I am fully convinced by Michel Thomas and to me the key is for students to be able to build sentences in small steps by learning its components parts. I am not interested in my students remembering long lists of words which I know they will not retain in the long run anyway. I want my students to become confident in the language they are learning by making connections. I do believe that once you fully understand something, you internalise it and you truly remember it.
Going back to my weekly French lessons, we already learned how to use the structure “c’est/ ce n’est pas…” with food by saying: “c’est / ce n’est pas bon” and also how to use it with words ending in -ible like “possible“. To review and reinforce this structure, I introduced words ending in -able which are also cognates or near-cognates like “confortable” and I taught a new common French expression “comme ci, comme ça” which is used to describe something as “ok” or “so-so”. To this end, I created a Google presentation in which I colour coded words according to their grammatical belongings: nouns are blue, adjectives are green, adverbs are purple and verbs are red: When going through the presentation, I didn’t focus on the grammar but on the reading and pronunciation skills. The last slide enables students to speak freely by starting to build sentences on their own. After going through this presentation by reading each sentence in turns, I asked my two pupils to create their own little books with their own opinions about anything they could think of. The objective was to use the structures in the presentation but adapted by the students themselves. I got largely inspired by Clare Seccombe‘s post about creating your own concertina book. I showed the post to my two students as the pictures on it are self-explanatory. They loved the process of folding their own little books and of being able to write their own sentences. At the end of the task I asked Louis to show and read his book whilst I was recording him. Here is the video of his little presentation: What about you? How do you teach your students to build sentences? Other posts you may enjoy reading: