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French Primary Sentence Builders is a workbook aimed at beginner students, co-authored by five modern languages educators with over 90 years of extensive classroom experience between the five, both in the UK and internationally.

This book is fully photocopiable but may not be scanned and shared

This ‘no-frills’ book contains 10 units of work on very popular themes, jam-packed with graded vocabulary-building, listening, reading, translation, retrieval practice and writing activities. Key vocabulary, lexical patterns and structures are recycled and interleaved throughout. Each unit in the book includes:

• a sentence builder modelling the target constructions, introduced by questions to guide communication;
• a set of Listening-As-Modelling activities to train decoding skills, sound awareness, speech-segmentation, lexical-retrieval and parsing skills;
• a set of reading tasks focusing on both the meaning and structural levels of the text;
• a set of translation tasks aimed at consolidation through retrieval practice;
• a set of writing tasks targeting essential writing micro-skills such as spelling, functional and positional processing, editing and communication of meaning.
• answers to all activities, including transcripts

Based on the E.P.I. principle that learners learn best from comprehensible and highly patterned input flooded with the target linguistic features, the authors have carefully designed each and every text and activity to enable the student to process and produce each item many times over. Alongside the units you will find: No Snakes No Ladders tasks created to practise speaking skills with an engaging and fun board game that can be photocopied and played in groups of 3 students.

Please note that The Language Gym www.language-gym.com website is an ideal supplement to this booklet. Our website recycles every single lexical and structural item found in this book many times over via self-marking vocabulary and reading workouts, in addition to engaging and fun games and a powerful vocab, listening, sentence & verb trainer.

This book is fully photocopiable but may not be scanned and shared

Equivalent to ISBN 9783949651359

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This book is meant as a revision resource for GCSE French. It can be used independently by students as well as for teacher-directed classroom practice. It contains 16 units which focus mainly on the themes: myself, family and relationships, daily activities, my role model, hobbies and leisure.

Each unit consists of a knowledge organiser recapping the target sentence patterns and lexical items, a series of receptive vocabulary building activities; a set of narrow reading texts and activities; a set of translation tasks. The tasks are graded in order to pose an increasingly demanding but manageable cognitive load and challenge and are based on Dr Conti’s P.I.P.O. framework:

Pre-reading tasks (activation of prior knowledge and pre-teaching)

In-reading tasks (intensive exploitation of texts)

Post-reading tasks (consolidation)

Output (pushed-output tasks)

Consistent with Dr Conti’s E.P.I. approach, each of the 16 units in the book provide extensive recycling of the target lexical items both within each unit and throughout the book, across all the dimensions of receptive and productive processing, i.e.: orthography (single letters and syllables), lexis (both words and chunks), grammar/syntax (with much emphasis on functional and positional processing), meaning and discourse.

The recycling occurs through input-flooding and forced retrieval through a wide range of engaging, tried and tested, classic Conti tasks (more than 20 per unit). These include student favourites such as slalom writing, faulty translation, spot the missing detail, sentence puzzles, etc.

Table of contents

1 Introducing yourself

2 Describing yourself, your family and friends

3 Talking about your hobbies and interests

4 Describing a typical day in school

5 Describing what you do after school

6 Talking about a typical weekend

7 Talking about what you did last weekend

8 Talking about when you were younger

9 Discussing the qualities of a good friend

10 Describing the qualities of a good partner

11 Saying why you don’t get along with people

12 Saying why I get along with people

13 Saying why I argue with my parents

14 Discussing why couples break up

15 Talking about a person you admire

16 Bringing it all together – Parts 1-5

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This booklet contains exercises for students to fill in .

The French Listening Booklet matches to the minutest details the content of the 19 units included in the best-selling workbook for beginner-to-pre-intermediate learners “French sentence builders”, by the same authors.

For best results, the two books should be used together.

This book fully implements Dr Conti’s popular approach to listening-skills instruction, L.A.M. (aka Listening-As-Modelling), laid out in his seminal work: “Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Learners how to Listen” (Conti and Smith, 2019).

L.A.M. is based on the concept that listening instruction should train students in the mastery of the key micro-listening skills identified by cognitive psychologists.

Each unit contains around 13 listening tasks, which provide continuous and extensive recycling of the target constructions and vocabulary items and address the development of the key listening micro-skills.

The tasks include engaging and tested Conti classics such as: “Spot the intruder”, “Missing details”, “Faulty transcript”, “Break the flow”, “Faulty translation”, “Gapped translation” and “Listening slalom”, alongside more traditional listening comprehension tasks.

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The latest words in each language have been added, reflecting all aspects of life today, from computing and technology to lifestyle and business. Additional features include guides to French and English pronunciation, as well as help with both French and English verbs.

The Oxford Essential French Dictionary is ideal for anyone in need of a handy quick reference. An essential book for the study of French.

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