Teaching Year 7 to order food in a French restaurant. Would seem a fairly mainstream thing to do. The one thing that parents command their children to do when they take them on holiday to France. But a bit like teaching "Je m'appelle...", it turns out to be mildly controversial in the current climate with its feverish debate over whether we are teaching pupils to communicate or whether we are teaching them grammar patterns. (Spoiler: We are capable of doing both.)
So if a pupil in a dialogue says, "La soupe", is this better or worse than saying, "Je voudrais la soupe"?
We've all gone back and insisted they say, "I would like". I suppose because we have a literacy/oracy push where full sentences are expected. Or maybe because we are getting ready for its role in, "Le week-end prochain je voudrais aller en ville mais je dois faire mes devoirs" in Year 8. But basically it's a crystal clear indicator that even when we are teaching "useful" communicative language, we still have our eye firmly on the structures of the language.
And there's plenty of grammar to unpack on the topic of food. Swapping between un - le - du / une - la - de la. Including the definite article when giving an opinon - j'aime le chocolat. Introducing tu / vous. Question forms. Phonics.
In fact, I find myself wondering if I shouldn't be doing less grammar and more on the practical communicative functional situational language. Is it OK to teach, "Je voudrais un steak" without equipping them to say how they would like it done? Or ask if there's a gluten free vegan option? Or is this the plethora of fluff we should be avoiding because it puts hurdles in the way of pupils who need to meet only language that exemplifies the grammar patterns?
We used to run a French Staff Restaurant every year to make this a real communicative experience for the pupils. The teachers had to order their food in French from the Year 7 pupils. Dealing with the real situation meant they had to communicate for real, drawing on all the French they had been learning, coping with situations that arose and teachers who didn't follow the "script." It put the emphasis on French for real communication, with the teachers also put on the spot. Nowadays, would this be treated with scorn as distracting from the real learning?
Another thing we do in lessons is start with scripted dialogues, then let pupils adapt them. Giving them scenarios to act out: The customer has a small dog hidden in their bag... The waiter is trying to hide from their old geography teacher sitting on the next table... Or is this just distracting fluff?
We have definitely boosted the part of the unit around giving opinions about different foods. Using the core structures to say things like, j'aime la glace avec des guimauves mais je n'aime pas les gateaux avec de la moutarde. Where does this fall? Is it sufficiently shifting the focus from the list of foods onto the powerful verbs? Or is it too much based on chunks of language and pupils recombining them to say fun things? For us it's all about the pupils' snowball of language, with more and more French sticking to it and not melting when you move from one topic to the next.
Or maybe this unit, instead of focusing on "Je voudrais" should be all about the food. French culture. And the culture of other French-speaking countries. Looking at foods and the culture and values around food. When we do this topic with Year 9 Spanish beginners, we concentrate on being able to have a conversation about the menu. What type of dish is it? What does it contain? How is it served? And we look at food websites to be able to ask and answer those questions, looking beyond the name of a dish. The "difficulty" of finding the information in the authentic materials, mimics and rehearses the communicative situation of needing to ask and decide what to order.
In French, we look at table manners. Pupils enjoy taking about what you can and shouldn't do in different circumstances. And guess what? It practises using the core structures of on peut, on doit, on ne doit pas.
What a delicious unit of work with all these things on the menu. It's almost as if we have always carefully monitored the balance between the focus on the structures of the language, the cultural aspects and the communication.
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