Lesson activity

Ruby Bridges interview (link)

In France, the lessons are organized in ‘sequences’ and have to include cultural, grammatical, phonological and lexical objectives.

Class: 14/15 year-old teenagers (3ème in France)
Objective: Oral comprehension about Ruby Bridges (African-American woman)and her experience at school in the 1960s in New Orleans.

—> the USA and the Civil Rights Movement (cultural objective)
—> simple past, simple past continuous, passive voice (grammatical objective)

—> pronunciation of -ed (simple past)

Organization in the classroom: pupils are divided into small groups in the classroom (3 or 4).

STEPS:

- Anticipation: before listening to the interview, we usually introduce the topic linked to the main document we want to study with pictures, music.
—> ex: ‘The problem we all live with’ by Norman Rockwell

The pupils describe what they see, make hypothesis. The aim is to point them in the right direction.

- First listening with no interruption. The pupils don’t take notes.

-  Second listening: the pupils focus on the place, moment, people, topic. They take notes. While listening to the interview the teacher makes pauses every time there is an important piece of information.

-  Third listening: the pupils write as many elements as possible.

-  The most important part is communication: the pupils need to speak as much as possible. If they make mistakes, pupils are invited to rephrase sentences and ideas. They give their opinions.

- Sharing: the teacher asks the pupils to make complete sentences and writes key words on the board. Then the teacher writes the sentences, said by the pupils thanks to the key words, on the computer. This constitutes the summary of the lesson. The pupils write it down in their copybooks.