Assessment (2007-2008)
French teachers

French movies

Florence -English teacher-is speaking

The idea of having our pupils introduce themselves in English and show their school to their Czech and Spanish e-pals through short videos seemed quite feasible with fourth-formers. They are usually incredibly creative and feel at ease with laptops and information technology. Our purpose was twofold : proposing an exercise which demanded imagination and technical skills (that needed to be learnt and mastered quickly) and proving that English is a useful tool to communicate with foreigners, and not only with native speakers.

So Françoise, the Art teacher and Vincent, the ICT teacher helped them with the form - they both thought that most of the pupils were interested and tried to do their best. Predictably enough what turned out to be more difficult was the writing of the scripts. Even though I tried to give them “food for thought” and anticipate their potential linguistic needs, I knew that it would be quite a business! Yet I didn’t want to interfere and only helped them with the grammar, the vocabulary and the pronunciation.  Most of them played the game and tried to express their ideas in English. Rewarding, indeed.

Françoise -Art teacher-is speaking

Here is how I’ve worked with the pupils on their videos.
When I first met them, I explained the project and told them what they were supposed to do. The first thing was to form groups of four pupils, choose a place in our school and decide on the way they wanted to introduce themselves.  (ads, stories, reports …) During our second class, we studied different important notions such as shots, camera angles, sequences … In parallel, they wrote their scripts in English and once that was done, they worked on the cutting of their scripts in shots, the filming and finally on the editing. Each group worked at its own pace, most pupils were really self-sufficient and got on well (only two groups had problems working together). The preparation time was quite long but it was necessary for them to know what they wanted to show and how they could do it. What they preferred was obviously the filming – they had much fun! The cutting and the editing turned out to be quite difficult for some groups which explains why we were a bit behind schedule and didn’t respect the seven weeks that were initially planned to complete the project.