I’m taking just a few minutes for a quick share tonight.  In an earlier post, I shared some activities that I developed to integrate culture in all of the communicative modes with my Novice Mid students.  In this evening;s post I’m including a few lessons I created to do the same with my Intermediate Low/French 3 students.   Click here for a packet of activities and keep reading for a short explanation of each lesson.

Lesson 1: In this lesson I played a short video to introduce the tradition of the yule log cake.  I then assigned partners and gave each member of the dyad a different article.  The students read their articles and filled in the information they could find in the packet.  Then they discussed their information with their partner, who had read the opposite article.  Although I intended for the pairs to fill out a Venn diagram as described in the packet, due to time constraints the students just discussed their information and filled in the missing information for the questions in the packet.  This worked out well, as they did a Venn diagram in the next lesson.  Although I didn’t end up assigning the Presentational Activity, I had originally considered adding it, based on timing.

Lesson 2: In this lesson, one partner watched a video about Christmas tree traditions and the other listened to a video on the same topic.  They then discussed the information they found and completed a Venn diagram comparing the information in each source. As in Lesson 1, time didn’t permit me to assign the Presentational activities.

Lesson 3: As in Lesson 2, half of the students read an article while the other half listened to a video.  I was consistent in assigning A/B roles, so that the students who listened in Lesson 2 did the reading in Lesson 3 and vice versa. After the interpretation phase of the lesson, the students discussed their information and took a pair “quiz.”

Although these activities were challenging, the students remained engaged throughout the three class periods I dedicated to these cultural lessons.  Following the third lesson, I introduced the same story project that I described in this post from last year. I did, however, add an interpersonal communication task to the IPA/Learning Stations in which the students used circumlocution to complete these pair crossword puzzles (Partner A, Partner B). My students love these pair crossword puzzles and they were a very effective way to review aspects of French holiday traditions that the students had learned in past years.