Skip to main content

1jour1question videos

One of my go-to sources for advanced level video listening is the set of short videos from Milan Presse, made available on YouTube. Each 1jour1question video. If you've never come across this excellent clips you can find them on this YouTube channel:

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCLmlUMA_bGiMWWgfDwfNDgw

Each video lasts 1m 43s, an ideal length for doing intensive "input-output" work, including true-false, ticking true sentences, gap-filling, matching and questions in French or English. Many of the videos are a good basis for further discussion or fit well with common themes in your syllabus. Written for French native speakers aged around 10-14, the content remains appropriate for older non-natives, while the language is clearly spoken at a natural (quite fast pace).

The range of topics is huge, many sparked off by current events of the time. This means that some of them have now lost that currency, but many have a good shelf life. (They're the ones I use for frenchteacher.net.)

Here are some of the titles to give you a flavour:

Ça sert à quoi, la Palme d'or?
C'est quoi, le terrorisme?
Pas plus de 2 degrés: d'où vient cet objectif pour le climat?
C'est quoi, la dyslexie?
La crise des réfugiés expliquée aux enfants.
C'est quoi, la maladie d'Alzheimer?
Pourquoi des attentats ont-ils eu lieu à Paris?
Pourquoi des ados partent-ils faire le Djihad?
Est-ce vrai que les filles sont meilleures que les garçons à l'école?
Pourquoi y a-t-il plusieurs Bacs ?

Each video features drawn cartoons, some text and a voice-over. Content is interesting, informative and balanced.

All in all, well worth using with your A-level classes and some able Higher Tier (high intermediate) students.

Comments

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).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,