Nyah has been absent from French for over a month due to college apps and illness but she came back today in a big way.
I had picture files and a few examples of her comprehension, amazing after such an absence, will show her retention of her French.
She identified the “white” thing in the “green” thing’s hand as milk and the animal that was not red or white as Kermit.
Confused at first about what I was asking: “what is the woman giving them?”, she answered lunch describing the flight attendant putting food trays in Mickey and Minnie’s laps.
She couldn’t remember Will Farrell’s name but was able to give the name of a movie he was in when I asked “Vous pouvez me dire les films dans lesquels il a eu un role?”
She recalled that John McCain’s daughter is on The View when I asked “Comment s’appelle sa fille?”
She didn’t recognize Queen Victoria but figured out she was a queen of England. The ‘pays’ was in the question…
and then later I showed her a drawing of Kim Jung-Il and she heard the word ‘pays’ and ID’d it as North Korea.
So those are just a few of the pictures I showed her, stimulating conversation whether she knew “famous people” (my theme) like Churchill and the Sopranos or not. It is all grist for the mill of PQA because it probes her Fund of Knowledge, thus taking her mind off the French and putting it on content.
I must admit I was surprised at how much French she understood and cautioned by how much general knowledge she lacked. Then I recalled that I remember Eisenhower and Churchill but did not know how to ID a photo of Calvin Coolidge. He was before my time as Eisenhower is before hers. She recalled that Carter had a peanut farm. Interestingly, she acknowledged that that was not an important feature of his presidency. So this probing, as long as it is in French, provides us with a lot of fodder for CI. We got a little French culture in with a drawing of Hillary Clinton as Jeanne d’Arc.