Wendy Adeniji and Joanne Jones look at language resources
Moliere
Free resources from Film Education
www.filmeducation. orgmolierefrench index.html
Post-16
Laurent Tirard’s film Moliere, which follows the playwright through an adventure similar to his plays, is released on July 13. So Film Education has created free online activities for AS and A2 French students based on extracts from the movie.
Teachers can use the activities directly from the internet and project the trailer and three film extracts on to whiteboards.
Three radio clips, a short summary of the film, a section for teachers and some pupil activities are available in English or French.
The suggested activities consist of lists of questions in French about the extracts. They focus on the work as a film, looking at the use of music and asking why the director has chosen to play a scene in a certain way.
The clips appear quite small on the screen and cannot be enlarged. They are in French with English subtitles.
There are pauses in the longer ones, even with a fast internet connection. But the film is visually appealing and will help pupils enter the world of Tartuffe and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomm*
Wendy Adeniji is a languages consultant
La Semaine de Berthe
By Gwen Brookes
Long Wittenham Publishing pound;3.99
bonjourberthe@ hotmail.co.uk
6-plus
Children’s storybooks written for native language speakers are often too complex for teaching young children a foreign language.
Primary teacher Gwen Brookes became frustrated with the search for suitable storybooks and decided to produce her own series.
One result is the charming La Semaine de Berthe. This slim paperback contains a simple storyline written in easily accessible language featuring an elderly, friendly witch and her cat.
The language is repetitive without being boring and a good basic vocabulary is introduced using common sentence structures children will be familiar with. The text also introduces days of the week and easy verb forms such as “je fais”, “je vais” and “je mange”. There are only a couple of lines of text in each example, giving a suitable writing frame that children could utilise themselves in follow-up work.
The child-style pictures help make the accompanying text explicit and a crossword, word search and dictionary are included. For only pound;3.99, there is a wealth of work to be obtained from this book. I look forward to seeing more in the series
Joanne Jones is a primary languages consultant and until recently was a literacy co-ordinator in a primary school
