Teenagers’ preoccupation with their own and other people’s love lives can be turned to advantage in the MFL classroom. Celebrity gossip offers scope for work on present and past tenses (Who’s going out with who? Since when? Who has just split up?) while horoscopes can be exploited to practise the future. Alternatively, pupils could describe the boygirl of their dreams.
The language can be simple at KS3 (tall, slim, funny, likes sport) while able pupils at KS4 could elaborate in the conditional tense (My ideal man would give me chocolates. He would not take me to a football match!). For KS4 oral work, sketches based on Blind Date make a refreshing change.
For post-16 - cultural differences: in Germany a traditional wedding kicks off with the civil ceremony and concludes in church two days later; in Spain celebrating guests start late and go on all night.
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