morning or good afternoon, just bonjour.
We had a discussion about simple dictionary work that wouldn't be too tedious. We will revisit this topic. Using a bilingual dictionary is in the new outcomes for primary!
For light relief we watched a couple of scenes from the lovely film être et avoir about life in a rural French primary school.
We finished with some Halloween vocab using the material mentioned in a previous post and played table top games like matching, pelmanism and dominoes.
