If you already sponsor a chapter of the Société Honoraire de Français ( SHF ) or Jeunes Amis du Français (JAF) or are considering founding one, please join us. After presenting an overview, including opportunities for awards, materials, and activities, the presenters look forward to hearing about your own experiences. Whether it be to recognize your outstanding students, provide them with service opportunities, or build an esprit de corps through fun activities, this organization can enrich and promote your program.
This session explores the importance of creating context in both traditional and immersion language classrooms to foster authentic connections to the language. We'll discuss practical strategies for helping students bridge cultural and linguistic gaps, build understanding, and increase motivation. The session also challenges the assumption that immersion learners automatically connect to the language, offering approaches to address gaps and help students engage more meaningfully with the language.
The transformative assessment approach of standards-based grading (SBG) aligns student performance with the ACTFL World-Readiness Standards (Can-Do Statements and proficiency benchmarks), promoting transparent grading practices rather than penalizing mistakes or emphasizing task completion. Recent research and pertinent questions around student perspectives, homework, grading categorization, assessment anxiety, and varying challenges between secondary and post-secondary implementation will be discussed. Participants are invited to bring and share insights and experiences regarding SBG with the group.
Current and graduating students of la Société Honoraire de Français will discuss how they helped French classes become a thriving community that fosters connection through one shared interest: the French language and cultures. They will elaborate on how this connection came to be, what has worked, what has not, and how other programs might be able to implement a few of these ideas into their own, regardless of their challenges or circumstances.
Invite your students to plan a class trip to different Francophone regions using Airbnb.fr and other authentic sites. The tasks will whet students’ appetites for la Francophonie, reinforce communication around travel and housing and facilitate comparisons between the places they discover and “chez nous.” As a task-based assessment, the AirBnB project incorporates ACTFL’s recently updated world-readiness standards. Participants will leave the session with slides and links that can be easily adapted to their needs.
Discover strategies for integrating a daily/weekly culture segment from 46 francophone countries into your French classroom. This session includes a supplemental activity to expand on francophone culture as well as tips for organized lesson preparation across multiple classes. Enhance your teaching with practical approaches to bring the richness of francophone culture to your students.
This session will explore the many facets of la Francophonie readily available to us via daily technology. Access to often free French-language resources allows us to come closer than ever before to recreating a surround-sound experience, traveling virtually to French communities both around the world and closer to home, and embracing a novel conceptualization of “le Français chez nous.” We will sample a variety of listening, reading, writing, and speaking exercises designed around the integration of contemporary French news clips, music videos, podcasts, TV shows, and films. Reflections will be shared with regard to scaffolding activities appropriately for different levels from middle school through university courses, and participants will be invited to contribute to an ongoing database of shared links with accompanying exercises for future use.
