Skip to main content

Great site for independent listening

I have spent a fair amount of time over the years searching for good online French resources, but every now and again I come across a site that I have missed. This is one such site:

http://fr.ver-taal.com/index.htm

It has the not too catchy title Exercices de français pour étrangers, but that's what it is, so fine.It is a fully interactive site with some grammar, but the best content is the listening material which is quite extensive and includes video snippets accompanied by interactive tasks - all at advanced level.

Areas covered include songs, TV news extracts and adverts. This would be an excellent site for students to work with independently, maybe during the revision season when they ask "How do we revise listening?"

By the way, there is also a thematic vocabulary area which students may find useful.

I've no idea who produces the material; they prefer to remain anonymous.

Add it to your favourites.

Comments

  1. I'd like to suggest the link to our website where we have media videos with quiz and transcript in quite the same approach as the link you suggested.

    The level is rather advanced.

    http://www.frenchplease.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd like to suggest the link to our website where we have media videos with quiz and transcript in quite the same approach as the link you suggested.

    The site is very new, the level is rather advanced.

    http://www.frenchplease.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g