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    Post: Advice for a New Teacher, Please?

    Mlle. Robertson

    Posted on 10/25/09
    (7) Comments
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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!!


    Posts on this thread, including this one

  • Advice for a New Teacher, Please?, 10/25/09, by Mlle. Robertson.
  • Re: Advice for a New Teacher, Please?, 10/27/09, by Cassie B..
  • Re: Advice for a New Teacher, Please?, 11/02/09, by Mlle. Robertson.
  • Re: Advice for a New Teacher, Please?, 11/06/09, by Alexis Savas.
  • Re: Advice for a New Teacher, Please?, 11/06/09, by hated HS.
  • Re: Advice for a New Teacher, Please?, 11/06/09, by Mlle. Robertson.
  • Re: Advice for a New Teacher, Please?, 11/07/09, by annon.

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