Lesson 3: Life cycle French detectives
Language detective skills are important for learning any language and pupils practise these skills, using their science knowledge to solve language problems in an entirely unfamiliar language.
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Learning objective
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Before the lesson
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Lesson plan
This lesson is about language detective skills. The children looked at strategies for working out new vocabulary in French transport, Lesson 1: French transport language detectives and will be using all the strategies in this lesson.
Ask the class to list strategies they might use. If you have these strategies listed and displayed in the classroom, remember to cover the list up before this exercise.
The strategies might include:
- Spotting cognates and near-cognates (un train).
- Spotting something in the word that looks a bit like a known word in English (un avion).
Context – looking at the context that the word appears in, so if you know you are looking at types of transport, you might guess that a word has something to do with context.
Memory – sometimes you may have heard a word before and forgotten it but now might be able to remember it.
Process of elimination – sometimes working out meaning may simply be a process of elimination.
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Belinda has been a French and Spanish teacher based in Bath for more than 15 years. She has delivered a range of courses for teachers and PGCE students and is particularly passionate about weaving language, culture and global learning across the curriculum. Having previously worked in travel publishing, she is a keen explorer and nature lover with a fondness for all things South America.
Belinda has created topics on introductions through puppets, playground games, and has created a French science lesson on the circle of life.
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