Stop – Grammar Time!

Who says that Comprehensible Input and grammar cannot coexist peacefully?  While we write up the One Word Images from yesterday, and then read them using Ben Slavic’s Reading Options, there is plenty of time to talk about grammar, while doing Choral Reading.  Though it is not strictly CI, but rather conscious thinking and learning ABOUT the language, you can see in the writing below that there are many opportunities, even when writing in front of the class, to grab language elements that might lend themselves to a quick discussion of syntactical, morphological, or lexical elements of the language.

In this series of videos, from French 1, a seventh-grade class, you can see what I sometimes call “Write and Discuss”, a process in which I draw the retell out of the class by asking questions and guiding the writing. First we review the  calendar, which is usually quite interesting to beginners at the start of the year and provides confidence as it is very transparent and familiar input, then we review the artists’ work, then we write up the story as a class.  The story is attached below as it is somewhat hard to read on the video.

In the example below, sur M. Canadian Bacon, dont le sobriquet est Candy, from my second-year French class, an eighth-grade class, we discussed lui and how it can refer to a him or her, à cause de versus parce que, and the difference between s’appelle and l’appellent.  The One Word Image from which this story and class-crested reading was built is below.  He is très mignon, au moins à mon avis!