Frenchies in a French lesson

Bonjour!

This is Marie, here I am again! This time, it is to tell you a bit more about my other activities in Pułtusk, and more specifically about one of the visits I did with Julia to a French lesson at Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Piotra Skargi w Pułtusku, last month. We visited three classes of different levels but I will tell you more about the most recent one. Here are my impressions of a native sharing her culture with foreigners learning her language.

We had "carte blanche" for two hours, which means we could do whatever we wanted with the students, providing they could hear us speaking French. We decided to focus more on cultural content to avoid complicated grammatical things and prepared some games and quizzes about French culture, food and about music from French-speaking countries.

We started by presenting ourselves. Then, to know them better, we asked questions to this small group, mainly composed of girls… First surprise for me!

We went on with our program but I was feeling confused because I didn’t know in which language to speak: I had to speak French so that they hear a native speaker but, as they started French the year before, I had to speak slowly and to switch into English to make sure that they could understand. Speaking slowly in my mother tongue in front of a class is also quite unusual for me… I am more used to informal and personal conversations so it was a learning experience for me too.

I really enjoyed to see them trying to answer the questions, to guess in which order we eat our meals in France (apparently not so easy for foreigners!), where did the dishes we presented come from (no, crêpes do not come from Paris but from Bretagne! 😊) and to associate artists and titles to songs. That’s how we can measure the cultural differences: for instance, they didn’t know Mika, who I consider internationally well-known. 

It was really nice to talk and exchange with them! And when we spoke about the language café, they seemed to be interested. Maybe some future participants? We left the high school happy of this two-hour session.

I think I like the format of the language-café more but I am also happy to be a direct interlocutor for students learning my language, in the formal frame of a lesson at school and to try to make them be interested in it. Let’s see what happens in the future!

See you soon, dear reader!

Marie 🌝