A Class Novel with Year 8 - an Update

 If you haven't read the first post about why I chose the novel and what I am doing with it, then read here first! But I owe you an update, especially everyone who has got a copy of the book to read and might be thinking about whether it would work with a class or a club.

I have tried to avoid worksheets, word lists, grammar work. And to just concentrate on reading the story. Typically at the beginning of a lesson we work on a passage. The BD version of the book has been very useful for looking at the pictures first for key events and key words. Then I read the passage through. We talk about words they know and cognates, and then read it through again. Then we get on with the lesson. At the end of the lesson I read through the same passage again, while it's still fresh in their memory.

This is the zone I am aiming for: They are reading the French partly by remembering what it says, partly by processing the language.

Working like this, we have finished the first chapter. We've done 7 lessons on it, with 10 minutes at the start, then 5 minutes at the end. At the moment, they don't know if I am teaching them next year or not. But anyway, I am hoping other teachers will be able to pick it up as well. And I am buying copies of the books (Tomek, Hannah, BD version...) for the school library.

What I need to build in more is opportunity for feedback. Feedback from the pupils to me, that is. The group has a majority of pupils who love reading. I have some who are more reluctant readers. We have had interesting conversations about speed of processing: whether they can keep track of the place in the text as I read. Or whether they should be worrying about consciously translating.

I have spoken to them about how I learned French, by immersion in books. And how it was maybe 20 pages into Le Comte de Monte Cristo that I worked out what was going on. And how you can relax, and enjoy the story and let your brain deal with the language without worrying about it.

One of the aims of reading the book is to familiarise them with the high frequency words that make up any text. Should I be making lists of these, teaching them? Or will their brains eventually cope? When I ask pupils to tell me what the words are that keep cropping up, they find ones that I don't even think about: cela for example.

On the other hand, in a reading (in French) they did with a cover teacher on the topic of Marie Curie today, when I came in they had all read it and could tell me exactly what it all said. Then we looked at the book Marie voyage en France on the visualiser. Again they were absolutely confident at first picking out single words, then re-reading to make whole sentences and working out new words. So I am confident that their ability to read for information and for pleasure is progressing.

Having said I am not making worksheets, I have also used this fiche de lecture with them. Rather than plod through the worksheet and translate the questions with them, I gave them the teacher version with the answers. From the answers (which they recognised from reading the novel), they could work out what the questions meant.

They enjoyed the fact that this worksheet was for French pupils who are reading the book in their own language. And they liked reading the instructions on having the book open, finding and copying the answer.

Then after the weekend, I gave them the pupil version of the worksheet to complete. With the books open, just like the French pupils were allowed. I didn't really care about the answers - more about the task of looking through the book, finding the correct passage to answer the question. They remembered what the questions meant from the previous week, and they knew more or less what answers they were looking for. So spent a good 15 minutes reading through the book talking with a partner about what was happening in various passages and which bits were the answer to the questions. And they got the answers right, which made them feel good. Sometimes a bit of a test or a worksheet is actually good for morale.