I would recommend continuing to take things slowly with them.
Your situation is almost too overwhelming to give specific
advice. Just work with them where they are....if they need to
review some basics when you get to a concept, slow down and
review the basics. You're in a tough spot, but keep in mind
that it shouldn't be this hard ever again if you stay in this
position. :-)

On 10/25/09, Mlle. Robertson wrote:
> 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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