Using mini dual texts to present vocab in context in MFL lessons

I think there is a growing sense that MFL teachers spend too much time introducing new vocabulary. It's the kind of thing MFL teachers have been doing for years: present vocab / choral repetition / individual repetition / selective repetion such as repeat if it's true / what number is it? / is it A or B? / what's missing? / playing simple games in front of the class with the vocab, etc, etc. I'm sure all MFL teachers are familiar with this sort of thing. Lots of singing and dancing at the front of the class & lots of noisy repetition from students.

Vocab mats etc are used by some to avoid the need to spend so much class time presenting new vocab: give them

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Exploiting a text - Spanish - En la cafetería

Lots of pdf worksheets below based on a simple Spanish text about food and drink in a cafeteria.

The pdfs can be accessed and printed by anyone.
If you don't want to print them, you can use them in full screen mode with your projector / IWB (if you have one). (You can also copy the text and paste it into Word, for example, if you want to resize components and put more than one exercise on one page.)

There are 9 pdfs based on the text itself:

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Exploiting a picture - Van Gogh's bedroom (French)

I recently came across an activity on the mflresources forum (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mflresources/) suggested by Vincent Everett (http://languagesatnorthgate.wordpress.com/), and it got me thinking about exploiting images for language practice using TaskMagic3.

Vincent introduced his activity as "a bit of reading, dictionary work, colouring in and culture". The activity was aimed at getting students involved in a bit of independent learning. As Vincent says:

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Splitting TaskMagic3 files into individual games and activities.

When you create a TaskMagic3 file, remember that, in most cases, you are creating lots of different exercises.

Similarly, when you see a link to download a TaskMagic3 file, remember that this one file provides access to lots of different games and exercises. It's not just one game or activity.

It's easy to forget this. I sometimes come across

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TaskMagic3 French Sample Unit - Basic grammar, articles, negatives etc. - Free download

At the bottom of this post you will find a link to download a free standalone TaskMagic program (which does NOT require TaskMagic) which provides a step-by-step introduction and practice of some French basics.

This unit is ideal for beginners at primary or secondary school level. It covers a lot of high frequency expressions & concepts in a short space of time.

The content of the unit is:

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Text Match exercises - what to match? (3) Gapped words or letters

Text Match is probably the most used component of TaskMagic and can be used in so many different ways...

This series of blog posts - "Text Match exercises - what to match?" - explores some ideas for the kinds of things that teachers can use as the basis for their text matching exercises. Each blog post contains screenshots of - and links to - interactive exercises as well as worksheets which can be viewed online, downloaded, printed etc. (SCROLL DOWN FOR THE WORKSHEETS)

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