Using Booksmarts Books and Videos in Core French Classes
High-Yield Strategies:
John Hattie (an educational researcher) developed a list of high yield strategies that are the most effective teaching techniques for increased student achievement. The Booksmarts resources and lesson plans include and promote many of these strategies.
- Rich relevant tasks
- Guided Instruction
- The use of learning goals and success criteria for teaching and learning
- Effective Feedback
Instruction:
- The emphasis is oral communication. Reading and writing float on a sea of oral language. If I can say it, I can write it, if I can write it, I can read it
- Student confidence in oral communication is essential for success
- Authentic/action oriented tasks are the goal
- Students must be given the opportunity to use and re-use vocabulary and structures
- Language acquisition is not grammar or vocabulary based
- Contextualized grammar instruction is important, students need to continue to improve in skill, but message must be valued over accuracy initially.
- Repeated listening and speaking will allow students to develop an earprint for what sounds right.
Backward Design Unit Planning:
- Begin planning with a culminating task that is authentic and action oriented (in the SnackBar unit the task is to be a restaurant inspector)
- Based on the task, decide what overall expectations that you will be assessing
- Create a learning goal(s) based on these expectations
- With students, create success criteria that are reflective of the task and the learning goal
- Build lessons that provide opportunities to give feedback (the Snackbar unit provides many lessons that will enable students to practice the vocabulary necessary for students to evaluate restaurants)
- Feedback can be provided by teacher or peers
- Each lesson can focus on a specific success criterion
Strategy Instruction and Metacognition
The curriculum lists many strategies for Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing at each grade level. As in first language learning, it is very important for students to build a bank of strategies that they use. Teachers must explicitly teach the strategies and encourage students to list the strategies that they used effectively in the lesson (see strategy handout)