On Monday, the lesson for both French ⅘ and French 3 was a review of the Halloween-themed video the students had watched the previous Friday, a short horror film called “Closet Space” in which a woman’s closet mysteriously duplicates the items inside of it: ​​https://youtu.be/5fje6_ou5RY.

Three possible objectives of this activity are: a) students will recall the sequence of events from the movie, b) students will recognize the vocabulary needed to discuss the movie, and c) students will demonstrate listening comprehension by transcribing sentences from a dictation.

I’ll focus my analysis on French 3’s lesson, because I believe it ran more smoothly than French ⅘ before it. Teaching the same lesson twice definitely allowed for a bit of fine-tuning in between. Normally, French 3 begins with an opening during which Denise asks students what the weather is and how they are feeling, but she skipped that on Monday in the interest of getting through the movie activity. Thus, the students were launched right into their discussion of the film without much of a warm-up.

The students spent about half an hour organizing the sequence of events of the film. They were given seven google slides, each with about seven sentences summarizing the film. They went through each slide with a partner and put the sentences in the correct order. When they were finished with each slide, they checked in with Denise to verify their answers.

Denise’s motivating strategy for getting students to complete the sequencing activity was quite evident: the first group to come up to her with the correct sequence of events for each slide got to pick out one of the stickers she had brought in. This extrinsic motivation seemed particularly successful in French 3. I watched as students ran up to Denise to check their answers before another group could; injuries were narrowly avoided, but an iPad did fly part way across the room at one point.

While the stickers were an obvious example of extrinsic motivation, I did notice at least one student’s intrinsic motivation as well. Once a single group got the right sequence for a slide, Denise told all of the students to move on to the next slide to restart the competition, regardless of if they had finished the previous one. This provoked a reaction from Eleanor, who hadn’t finished first and was still working on the first slide. When Denise moved on to the second slide, Eleanor asked, “How are we supposed to know the right answer? I would like to know the right answer.” Following this comment, Denise then gave the correct sequence of events for each slide before moving on to the next one. Thus, while the lesson itself initially didn’t promote intrinsic motivation—once one student was rewarded everyone could move on, regardless of if they got the right answer—it was clear to me that Eleanor was interested in figuring out the correct sequence just for the reward of understanding the film and the vocab associated with it.

After the sequencing, the students did a dictation exercise where they had to transcribe sentences I read aloud to them summarizing the film, meaning they were already familiar with them from the previous exercise. I read each sentence three times; at the end a few students asked for various sentences to be repeated. This activity lasted ten to fifteen minutes.

French ⅘ students continued working on the film activities when Denise asked them to produce sentences to summarize the film based on a series of pictures they were given (although I have an inkling they were reusing the same sentences from the previous two activities), but in French 3 she opted to eliminate this activity in favor of concluding the class with a new discussion altogether. She introduced several verbs to describe preferences, then asked students to think about which of the Halloween films they had watched on Friday they preferred, as well as which seasons they preferred. This final activity lasted about five minutes and didn’t generate much student conversation (it was the end of the period, so students may have been checked out by then), but Denise told them they would continue discussing preferences the next day, thereby providing insight into the following class. It struck me as a bit of an abrupt transition and ending, but it at least gave me an idea of what the students would be working on next.

The lesson was fairly well structured, especially once Denise realized which steps confused the French ⅘ students (when to check in with her for the sequencing activity was a point of misunderstanding) so she could clarify them for French 3. However, it did not reach beyond the “remembering” stage of Bloom’s taxonomy; I’m not sure it even touched on the “understanding” stage, because the students were working exclusively with sentences generated for them. While the lesson included multiple elements of language comprehension, including reading and listening, and Denise adapted the lesson slightly based on what students expressed interest in, like when Eleanor wanted to know the correct order of events, I probably would judge it more positively if it reached into the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. It felt fairly formulaic and uninteresting; however, French 3 students at least demonstrated engagement when stickers were involved. From a behaviorist perspective, maybe it worked; from a cognitivist perspective, I’m a bit more skeptical.

I’ll conclude with a few remarks about Friday’s French ⅘ lesson, which I haven’t even touched on yet, in part because I’m not sure I could explain the lesson very well. It started off promising enough, with Denise offering an “étude de mots” (a word study) of the word “oublier” (to forget) and other words derived from it (inoubliable, un oubli). I appreciated that she emphasized to students that studying every vocabulary word in the French language is impossible, but that they can figure out a lot about a language from things they already know. It served as a reminder that education is about activating prior knowledge in order to construct meaning from new things. That being said, I can’t tell you much about the rest of the lesson. The students were reading an article about friendship and answering questions about it, but there seemed to be some confusion about what they were accessing from the online textbook. At the end of class, Denise mentioned that the reading activity took longer than she expected, but as far as I could tell the students didn’t really know what they were supposed to be doing, and Denise did nothing to add momentum to the lesson; she just let them sit at their desks, staring at the reading comprehension questions (or not; some of them were on Instagram).

I guess it just makes me a little sad. And maybe it’s a bit ironic, considering I spent part of the morning gluing new room decorations about what makes a good language learner, but I’m not sure I saw many of the habits described on the posters, nor am I sure that I see those habits encouraged very often.