I have written several posts on Listening, including listening for entertainment, but relatively few posts on Reading. I have written here about non fiction authentic texts, but today's post is going to be about reading fiction. For me, learning French in the olden days, reading was the key to having access to the language. My exposure to French was through taking Dumas novels out of the school library and reading them for pleasure.
In this post, I am going to focus on Reading in the KS3 classroom, but I want to make one point about my reading when I was a pupil, so indulge me for a minute. Apart from the novels in the school library, I went on to buy many books in French second hand. All of them would have penciled in translations of words the owner had looked up in the dictionary. This never went beyond the first two pages. After that, I don't think they had read any further. Sometimes these were books with uncut pages, and they remained uncut until I had to cut them. I always tell my students not to look up every word on the first page. When I read Le Comte de Monte Cristo, it took me 20 or 30 pages to work out what was going on. And when I did work it out, I didn't have to go back to page 1 and re-read. It all just fell into place. I recently doubted how much I understood when I was reading in French aged 16, so I re-read Les Trois Mousquetaires and reading it again, I had exactly the same pictures in my head as I remember from the first time.
I am not going to be writing about sending your pupils home with classic novels to struggle throught without a dictionary. But I am going to talk about not getting bogged down translating every word.
Neither do I want to befuddle pupils with incomprehensible texts or pretend they are reading when they are not. One way to do this is to give them a translation of the text and work with parallel texts. I have hinted at this before in ideas for cover lessons. We seem to be hard-wired to want to use texts to test pupils' comprehension. Using parallel texts takes this out of the equation. They have access to what it means. Now we can get on with enjoying reading it in French.
Perhaps as a model, we need to think more of how we would approach working with a song. When we use songs in lessons, we put enjoyment of the music, the rhythm, the video, the physical quality of the sound of the words before testing meaning. We will look for words that pupils understand. We will look for repeated structures that unlock the meaning. We will use it as an opportunity for pupils to learn beautiful phrases that will stay with them for a lifetime. We hope they will make an emotional connection with the song, the singer, the French-speaking world. It can be the same for reading fiction.
By now you are impatient for an example. My biggest example today is a book translated from English into French. Sorry if that loses some cultural dimensions. But it's such a good example and it works so well. It is the Tom Gates books by Liz Pichon. It does count as an authentic text. It's sold for French teenagers to read. And reading books in translation is part of the culture of the non English-speaking world. Liz Pichon also gets involved in the translation of her books, for example in translating the names of people and places, so if she does an author visit to your school, you can ask her about languages and French in particular.
So what do we do with the texts? I don't have class sets. If I was spending that amount of money, I would want something that was an originally French-speaking book, not a translation. I use it early on in Year 7. With photocopies of the limited number of pages we are allowed to make. On A3 with a double page of French and a double page of English, so the English half can be folded away if we just want to look at the French.
Here are some suggested activities that are ways of enjoying reading the text without being tested or getting bogged down:
Read the French while listening to your teacher reading it aloud. Enjoy the sound of the French and being able to pick out some words. Talk to your teacher about what words you recognised and what you think it is about.
Read the English and enjoy realising what some of the French was about. Now read the French again and see if it makes any more sense. Practise reading the French aloud to practise your phonics.
Read the French and hunt for some words your teacher asks you to find. These will be well-chosen to be new words but ones that are deducible from what you remember from the English translation and other words in the sentence.
Pick out words in the English that you wonder what the French would be (caramel wafer?). And find them in the French text. Enjoy learning interesting words. Pick out interesting looking words in the French, (roulez-boulez?!) and find what they mean in English. Enjoy saying them. Keep a list of great words.
Find the words in English that go with the pictures. Find the same words in the French. Work with a partner. One of you looks at the English, one looks at the French. One reads aloud in one language. The other follows the text in the other language. When you think they are about to get to a picture, shout, "Snap."
Work with a partner. You start reading the text in French, stopping in random places. Your partner is looking at the English and listening to you reading in French. When you stop they have to say what the last thing you said was in English. Or your partner reads aloud in English while you follow the French. When they stop you have to say what comes next in French. This will involve some amount of dealing with different ways of saying things in the two languages, including word order!
Use the parallel texts to focus on high frequency "little" words that can get ignored. Or even verb endings. Ask your teacher questions about differences between the French and the English.
Use the text as a model to write about you and your school, including Liz Pichon style pictures integrated into the text. Or re-write some of your normal classroom writing in this style with pictures and some words you have picked up.
And Always Always: Go back and read the text through, normal speed in French. While listening to your teacher read it aloud. Again and again.
This doesn't have to be done in one lesson! In fact it is best done over a longer period of time. And over that period of time, keep going back to pupils reading the page at normal speed. What they understand because they remember what it says and what they understand because they are reading the French will slowly merge.
I mentioned in this post on Story Books, that I am buying a class set of Tomek by Jean-Claude Mourlevat to use with Year 8. I will be using similar approaches. Most importantly alternating reading the book together and pupils re-reading it for themselves. Without ever getting stuck on translating every word.
I will keep you posted!
In fact, you can now click here to find out more about how Tomek is working out as a class novel.
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