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 [...]

Planning for spontaneity

In this post, I want to look at how we can review the last term to see how pupils are using classroom language and how to use that to plan for this term and next September.  This is more about how pupils are interacting than how they are advancing in their content, or topic, language.  [...]

Happy New Term!

Happy New Year!  ¡Feliz Año Nuevo!  Bonne Année ! Thank you for joining me again in a new term.  When I started writing this blog in February 2011, it was mainly as a way of forcing myself to be specific in my thinking about what I am trying to do with my classes as well [...]

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 [...]