French Lesson Plans & Activities
Sample Lesson for Graduate Reading Course
Verlaine and Fauré (Reading, In-Class Transparency)
For graduate reading classes, I usually put the students into groups to discuss readings and translations of tricky phrases (e.g. sans doute 'no doubt, probably' vs. sans aucun doute 'without a doubt'). However, for this class, I decided a different sort of activity would provide a welcome departure from the norm. I assigned students a reading of a few poems by Paul Verlaine that had been set to music by French composer Gabriel Fauré, along with a short reading on what happens to poems when they are set to music. In class, we did a previewing activity, asking students how they thought the poems would be set in very general terms (not requiring musicological knowledge, though many of the graduate students were in fact music students), as well as a basic thematic evaluation of the poems. We then listened to the songs in class, and students had to note their reactions to the setting on the poems. As a follow-up, we discussed these reactions and why Fauré might have made the choices he did.
Sample PowerPoint Lessons
Places around town (warning: large file):
The places around town lesson is actually not a complete lesson plan, but rather an introduction to vocabulary. I flew to a conference in Paris early on in the semester, so I made sure to take pictures that would be useful for an upcoming vocabulary lesson. Unfortunately, not all of them came out well, so a few pictures are from Google Images. The idea was to take students away from the cartoonish images of a textbook and show them what these places actually look like in a city they might very well go to (with Café Indiana being especially interesting to students at Indiana University!). It's also an opportunity to discuss the importance of certain places like Gibert Joseph (where students in Paris universities get many of their textbooks) and Le Grand Rex (one of France's oldest and fanciest movie theatres).
Reflexive verbs
The reflexive verbs presentation does contain an entire lesson. The lesson outline is not one that I designed, but the organization and the animations of the presentation are mine. The most important thing that I wanted students to see through the order of the presentation as well as through animation was the relationship of laver to se laver, because the exact meaning of reflexives can often get lost in translation, with students making all of their verbs reflexive. Showing laver and se laver might help them preserve the distinction. One other note: I found that when teaching the difference between se coucher and s’endormir, impressions of insomniacs and narcoleptics are quite helpful for illustration.
French Culture Lesson: Les DOM (Power Point, Lesson Plan)
This culture lesson focuses on the French overseas departments, and is informed heavily by my experiences living in French Guiana and my opinions on colonialism. The complexity of the issues sometimes forces me to switch into English to get students to be able to express themselves thoughtfully, but there are many chances to return to French. Students learn about how French colonies compare with those of the U.S., and how they fit into the French political system.
Sample Activities
Mechanical Activity: Ambipositional adjectives and Little Red Riding Hood
This activity, designed for a graduate reading class (and a bit on the violent side), is to test students' ability to properly decide whether an adjective goes before or after the noun. It uses the familiar story of Little Red Riding Hood, which I adjusted slightly to put my own twist on it.
Skill-Building Activities (Writing) (Valentines using the subjunctive, Une autobiographie technologique)
The Valentine Activity is perhaps the activity for which I have received the most positive feedback. Students are tasked with writing a Valentine in French to someone important in their lives. It is ideal for any class studying the subjunctive of "wishing," but especially during the spring semester around Valentine's Day. I find that supplying crayons and construction paper produces a nostalgic enthusiasm for the activity as well.
The second activity, designed to go with Chez Nous chapter 11.3, is a chance for students to practice two things: technology vocabulary and structures for since. This is a chance for students to reflect on the various ways that technology has developed over their lifetimes. If you are from a different country or generation than your students, you may want to consider using this activity to show how different or similar the timelines for technology are.
Verlaine and Fauré (Reading, In-Class Transparency)
For graduate reading classes, I usually put the students into groups to discuss readings and translations of tricky phrases (e.g. sans doute 'no doubt, probably' vs. sans aucun doute 'without a doubt'). However, for this class, I decided a different sort of activity would provide a welcome departure from the norm. I assigned students a reading of a few poems by Paul Verlaine that had been set to music by French composer Gabriel Fauré, along with a short reading on what happens to poems when they are set to music. In class, we did a previewing activity, asking students how they thought the poems would be set in very general terms (not requiring musicological knowledge, though many of the graduate students were in fact music students), as well as a basic thematic evaluation of the poems. We then listened to the songs in class, and students had to note their reactions to the setting on the poems. As a follow-up, we discussed these reactions and why Fauré might have made the choices he did.
Sample PowerPoint Lessons
Places around town (warning: large file):
The places around town lesson is actually not a complete lesson plan, but rather an introduction to vocabulary. I flew to a conference in Paris early on in the semester, so I made sure to take pictures that would be useful for an upcoming vocabulary lesson. Unfortunately, not all of them came out well, so a few pictures are from Google Images. The idea was to take students away from the cartoonish images of a textbook and show them what these places actually look like in a city they might very well go to (with Café Indiana being especially interesting to students at Indiana University!). It's also an opportunity to discuss the importance of certain places like Gibert Joseph (where students in Paris universities get many of their textbooks) and Le Grand Rex (one of France's oldest and fanciest movie theatres).
Reflexive verbs
The reflexive verbs presentation does contain an entire lesson. The lesson outline is not one that I designed, but the organization and the animations of the presentation are mine. The most important thing that I wanted students to see through the order of the presentation as well as through animation was the relationship of laver to se laver, because the exact meaning of reflexives can often get lost in translation, with students making all of their verbs reflexive. Showing laver and se laver might help them preserve the distinction. One other note: I found that when teaching the difference between se coucher and s’endormir, impressions of insomniacs and narcoleptics are quite helpful for illustration.
French Culture Lesson: Les DOM (Power Point, Lesson Plan)
This culture lesson focuses on the French overseas departments, and is informed heavily by my experiences living in French Guiana and my opinions on colonialism. The complexity of the issues sometimes forces me to switch into English to get students to be able to express themselves thoughtfully, but there are many chances to return to French. Students learn about how French colonies compare with those of the U.S., and how they fit into the French political system.
Sample Activities
Mechanical Activity: Ambipositional adjectives and Little Red Riding Hood
This activity, designed for a graduate reading class (and a bit on the violent side), is to test students' ability to properly decide whether an adjective goes before or after the noun. It uses the familiar story of Little Red Riding Hood, which I adjusted slightly to put my own twist on it.
Skill-Building Activities (Writing) (Valentines using the subjunctive, Une autobiographie technologique)
The Valentine Activity is perhaps the activity for which I have received the most positive feedback. Students are tasked with writing a Valentine in French to someone important in their lives. It is ideal for any class studying the subjunctive of "wishing," but especially during the spring semester around Valentine's Day. I find that supplying crayons and construction paper produces a nostalgic enthusiasm for the activity as well.
The second activity, designed to go with Chez Nous chapter 11.3, is a chance for students to practice two things: technology vocabulary and structures for since. This is a chance for students to reflect on the various ways that technology has developed over their lifetimes. If you are from a different country or generation than your students, you may want to consider using this activity to show how different or similar the timelines for technology are.
Linguistics Course and Lessons
Syllabus: L103 Introduction to the Study of Language
I designed this course for an intensive summer course for non-majors. The textbook I used, Contemporary Linguistics, by William O'Grady et al., was probably too dense for this situation, but students seemed to find that lectures went a long way to clarifying the readings. Students had regular homework assignments as well as quizzes and tests. They also had to keep a 'language journal', to reflect on topics we had talked about in class or just language phenomena that seemed unusual or interesting to them.
Sample Lessons
Morphology (PowerPoint, handout)
This lesson is about the processes by which words are formed and altered. This is mainly a lecture, though I do have a few questions in the PowerPoint designed to check that students understand the concepts. There is also a handout that students fill out to keep straight the basic differences between derivational and inflectional morphology. The structure of the lesson was designed to track a chapter in the students' textbook.
Linguistic Anthropology
This lesson is about the relationship between language and culture. Students did not have any preparatory reading, but were encouraged to actively participate. It includes a link to a long video clip from the Young Turks in which two people talk about the connotations of the word homosexual (i.e. is it a negative word or not?), and students were encouraged to consider the arguments made in light of concepts introduced earlier such as orthophemism and dysphemism.
Language Evolution
This lesson was a topic selected by my students for the last class of the semester (chosen over computational linguistics and language policy and planning). Students read a chapter from Salzmann (2006) Language, Culture, and Society, and we reviewed some of the major theories of when and how it could have evolved. With more time, I would provide some video evidence of Kanzi the bonobo producing and understanding novel sentences to get a sense of the level of complexity (or simplicity) of his possible utterances, and to see what protolanguage might have looked like.
Sample Activities
Prototypes
This is an interactive activity for a lesson on semantics. Students learn that a prototype is the quintessential example of a category, and that not all members of a category can be a perfect fit-- some differ in really important ways, and sometimes they are so different that they don't even seem to fit the category at all. This activity asks students to judge different species on how 'fishy' they are. Some are obviously quite fishy (halibut, goldfish), others are quite 'unfishy' despite their names (starfish, jellyfish), and others are fish-like without being members of a fish species (shark, dolphin). Students found it hard to pick out a single prototype, because they had three main conceptions of a fish: an wild fish, a pet fish, and a food fish. No fish in the cultural context of my students (mostly from the U.S. with two from the Middle East and one from East Asia) served all three purposes. Watching students reach this conclusion is quite gratifying, as it really makes them think about the properties of concepts and categories.
Spot the Spy
This is an activity I came up with a a substitute for an undergraduate phonology class, where we students had been discussing for several classes some features and constraints with respect to phonological inventories. This activity should take about 15 minutes. Students are provided with consonant inventories of German and Iberian Spanish (in a handout created by the instructor-- feel free to use the German and Spanish inventories on Wikipedia, substituting Spanish's bilabial fricative for the bilabial stop listed). They should get about 7 minutes to work in groups to come up with constraints. Then ask or assign two groups of 5 volunteers, one for German and one for Spanish. Give one sheet of paper marked with a 'G' in the handout linked above to each of the first 5 volunteers. Each sheet is a handout that is supposedly of German-- but two are from Spanish. Students have to identify the Spanish spy constraints and send those students back to their seats (constraints are in red for the instructor's use). They repeat the same process for the group of Spanish constraints, sending the German spies back to their seats. It's also useful to have students-- either the volunteers or those accusing the spies-- to restate the constraints in phonetic terms. A follow-up activity could be to have students share the constraints they found that were not among the 10 on the sheets.
Sample Quiz
Language, Brain & Mind
This quiz was on two classes' worth of material. Students have a short set of true/false questions, as well as a labeling activity for the most important parts of the brain for language production and processing. In addition, by a fortuitous coincidence, a news article appeared that discussed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who had been shot in the head a few months earlier, and mentioned her linguistic deficits in recovery. I placed the relevant portions of this article into this quiz and had the students diagnose her based on the language disorders we had observed in the previous class.
I designed this course for an intensive summer course for non-majors. The textbook I used, Contemporary Linguistics, by William O'Grady et al., was probably too dense for this situation, but students seemed to find that lectures went a long way to clarifying the readings. Students had regular homework assignments as well as quizzes and tests. They also had to keep a 'language journal', to reflect on topics we had talked about in class or just language phenomena that seemed unusual or interesting to them.
Sample Lessons
Morphology (PowerPoint, handout)
This lesson is about the processes by which words are formed and altered. This is mainly a lecture, though I do have a few questions in the PowerPoint designed to check that students understand the concepts. There is also a handout that students fill out to keep straight the basic differences between derivational and inflectional morphology. The structure of the lesson was designed to track a chapter in the students' textbook.
Linguistic Anthropology
This lesson is about the relationship between language and culture. Students did not have any preparatory reading, but were encouraged to actively participate. It includes a link to a long video clip from the Young Turks in which two people talk about the connotations of the word homosexual (i.e. is it a negative word or not?), and students were encouraged to consider the arguments made in light of concepts introduced earlier such as orthophemism and dysphemism.
Language Evolution
This lesson was a topic selected by my students for the last class of the semester (chosen over computational linguistics and language policy and planning). Students read a chapter from Salzmann (2006) Language, Culture, and Society, and we reviewed some of the major theories of when and how it could have evolved. With more time, I would provide some video evidence of Kanzi the bonobo producing and understanding novel sentences to get a sense of the level of complexity (or simplicity) of his possible utterances, and to see what protolanguage might have looked like.
Sample Activities
Prototypes
This is an interactive activity for a lesson on semantics. Students learn that a prototype is the quintessential example of a category, and that not all members of a category can be a perfect fit-- some differ in really important ways, and sometimes they are so different that they don't even seem to fit the category at all. This activity asks students to judge different species on how 'fishy' they are. Some are obviously quite fishy (halibut, goldfish), others are quite 'unfishy' despite their names (starfish, jellyfish), and others are fish-like without being members of a fish species (shark, dolphin). Students found it hard to pick out a single prototype, because they had three main conceptions of a fish: an wild fish, a pet fish, and a food fish. No fish in the cultural context of my students (mostly from the U.S. with two from the Middle East and one from East Asia) served all three purposes. Watching students reach this conclusion is quite gratifying, as it really makes them think about the properties of concepts and categories.
Spot the Spy
This is an activity I came up with a a substitute for an undergraduate phonology class, where we students had been discussing for several classes some features and constraints with respect to phonological inventories. This activity should take about 15 minutes. Students are provided with consonant inventories of German and Iberian Spanish (in a handout created by the instructor-- feel free to use the German and Spanish inventories on Wikipedia, substituting Spanish's bilabial fricative for the bilabial stop listed). They should get about 7 minutes to work in groups to come up with constraints. Then ask or assign two groups of 5 volunteers, one for German and one for Spanish. Give one sheet of paper marked with a 'G' in the handout linked above to each of the first 5 volunteers. Each sheet is a handout that is supposedly of German-- but two are from Spanish. Students have to identify the Spanish spy constraints and send those students back to their seats (constraints are in red for the instructor's use). They repeat the same process for the group of Spanish constraints, sending the German spies back to their seats. It's also useful to have students-- either the volunteers or those accusing the spies-- to restate the constraints in phonetic terms. A follow-up activity could be to have students share the constraints they found that were not among the 10 on the sheets.
Sample Quiz
Language, Brain & Mind
This quiz was on two classes' worth of material. Students have a short set of true/false questions, as well as a labeling activity for the most important parts of the brain for language production and processing. In addition, by a fortuitous coincidence, a news article appeared that discussed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who had been shot in the head a few months earlier, and mentioned her linguistic deficits in recovery. I placed the relevant portions of this article into this quiz and had the students diagnose her based on the language disorders we had observed in the previous class.
Language Policy & Planning Course, Lessons, and Assignments
Syllabus: Speaking Freely? Language Policy & Planning in Western Europe
This is a syllabus for a summer course I taught through IU-Bloomington's West European Studies program, and joint-listed in the Geography department. I had several goals for the class. One was to discuss, at some point or another, every country in Western Europe; rather than coming up with a definition of what counted as 'Western Europe' I simply took the map that the program used to illustrate the region and accepted that. I also wanted students to get an idea of the range and depth of problems and phenomena subsumed under the umbrella of language policy and planning: spelling, foreign policy, education, minority rights, etc. I tried to present as many sides of the issues as I could. I also encouraged students to take an active part in expanding their knowledge of the situations by giving them suggested readings and having each student do an article presentation, usually selected from these suggested readings.Students were encouraged to participate in discussions, and frequently discussion turned to similar issues in the United States, comparisons which I encouraged as a way to facilitate understanding of issues that at times seemed a bit remote.
Background lesson: Economics in LPP
This lesson, early in the semester, was one of a series of introductory lessons designed to give students a framework for analyzing language policies. We talked about the nature of language and how that relates to its valuation as a common resource, a type of goods, etc. This presentation, like my other two listed below, shows the way in which I like to structure a lesson, starting with a presentation of what the main questions we are going to address in the class and ending with discussion questions, sometimes linking back to other lessons and other times just being self-contained.
Country profile: Luxembourg
This lesson, about halfway through the semester, covers a small country in Western Europe, but one that is important because unlike larger countries, its multilingualism is societal, not regional. In other words, all people in the country are multilingual, rather than having pockets of areas where people speak a different language. The students had been asked to read an article that covered some of the main points, and the discussion questions at the end were covered in small groups.
Issue lesson: The Deaf
This lesson is designed to give students a pan-regional view of a minority that all countries share. The Deaf pose challenges for language policies in large part because unlike other linguistic minorities, they are not regional, but rather are found all over each nation. The day's lesson was followed by a screening of Nicolas Philibert's In the Land of the Deaf.
Sample Assignments
Language Diversity and Endangerment
This assignment was the first of the semester, and was designed to give students an idea of just how diverse Western Europe is linguistically. Students had three other small assignments like this. Some, like this, were intended to merely broaden students' knowledge in a way that class time over the summer simply did not allow me to do. Others, which included reading primary source materials on language learning policies and watching a series of videos on political stalemates in Belgium between the Walloons and the Flemish, were intended to get students to think critically and make insights into policy dilemmas.
Semester assignments
This document outlines all of the semester-long assignments that students had to do, including a journal or a wiki, and a term paper. The journal was an assignment that I had had to do in college for a course on Modern French Civilization, and had found both interesting and useful. We had to follow an issue in the news (e.g. cultural policy, homosexuality, immigration), and write several short summaries of newspaper articles written about those topics. I don't think it worked well for the summer course, however, because summertime tends to be slower in terms of political news (of which language policy often makes up a very small part), and since the class only lasted six weeks, there was not much news that appeared for most of the students during the class time. It is an assignment I would try again during a regular 15-week semester, however. No student chose to do the Wiki, so I cannot evaluate it as an assignment. The final paper was done in stages, largely to make sure that students were doing their own work and not waiting until the last minute to do their papers. Students seemed to benefit from being forced to prepare early, and I was impressed with the quality of the work that many of them turned in. While I am not a believer in holding students' hands in high level classes, I also did not have much experience in assigning and grading work at this level, so the intermediate steps were important for me as a preview of what level of work was reasonable to expect.
Pictured above: Bouillon d'awara, the national dish of French Guiana, a stew made from the paste of the fiber palm fruit and many types of meat and vegetables. Pointe Buzaré in Cayenne. A cabine téléphonique in the Place des Palmiers in Cayenne.
This is a syllabus for a summer course I taught through IU-Bloomington's West European Studies program, and joint-listed in the Geography department. I had several goals for the class. One was to discuss, at some point or another, every country in Western Europe; rather than coming up with a definition of what counted as 'Western Europe' I simply took the map that the program used to illustrate the region and accepted that. I also wanted students to get an idea of the range and depth of problems and phenomena subsumed under the umbrella of language policy and planning: spelling, foreign policy, education, minority rights, etc. I tried to present as many sides of the issues as I could. I also encouraged students to take an active part in expanding their knowledge of the situations by giving them suggested readings and having each student do an article presentation, usually selected from these suggested readings.Students were encouraged to participate in discussions, and frequently discussion turned to similar issues in the United States, comparisons which I encouraged as a way to facilitate understanding of issues that at times seemed a bit remote.
Background lesson: Economics in LPP
This lesson, early in the semester, was one of a series of introductory lessons designed to give students a framework for analyzing language policies. We talked about the nature of language and how that relates to its valuation as a common resource, a type of goods, etc. This presentation, like my other two listed below, shows the way in which I like to structure a lesson, starting with a presentation of what the main questions we are going to address in the class and ending with discussion questions, sometimes linking back to other lessons and other times just being self-contained.
Country profile: Luxembourg
This lesson, about halfway through the semester, covers a small country in Western Europe, but one that is important because unlike larger countries, its multilingualism is societal, not regional. In other words, all people in the country are multilingual, rather than having pockets of areas where people speak a different language. The students had been asked to read an article that covered some of the main points, and the discussion questions at the end were covered in small groups.
Issue lesson: The Deaf
This lesson is designed to give students a pan-regional view of a minority that all countries share. The Deaf pose challenges for language policies in large part because unlike other linguistic minorities, they are not regional, but rather are found all over each nation. The day's lesson was followed by a screening of Nicolas Philibert's In the Land of the Deaf.
Sample Assignments
Language Diversity and Endangerment
This assignment was the first of the semester, and was designed to give students an idea of just how diverse Western Europe is linguistically. Students had three other small assignments like this. Some, like this, were intended to merely broaden students' knowledge in a way that class time over the summer simply did not allow me to do. Others, which included reading primary source materials on language learning policies and watching a series of videos on political stalemates in Belgium between the Walloons and the Flemish, were intended to get students to think critically and make insights into policy dilemmas.
Semester assignments
This document outlines all of the semester-long assignments that students had to do, including a journal or a wiki, and a term paper. The journal was an assignment that I had had to do in college for a course on Modern French Civilization, and had found both interesting and useful. We had to follow an issue in the news (e.g. cultural policy, homosexuality, immigration), and write several short summaries of newspaper articles written about those topics. I don't think it worked well for the summer course, however, because summertime tends to be slower in terms of political news (of which language policy often makes up a very small part), and since the class only lasted six weeks, there was not much news that appeared for most of the students during the class time. It is an assignment I would try again during a regular 15-week semester, however. No student chose to do the Wiki, so I cannot evaluate it as an assignment. The final paper was done in stages, largely to make sure that students were doing their own work and not waiting until the last minute to do their papers. Students seemed to benefit from being forced to prepare early, and I was impressed with the quality of the work that many of them turned in. While I am not a believer in holding students' hands in high level classes, I also did not have much experience in assigning and grading work at this level, so the intermediate steps were important for me as a preview of what level of work was reasonable to expect.
Pictured above: Bouillon d'awara, the national dish of French Guiana, a stew made from the paste of the fiber palm fruit and many types of meat and vegetables. Pointe Buzaré in Cayenne. A cabine téléphonique in the Place des Palmiers in Cayenne.