Finish cartoon Le Petit Chaperon Rouge at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9OsRljQSbw
I explained that I show her these videos not to teach her French but to show her what she already knows.
Her response to that was ‘nothing’, so typical of teens. My response was to tell her I was a little short b/c of trying to pull all this together.
The problem with these, which I believe is something like the Movie Talk so many tprs teachers use, is that it can take several days to get through a story.
I pointed out that the pronunciation stresses the r, le grassayer and often the final mute e which is not so mute in this.
The video had the wolf going to grandma’s house to ‘prevenir’ her and Nyah immediately asked what that means, a very good example of how alert she is to anything she doesn’t know. My translation of it for her was initially ‘warn’ but that didn’t fit the context, more like ‘let her know’. On the other hand, she let ‘bouquet’, a totally new word, go due, obviously, to its cognate status.
Then we had ‘perdu’ which stumped her despite having it as a major element in early stories. That relates to the U-shape of acquisition (see entry Observations on Teaching One Student) Rod Ellis describes in his Second Language Acquisition.
Asking what ‘pleurait’ was and being told LPCR was crying, she got put out b/c “she didn’t go that far off the trail,” an example of how close attention Nyah pays and how irritated she gets when she doesn’t understand something. I challenged her to write her own story if she didn’t like this one. The truth is she is beginning to participate more in making the story using the map, etc.
What’s that mean, a specific word, and then “so what does the whole sentence mean,” showing the way she bears down on meaning. Then we got off on some item and she struggled to explain and finally said I had answered her question but had gone 10 extra steps, showing my weak point 🙂 Looking for an adjective to use for how she bears down on understanding everything, I came up with ‘determined’ and ‘insistent.’
We went to what I called frenchy french, c’est dangereux ces bois. I showed her how the normal order would be ces bois sont dangereux and she got that.
She blanked again on ‘mechant’ but then got it as soon as I gave the English, showing how she retrieves words but may need a nudge.
When I explained the -e on perdue as due to the feminine referent, she said, “I didn’t notice” and giggled. She does really bear down on these features, even the grammar. I’m writing these up in reverse chronological order and I note that in a later lesson, she easily identified the -e on a past participle as “because she’s a girl.”
We were able to related frapper a la porte to a frappe capucinno.
Donc was used and she heard ‘dans’. I note that she relates words by sound, a sign of her oral input leading to aural comprehension or uptake.
An example of reinforcing recognition is ‘voir’ where the wolf says ‘the better to see you with’. We have used it but mainly ‘voit’, not ‘voir’. It also reinforces noticing the final r.
Her memory was better than mine for ‘ventre’; stomach ache in one of our earlier stories: mal de ventre.
As LPCR was returning home, she saw the wolf sweeping the path in the forest as the hunter had ordered him to do for being ‘mechant’ and trying to eat LPCR, and before I could say anything, Nyah exclaimed, “He’s doing community service.” A nice way to end the session with a 21st century teenager.