KS4 French Listening Higher - A la découverte de Vézelay

A la découverte de Vézelay takes the listener on a tour of the magnificent medieval village of Vézelay in the heart of Burgundy. A typical example of Burgundian patriomoine.

On the edge of Avallonais, Vezelay is a major site for Christianity. The beautiful Church situated on a hill at the top of the charming village was granted the title of Basilica by the Holy See in 1920 and is dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen whose relics are displayed for veneration in the crypt. It was named as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1979 and provides one of the 4 starting points in France for the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela.

Thomas Beckett chose Vezelay for his Whitsunday sermon in 1166, announcing the excommunication of the main supporters of Henry II and threatening the King with excommunication too.

This resource includes a link to the video to accompany the commentary, a set of GCSE style questions and a full French transcript. Ideal for GCSE Higher listening practice

Maison Claire Fontaine is a French language immersion and activity centre for UK school children based in the beautiful Burgundian countryside. We have been producing these videos during the coronovirus to hopefully provide the opportunity for a bit of Burgundy to find its way to UK school children whilst they cannot travel to Burgundy themselves.

We offer all these resources for free. However, if you have found them useful we would be enormously grateful if you could share them with others as well as promote our online French lessons and conversation classes to your pupils, fellow teachers and parents. Our teachers would love to hear from anyone who would like to improve their own French speaking with fun, enthusiastic and experienced French native speakers based here in Burgundy.

We value your feedback and look forward to hearing from you on our email : maisoncfontaine@gmail.com.

A HUGE thank you for your help.