This year the Spanish 3 teacher and I are working together on our first unit, which is about the Olympic Games. During #AuthRes August, Madame Farabaugh posted about taking advantage of all of the current resources surrounding the Rio Olympics. We loved the idea and are even planning a mini-Olympics for our students to organize and compete in.
The official site for the Rio Olympics is available in both French and Spanish so that is one of our primary resources. There is a lot of opportunity for review of very simple language so that a review unit is not necessary, which I really like Allison Wienhold's thoughts about why she doesn't start with the classic review of verbs and vocabulary from previous levels.
When approaching authentic text like this website, I ask myself what do I want the students to be able to do with this. I don't want them to translate the page; the website already does that for them. With the click of a mouse, they can change the website to English. Sara Elizabeth Cottrell's post about the Babel Fish really got me thinking this summer about finding a reason for the students to need the page in French. The main reason that I can come up with here is that the articles and the biographies will be written by French speakers for French speakers. Therefore, they will provide a different perspective of the Games from the English page. So, I want my students to be able to find information on the page and to be able to understand at least 70% of what is being communicated. Then I want them to be able to talk about it in French.
At this stage, I am thinking I would rather them to have depth of HOW to navigate a single page so that they can then go on and explore other pages at their leisure. That leads me to ask WHAT are the high frequency words that are on a page that they will need to know. Fortunately, there are a lot of cognates in French, but there are some words that are nothing like the English. For example, the word for "events" - there are 16 events in artistic gymnastics. I also think about what are the common questions one has about a sport. For example, is this a men's or women's event? Who are the athletes? When are the matches? Who won? Other than a basic overview, people do not go to the Olympics webpage to find out the details of how a sport is played. Therefore, only the basic sport vocabulary, such as team, ball, and score, are needed.
With Level 3, I know that my students are very apprehensive about all that they have forgotten over the summer. So, after going over one sport page with them and covering the vocabulary, I had them create two Google Slides each for a different sport. One sport needed to be one that they were familiar with, and the other needed to be one that they were less familiar with. I wanted it to be like an infographic so that they could then use it to discuss the sport with a partner. Therefore, the information should cover the basics that come up in a conversation: what, who, where, when. Anything else that they choose to add is icing.
