Talking about Table Manners in France

 Looking forward to teaching my Year 7 some table manners this week. We are going to watch this video by Geraldine from Comme une Française about what you can and can't do at the table, especially concerning bread. Her videos are usually in English and teach words and cultural concepts. You do have to check before showing them as she sometimes uses naughty words. Not in anger, just to explain. For example if you want to explain la bise then she has a video, but she starts by explaining the difference between un baiser and the verb baiser. So maybe not.

To go with the very interesting video about whether bread can be put down upside down, whether to tear or cut, or wipe your plate or nibble the end... (I know, all those things we had to work out for ourselves because there was no YouTube)... I have made a speaking activity.

It's in the format of one of my Keep Talking sheets, with more freedom to make your own sentences than a "sentence builder". And designed so you can go round and round to make more of a paragraph.

So you can ask pupils to come up with things like:

In France you can use your bread to wipe up the sauce on your plate but you shouldn’t put the bread on the table upside down. In England it is not polite to wipe your plate but you can dunk a biscuit in your tea.

I will start by making up my own paragraph in French and underlining it on the sheet projected on the board as I say it. Pupils will listen and follow and underline too as they hear me say it. It will quite possibly be exactly the model paragraph I gave above. Then I will put the English version of what I said on the board. And the pupils will put it back into French speaking in pairs and then in writing in their books. They will easily be able to pick out what they need because we've underlined it. This way I can help them find the meaning of the few items on the sheet they are going to need help with - tremper, poser, nappe, doigts for example. If you use it, you could always put the English on the sheet for them in a different colour.

Then pupils can write their own short pieces about etiquette in England and France. Then we can do delayed reading. Pupils work in pairs. The one doing the reading is allowed to look at what they have written. But they must look up and make eye contact with their partner when they speak. They can read, remember and say short chunks, or challenge themselves to say longer chunks. But if they look at the page while they are speaking, they have to go back to the beginning.

Then we will work on the Being Ben activity, which I have written about before in a post about A Level Speaking. (In this post I called it Simultaneous Translation to assuage fears of anyone scared of use of English in an A Level lesson.) Pupils work with a partner using the sheet. One is responsible for thinking up what to say. And making it sensible, coherent and developed. They feed the ideas to their partner in English, and the partner has to say it in French. It turns out doing the French is the easy part. Thinking up sensible things to say is the thing you need to work on. And as they take turns at this, they can start using the sheet less and less.

Gosh. This post has turned out to be more about sharing speaking activities than the actual Keep Talking sheet! Anyway, it's available here. Enjoy! (Or bon appétit!)