Testing

Meeting Stavanger

27-28.05.2010

The testing

• In two schools for children with special behavioural problems (primary and secondary)

• The testing was conducted by class teachers in October 2009 - January 2010

• The children had little or no knowledge of French

What was tested?

• The acquisition of names of foods in French in a fun/playful manner

• The increase in their awareness of other cultures

Which best practices were used?

• Speech bubbles and Divis (making videos and saying words in the foreign language)

• Eat (using ICT and working on the theme of food, eating and cultural awareness)

What did the children/adolescents do?

• They chose a recipe from the EAT website• They cooked the recipe and filmed the project• They listed the names of the ingredients from

the website and repeated/recorded them• They subtitled the video of the cooking• They cooked a local recipe and made a similar

video to send to the children in the other country (in English) and compared the two recipes to decide which dish they preferred

How did the experiment go?

• It was very successful in terms of motivation (the children enjoyed the practical tasks including the eating and didn’t mind the language element, it was part of the fun)

• They enjoyed recording the names of food and making the video and subtitles and they were very proud of the results

Recommendations (1)

• This project needed a lot of organising from the leader (ingredients, shopping, facilities, equipment, cameras, computers etc) and is best for small groups of learners.

• The children needed a lot of help to edit their video and upload the result on the Internet (but they also had a lot of fun)

Recommendations (2)

The idea of filming an activity in which a foreignlanguage os also learnt can be applied to manythemes (many easier than cooking!)Ex: ball games, hide & seek, society games, TV

games/competition ideas or drama (acting a well known scenario, song, musical, murder story etc)