French Culture Reading A-Level Cultural

Have you ever wondered how to get your students to improve their cultural understanding of the French-speaking world?

How to allow them to work independently - yet at their own pace, while sharing and discussing their findings with their peers?

How to ensure that they go beyond the facts, and target the top band of the assessment criteria by showing their ability to analyse the information that they have uncovered in their research?

But maybe more importantly that they do not give up halfway through and that they feel completely prepared for the speaking examination?

To further my work on the 72 speaking cards for the AQA A-Level speaking examination in French which you can find here: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/72-cards-for-the-aqa-a-levels-speaking-examination-in-french-paper-3-all-themes-12011519 , I prepared for my students a 36-page reading guide, covering all the sub-sub themes (I call them granular themes) for the speaking part of their test.

Each page consists of the following, for every single granular theme studied:

• 2 recent (2015-2018) web links to sites providing factual information, in a paragraph form, forming the base for a three-tiered reading comprehension activity.
• 5 further demanding questions on the granular theme, the answers to which require a demonstration of analysis.
• each worksheet can be set for homework, peer or teacher assessment, classroom presentation or a combination of any of these.

What you are getting there is a lot more than the sum of its parts: it’s a complete system to get your students to read around the subject independently, something that you can plan with them months in advance and review with them when the time is right.