Gap fills are a favourite activity in language learning lessons. Either with words to select from a word bank, or with free choice of the word to fit into the gap.
I found this one on the site kwiziq:
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| Gap fill activity from the site kwiziq |
It had me scratching my head for a couple of them, and for others I could think of 2 or 3 words that I could use. And I think I found one mistake. I think it's a great example to look at what we might want from a gap fill. For a start, some of the answers are the typical vocabulary we might want pupils to be recalling for this topic: beach, sand castle, bucket and spade... Then there's the markers for gender and number that we might want pupils to respond to correctly: le/la/les/son/sa/des. But this is more than a vocabulary test or a grammar exercise. The learner has to read the text and figure out the missing words. They have to understand the meaning of the sentence and parse the grammar of the sentence in order to identify the part of speech of the missing word.
And they have to do all of this, with a text missing key words!
In my experience, learners find this almost impossible. It's demanding enough to expect them to read a text in a foreign language even with all of its key words. The idea of removing some words from a text in French before asking the pupils to read it is starting to sound extraordinary. Why would anyone do that to a learner?
You could say that it mimics the situation of coping with an unknown word. Two things on that. One is that as you can see from this example, it's the known words that have been removed. The other is that if that's your intention, then by all means give them the sentence WITH the unknown word, and ask them to suggest possible meanings. Eg Lola a fait un château de sable et remplit les douves d'eau. What could be the possible meanings of the underlined word?
So I'm not a fan of gap fills. But I have been using some in a slightly different format:
These are somehow much more do-able than a traditional gap fill. In fact it's an activity that I may leave for a cover lesson, where an activity that pupils can do independently and successfully without getting stuck or needing other resources is the raison d'être of the worksheet. You can ask the pupils to write the passage out in French. And then to translate it into English.
Although words are partially or (sometimes) completely obscured, there isn't that terrible experience of staring at the gap and not knowing what word could go there. It puts the focus properly back on reading the whole sentence, rather that on the aching gap left by a word. Even though many more words are partially missing than in a gap fill, pupils can read the sentence and work out what the obscured words are. When they write it out, they are recalling the spellings, apostrophes and accents. And if you wish, you can choose to obscure endings or articles to test specific items of pupils' knowledge. You can avoid obscuring unfamiliar words such as citron here, for pupils to work out from context. Where words are repeated, you can choose how much in each case is covered up, so pupils can piece together the spelling, as in guimauves. In the case of crêpes, you can see how many pupils make the effort to go back to the first instance and insert the circumflex accent when they see the full word revealed later in the text.
So it's primarily a spelling exercise. But I think it is still doing the job of a gap fill in terms of forcing pupils to read for meaning and grammatical sense in order to correctly predict the exact missing letters. It's adding to the level of thinking required, slowing the reading down and making the reader more active. The challenge is generally accepted and pupils are motivated, doing a task that requires them to pay attention to detail and think carefully.
And here's the same activity taken to another level of purposefulness:
These are for Year 9. You can see as with the Year 7 Food example, I want the pupils to spell familiar words correctly, including accents and endings. I want them to be able to identify familiar words in sentences with some items of new vocabulary. And I want them to have to read the whole sentence carefully to make sense of what the obscured words must be.
But there's more. These 3 paragraphs are very different. And I want the pupils to think about the difference.
One has only one infinitive: jouer. Of course it's great to be able to write a whole paragraph just on jouer. And then maybe you could do another paragraph on nager. I make sure my Year 11s are able to do exactly that. Because it means you are using the full repertoire of I can, I like, I want to, I have to... And your English teachers will tell you it's good to have a paragraph based around just one idea. But of course, when the pupils do the coffee splat activity, writing the paragraph out in French and then translating it into English, they realise, and can tell me, that it's too repetitive.
One of the other paragraphs has many infinitives. But they don't have any real link. So although it's less repetitive, it's just a list of different activities, linked with and... and... The final paragraph has several infinitives, but carefully chosen to link (or to deliberately contrast).
To get at this just by reading, without experiencing writing it out, wasn't as effective. It was when I took the three model texts and splatted them, that all pupils really engaged with how it felt to write them. And it really got the message across.
So now they can really serve as model texts. Pupils can pick one infinitive and see if they can write a paragraph just about nager, for example. They can pick a bunch of random infinitives and see if they are happy with the resulting paragraph. Or they can choose carefully some activities that go together well - buying a bucket and spade to make a sandcastle and fill up the douves with water, for example!
