It can be hard to incorporate authentic resources into novice level lessons, given students’ limited vocabulary. Sometimes we have to get creative and think outside the box in how we use them and how we scaffold them so that the students can access them and get something out of it. I recently showed a short cultural video to my students and in this post, I will share how I made it accessible to my students.
Before we begin, I like to show my students where the country we’re looking at is on a map. The video is about a boy named Mansour who lives in Dakar, Senegal, so I show a map zoomed in on Senegal, and one showing more of Africa. Email subscribers, click here to watch the video. There are many similar videos about the daily lives of children in countries all over the world on ARTE’s YouTube Channel.
I usually subtitle videos I show in both French and English. There are automatic captions you can show on the YouTube video, but you can’t show both languages at once and there are some inaccuracies. There are a lot of words in the video that my students will recognize, but at this level, they need subtitles to help them fill in the blanks. Contact me if you would like access to the subtitled version.
While watching the video, students circled all the statements on the sheet below that were true:
After going over the answers in French, we did some cultural comparisons. Students were asked to look at the differences in meals, transportation, and school between the U.S. and Senegal. Email subscribers, click here to view the presentation.
While I begin this discussion in French, eventually I expand the conversation in English. When we get to the technology slide, I point out that while Mansour’s classroom doesn’t have an interactive whiteboard, that doesn’t mean no classrooms in Senegal or in Africa have interactive whiteboards. Sometimes students learn a piece of cultural information and assume it applies universally to everyone in a given locale. There are a lot of misconceptions about Africa, one being that everyone lives in poverty. I think it’s important to explain to students that one classroom in Africa or anywhere else is just one classroom, and that all classrooms don’t look the same.
Finally, in this video, students see some cultural similarities between life in Senegal and life in France, notably their school system and what they eat for breakfast. While I’m not a history teacher so I don’t delve too deep, I do introduce bits of history into my lessons from time to time. During our lesson about Black history in New Orleans (click here to read my post about it), students learn that the first Africans to come to the city were enslaved people from the Senegambia region of Africa. In this lesson, I explain to students that many of the aspects of French culture that they see in Senegal, including the use of the language itself, are due to the fact that the country was a French colony for several centuries.
How might you use this video in your class? What are your favorite video companion activities? Tell me in the comments.
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