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D'après une pensée de Black Elk.
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Educational project for the teaching of French.
I am grateful to numerous sites that have inspired me to write this project. All texts and videos have a mention concerning their origins or sources of inspiration.
I am also very grateful to my colleagues at SPS for their suggestions and ITG at SPS for its precious help notably Jamie Cross.
Co-authors: Laurent Patenotte and Véronique Mattei; Project director: Laurent Patenotte.
The authors are not making any money with this project. They are only motivated by a simple idea: using the teaching of French to educate students not only about the Francophone worlds and cultures but also issues that concern us all.
In Écran vert, a monthly documentary that shows on TV5MONDE, Grace, a renowned singer, reminded us of a sentence by Black Elk, her Sioux grand father: “It is important to live for the seventh generation that is going to follow.”
It is therefore for that generation that we are getting aware of our gestures and choices in our lifetime. Hence the title of this Internet book: Gestes et Choix utiles (Useful Gestures and Choices). This is a pedagogical as well as educational project that uses French, a language which carries the traditions and cultures of Francophone peoples of the 5 continents.
Gestes et Choix utiles presents itself like a book and can be read in the following manner:
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Texte 1 |
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Viande, poisson ou légumes. |
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- The middle column is made up of texts and illustrations;
- The column on the right is reserved for glossaries;
- The left column is for les Mises en pratique, a section made up of questions and videos. The questions are directly related to both the content of the text that they read in the middle column and their lives on the St. Paul’s grounds or the campus of Middlebury College. All the videos can be seen on Google videos.
The texts are written in a simple style that allows students of the intermediate level to approach them without great difficulty. However, this project does not limit itself to students of that level. Some texts and videos can be used by beginners and others, whose content and syntactical structures are far more complex and in which the speaking is less rigid, therefore freer, are directed to more advanced students. Each level of understanding – Beginners French, Intermediate French, Advanced French – is clearly marked for each video. At the end of each text, a link allows students to use a program, Oddcast, to help them hear words, parts of sentences, or whole sentences found in these texts. The texts and videos cover a wide range of themes that have been classified in 8 major categories: 1. on my campus, 2. at home, 3. in town, 4. in the trashcans, 5. on the grounds, 6. in my closets, 7. on the road of life, and 8. societal choices. All videos come from the Internet (YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.). Sustainable Development : Gestes et Choix utiles is a long term project to which other categories, texts and videos will be added in the future.
Each text is accompanied by a glossary presented by grammatical etiquettes. The goal is to help the learners to acquire the means to first express themselves about the world in which they wish to live and second to identify, recognize and use appropriately correct grammatical structures. The links to Google-pictures allow students to acquire a direct understanding of words in their cultural and visual environment. Thank you Internet!
At the end of each glossary, students can practice their vocabulary learning with Quizlet, a key component that will allow them to use each term of the glossary in a sentence and test their vocabulary memorization. Everything is in French. And a big thank you to Jane Clunie for introducing me to this wonderful tool.
In the part entitled Mise en pratique, the questions followed by videos – and sometimes audio links – respond to a greater need for our students, a need to better reflect and understand what kind of world they will very soon be confronted with. The videos available thanks to a permalink cover a great variety of geographical places and make the learners aware of accents and syntactical structures used by the various Francophone cultures of our planet. Some of these videos are sad, others happy, some serious, even scientific, and some deliberately absurd and humorous.
Nevertheless, all concur to give students a better comprehension of the French language, the Francophone cultures and planetary challenges for the years to come. The idea to classify these videos by levels of difficulty and to present them in a Map Site by their geographical places was suggested to me by my colleagues at SPS for teachers who would rather exploit only the videos with their students. All videos come with a set of questions or pedagogical help and have been transcribed to help students understand passages that might otherwise pose too great a difficulty.
Furthermore, all these pedagogical projects offer the possibility of debates destined to learners of every level who would be limited only by their linguistic skills and competency. Besides, students are invited to write, perform and videotape their own script in which they could present a three to five minute clip of their institution in relation to sustainable development.
Laurent Patenotte,
Instructor of French at St. Paul’s School, Concord, NH (since 2002)
and at the Middlebury French Summer School (since 1979)
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