Mlle. Robertson

Posted on 10/25/09

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So I am a second-year teacher. This is my first full-time
teaching job at a new school. Last year I taught only
half-time and taught three sections of French I and loved
it! I feel that I had a fairly successful year and both my
students and I enjoyed the year overall. This year, I am
supposed to be teaching all four levels (I, II, III, & IV),
but two of my level III students are mixed into my level IV
class (odd?). Well, during the first week of school I did a
lot of pre-testing to try to figure out where all of my new
students were in their French. My I's of course had for the
most part had no exposure to the language, as I expected. My
II's, III's, and IV's all seemed to struggle very much with
even the most basic grammar and vocabulary. So I have been
giving my II's a lot of review of French I material (present
tense of regular verbs for grammar, regular/irregular
adjective vocabulary, c'est vs. il est, and working on
gender/articles for nouns). They act as though they've never
had a French class, really. My III's and IV's I have been
treating as a single prep, since in one section they were
mixed. I began the first few days of school speaking to them
in French quite a bit (not exclusively, but for about 1/2 of
each class period or so) and I could tell they were not
really following along. So I began speaking all in English
after that. I quickly found out that they too were very far
behind in their skills. They seemed to know a lot of
specialized vocabulary (parts of a car, how to get around an
airport, wild animals and what noises they make, etc.) but
did not know a lot of very basic vocabulary (things in a
classroom, rooms of a house, food items, body parts, etc.)
and also knew only some types of verb conjugations (seemed
to know future and conditional fairly well, and had at least
had some exposure to them) but did not know many common
tenses (PRESENT TENSE!, Imparfait). It has been a struggle
for me to figure out how/what to teach them each week. I had
started the year using the French III textbook as a guide,
but very quickly discovered it was much above their level.
So I reverted to using an old grammar guide from when I was
in school to teach them some basic prepositions,
conjunctions, and to review passe compose. Then I introduced
them to imparfait and spent several days on it. Then we took
a couple weeks going over the difference between imparfait
vs. passe compose. For the most part, they really get it
now. From there, I have found a list of the Top 100 most
common words in the language and am typing up my own guide
based on them, going through each one one at a time with
first notes then a worksheet for them to fill in. Now, I had
assumed that some would be cake for them that they would
breeze through and others would take more explanation and
time to work through. On Friday, we did they very first page
(the verb etre and the three types of articles - definite,
indefinite, and partitive). They did fine with etre (in
present tense, p.c., and imparfait). But they had no idea
what an article was, when/how to use le/la/l'/les!!!!!

Every week, I seem to feel more lost with teaching my upper
level students. I feel like I don't know if I am doing what
I should be doing with them. I feel frustrated, but I try
not to take it out on the students as it is clearly not
their fault and not due to a lack of their ability but
rather a lack of their previous teacher actually *teaching*
them large parts of how the language works. I want to give
them as much as I can this school year, and I don't want
them to feel discouraged/overwhelmed. Any advice on this
would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you all in advance!!

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