Sticky Grammar! #7: Gender Walls Revisited

In an earlier article on Sticky Grammar (which is more concerned with making grammar stick with learners rather than it being necessarily very complex), I looked at how to use the Gender Walls technique for helping learners of French to keep masculine and feminine nouns distinct in their minds.  Of course this can be used for [...]

Welcome back… and Happy Holidays!

After a spot of paternity leave following the birth of my beautiful daughter nearly three weeks ago, it’s now time for the Easter holiday!  On the blog this term we’ve looked at ‘Beginnings’ from different perspectives.  In the summer term we’ll take a look at some activities I’ve been having fun with this term and [...]

Sticky Grammar! #6: The Sentence-Construction Game

The activity I’m going to describe in this post is the climax of a whole series of activities intended to teach pupils how to use direct object pronouns in the perfect tense in French with all the agreements. Throughout this whole process, my aim has been to help pupils use this particular bit of grammar [...]

Sticky Grammar! #5: Gender Walls

By the end of article #4 in this series, I had presented the new vocabulary for Christmas presents and repeated it with the class using a song (12 Days of Christmas) and various activities to be done in pairs, but we hadn’t looked at any techniques for remembering the gender of the nouns, and as [...]

Sticky Grammar! #4: 20 clues, 20 questions

Now, where were we?  In this series of posts we’re looking at ways to make grammar stick with classes of all abilities, especially the difficult bits that are often reserved for higher sets, by incorporating visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles into the way in which the language is presented and practised.  More briefly put, [...]