Under this broad topic heading, a wide range of tasks can be achieved. We have some suggestions and no doubt schools will have lots of original ideas too. We have tried to include some activities which could be tackled by pupils of all abilities; some require more language input than others and all pupils should be able to accomplish something. We have also tried to use the unique nature of the Internet to address the concepts of authenticity, audience and purpose.
Pupils use the resources of the Internet to research a region in a country where the language they are studying is spoken. Teachers can refer to the languages pages for some advice and examples of useful sites; you could also try doing a search on the region or towns and cities in the region you would like to target to see whether your pupils are likely to find appropriate useful information.
These tasks assume that pupils have met and learned the descriptive and/or presentational language they will need. Teachers need to identify which languiage elements pupils will need to know in order to be able to do the tasks.
For the least able, this might be a list of nouns of places of interest and leisure activities - "There are lots of (interesting) places to visit in Oslo: a folk museum, a swimming pool, 4 cinemas etc.
Other pupils might present their information in the form ofDepending on the information available, information on accommodation and travel could be included for some or all pupils.
"Vous pouvez visiter les endroits suivants: Nice; Strasbourg; Clermont-Ferrand ou Rennes. Choisissez un seul et trouvez ce qu'il y a à faire là-bas. Vous aimez bien (le ciné). Est-ce que l'endroit que vous avez choisi vous donne des possibilités?
Préparez un petit rapport sur l'endroit pour attirer les autres visiteurs"
A task to prepare an oral presentation could include the notion of a
particular audience for the presentation.
Pupils might also be given the task of presenting the information in a
particular style, for example in the style of a television travel programme,
or a presentation aimed at teenagers of their own age.
If individuals or groups of pupils research different towns or areas, the initial presentations can be used for a further task. In this case, the initial presentations would probably be most effective if done in a similar style, rather than with a variety of audiences in mind. Pupils listen to the oral presentations with the task of identifying the most suitable choice of town/region for a particular purpose e.g.
a family holiday with young childrenWhen pupils have made their choice, they state which area they have chosen for a particular group and explain their reasons. This could be an individual or a group activity and could be done orally and/ or in writing.
Following the oral activities, pupils could go on to writing tasks.
At a simple level, information could be entered on to a grid. When complete about all the towns/areas described, this grid could be used for further oral work. This could be at a simple or a more extended level:
"Where can you visit a water-park? Aigues-Mortes."A postcard home from an imaginary holiday or exchange visit in the region. At a simple level, this could be a gap-fill task, at higher levels, pupils write in response to a model given, or totally independently.
A brochure aimed at a particular audience, e.g. young people of the pupils' age, people interested in sporting holidays. This could involve little writing as captions for pictures, or more extensive text.
An imaginary diary of a holiday in the region.
All these tasks can be done on paper or with a computer. Gap-fill and text reconstruction tasks can be set up with a word-processor, which can be used for the independent writing tasks. It may be possible to download photographs or other graphics from the Internet site to include in brochures, for example, using desktop publishing software.
It would be possible to compile a computer database from the information acquired about a number of towns and regions. The bank of data created could be used as the source materials for other language work e.g. comparisons of facilities and leisure activities available, reasons for differences, comparisons of costs etc. These could be speaking and/or writing tasks.
More detail about this type of activity, and help with planning can be obtained from the Project Officer.
As a follow-on activity to the activity researching information from Internet sources, pupils could work on the task of presenting their own town or home area in the foreign language. Ultimately the intention would be to create something for display on the Internet, but, in preparation, this could take a variety of forms including speaking and writing.
The written products could be enhanced by including photographs of places of interest. Images can be scanned for use on computers and a video still camera allows photographs to be taken directly onto disk which are easily converted for use. With appropriate software, scanned or digitised images can be used in desktop publishing or in creating multimedia presentations, which incorporate text, images and sound.
Writing can also be in a computer-generated form suitable for up-loading on to the Project's Schools' pages section on the Internet, where other schools in the project, and perhaps, eventually, all Internet users, could see the results.
Pupils could make decisions about what to include and about whether to prepare a general description and/or descriptions aimed at different user groups - teenagers, students, families, business visitors, a twin town etc.
Information could include details of accommodation and travel facilities as well as tourist information.
When planning pages for the Internet, you need to seek advice from your IT co-ordinator to know how to prepare text and images appropriately.
Incidentally, while researching the availability of information in foreign languages, it crossed the Project Officer's mind to have a look at the tourist information available from Britain. The few sites she looked at were rather disappointing, so that could give a real purpose to this type of activity. It also raises questions of providing information about the home town or area in more than one foreign language, as well as consulting your colleagues in the English department about a contribution in English. There could be opportunities for some language awareness work here. Involving the English department in this one aspect of the activity, as well as widening the scope across the curriculum in a manageable way, might also help to generate discussion about Internet activities in greater depth than your pupils could manage in the foreign language.
Pupils could obtain information about sport from the Internet. This could be used in a variety of ways. A simple task could be to search for some results involving teams from German/Spanish/French speaking countries to present a brief sports report. More able pupils could compose additional items of comment about matches and/or teams' positions and progress in the relevant league. Written reports could take the form of newspaper articles.
A full sports report could also be prepared using information researched about a range of sporting activities. This could take the form of a radio bulletin or a television programme (which could be recorded on video).
Weather
Meteosat images are available for France. These cover today, the previous day and also forecasts for the next day in the form of meteosat images. These could be used to prepare oral or written weather reports. At the simplest level, pupils could describe the weather in a few regions from the evidence of the images. More demanding tasks could involve preparing a radio or television weather slot using a greater range of language. Pupils might be able to incorporate different styles of expression for different radio or television stations.
Paris Participer
There is a site on the Internet which invites classes to send a photo of the class with some text to the World Wide Web. To begin with, you might like to consider sending a description of your class(es) involved in the Project to the Project's Schools' Pages. Photos would be a real bonus, but I'm sure the young people involved would love to read about each other and what they are doing. We could justify the text being in the foreign language by intending its eventual destination to be international via the Internet.
YEAR 12
We have not included details of learning activities aimed at Year 12 pupils because we envisage that they will use the Internet as another resource for researching the topic on which they are currently engaged, alongside books and paper resources, CD-ROMs etc.
At first they could look at the small number of sites which we suggest. Later they could access the Internet via one of the general lists of sites whcih are available. The information will be used in the same way as the other information with which they deal at this level.
