Dropping Keys

This past Tuesday’s lesson was on how to give directions. I had two main aims to accomplish: to intro direction vocab and to give opportunities to practice giving/following directions.

To cover the vocab, I did something I think was really cool. I changed the nav in my car to French. Using the voice memo on my iPhone, I then recorded it giving me directions from MIIS to my house. I used Audacity to edit the audio, deleting all the empty noise in between instructions, to shorten it to 2m30s. Then I transcribed it. I made a sort of rational deletion cloze thing where I deleted the nord, sud, est, ouest, droite, gauche, this way and that way kind of stuff in some sentences, but left the same terms in others. I’ll paste it in here at the end to show you. If I had taken out every instance of sud, for example, then it wouldn’t have taught them the vocab, it just would have tested them on something they didn’t yet know, but by listening carefully, they could figure out that another instance of the word they needed was just a line or two above or below. Then, because it was so repetitive, as GPS directions tend to be, they were able to notice patterns and guess what the words meant. It was interesting because they seemed alarmed at the first listen and I heard some grumbling “But I don’t know these words!” They got three chances to listen to the text, though, and by the last one, the grumbling stopped and I heard whispering “It says six cents pieds!” Or “I think virer means tourner.” so I knew they were getting it.

After the vocab treatment, we moved on to giving directions. The class did a brainstorm where they all just called out all the direction words they knew in French (some of which they just got from the GPS task which made me happy that they made the connection between the two tasks) and I wrote them on the board loosely categorized into verbs, directions, prepositions, etc. so they had a sort of menu from which to select for the upcoming task. Collectively, they knew them all- continue, pass by, turn, across from, next to, u-turn, etc. (in French), so that was pretty cool. They could then use the list on the board as a reference to help them with the next part.

I asked people to pair off and gave each pair one of those cute, glossy tourist maps of Carmel and a handout with the task instructions and a model exchange. Each person chose 5-6 places in Carmel that they were interested in visiting. Then student 1 told her partner the first place where she was starting and then the second place she wanted to go. Student 2 then navigated her partner to that location on the map using all the words they learned in the first part of the lesson. The pairs continued until each student had successfully arrived at all of her 5-6 locations, then they switched roles. At the end, I put the map up on the overhead and asked for some volunteers. I chose two places, for example, an art gallery on Ocean and Sunset Center, and the students called out the directions to guide me there as I used a marker to highlight my route. They seemed to think it was funny to lead me astray- and it was!

This lesson was great fun and I was really pleased with how it went. There was one hiccough, though. As I set them loose on the second part with the maps, I saw a hole in my directions where I realized it wasn’t clear that each person was to complete all of her 5-6 places to create sequence of directions before switching with the partner. I thought that they might try to trade back and forth, like I do one, you do one. I quickly visited each group and discovered that only 2 of the 12 pairs had misinterpreted it and I set them straight, so disaster averted! I will need to revise my directions before the next time I do that lesson, though.

I continue to have a real issue with directions and need to work more on clarity and sufficiency.

The students were all quite talkative, seemed at ease, and I only heard minimal English snippets, which was fine. After class, a couple students stopped on the way out to tell me it was fun and thank you.

Here’s the listening activity in case you’re interested.

ORIGINAL FULL-TEXT:

1. Calcul de l’itinéraire en cours. Veuillez suivre l’itinéraire affiché.
2. Maintenant, virer à gauche.
3. Ensuite, à la suivante, virer à droite.
4. Maintenant, virer à droite.
5. Suivre cette route pendant un mile.
6. À un quart de mile, virer à droite.
7. Maintenant, virer à droite, ensuite dans six cents pieds, continuer tout droit.
8. Maintenant, à l’entrée suivante de l’autoroute, continuer tout droit vers CA-1 sud.
9. Suivre cette route pendant un mile.
10. Préparez vous à virer à droite.
11. À un quart de mile, virer à droite.
12. Maintenant, à la deuxième, virer à droite.
13. Ensuite, à la suivante, virer légèrement à droite.
14. Maintenant, virer légèrement à droite.
15. À un quart de mile, virer légèrement à droite.
16. À un quart de mile, vous arriverez à destination.
17. Elle se trouve sur le côté droit de la route.
18. Vous êtes arrivé à destination.

AND WITH DELETIONS: 

1. Calcul de l’itinéraire en cours. Veuillez suivre l’itinéraire affiché.
2. Maintenant, virer à gauche.
3. Ensuite, à la suivante, ______________________________.
4. Maintenant, __________________________________.
5. Suivre cette route pendant _________________.
6. À un quart de mile, _________________________________.
7. Maintenant, virer à droite, ensuite ________________________________, continuer tout droit.
8. Maintenant, à l’entrée suivante de l’autoroute, _______________________________ vers CA-1 sud.
9. _______________________________ pendant un mile.
10. Préparez vous à virer ___________________________.
11. ____________________________________, virer à droite.
12. Maintenant, __________________________________, virer à droite.
13. Ensuite, à la suivante, virer légèrement à droite.
14. Maintenant, virer légèrement à droite.
15. _________________________________, virer légèrement à droite.
16. À un quart de mile, ____________________________ à destination.
17. Elle se trouve sur le côté droit _________________________.
18. Vous êtes arrivé à destination.