Learning ressources for adults and older teens

How to improve your Understanding Skills?

Understanding a French conversation, a movie or the News is not always an easy task.
Generally the first thing you can manage is to understand the news especially if it is not spoken too fast. But when there is an accent, or some slang words, it becomes more complcated.

Here are some tips to improve your oral skills:
1. Do private lessons, or a class that focuses on oral skills and conversation, with a smal amount of students.
2. Watch the news in French.
2. Listen to authentic conversations, but don't go too high in a level as you may not understand anything.

How to improve your oral production?

With an action based methodology, you will soon be able to ask and asnwer questions, build more complex dialogs and follow real conversation.
To reinforce your oral skills, it is important to listen to native speakers, but also use the language as much as possible. Don't be afraid to make mistakes - you'll learn so much from them!
1- Read out loud
2- Listen to the news while reading the transcriptions (check RFI and TV5 monde or Youtube videos).
3- Watch a French movie with French subtitles. Listen to a sentence, stop the movie and repeat the sentence out loud.
4- Go to a class and talk as much as you can. In our conversation class, we not only make sure students are interacting and talking a lot, but we also help them understand major mistakes. It’s indeed very important to understand recurring mistakes and to repeat the sentence correctly to make sure you develop the right reflexes.
5- Go on an immersion trip, but be careful, if people don’t correct you, you risk developping bad prononciation habits.

How to improve your written production?

1- Learn your grammar!
Work with a good book, do exercises regularly
2- Write little texts and read it out loud.
You might be able to correct your own mistakes.
3- Take a course in which your teacher will give you written homework.
Many teachers don’t do it, since it’s more work for them (they have to correct your homework at home), but it’s essential for you. Because during the class, more time should be devoted to talking.
4- Take private lessons and work on your weaknesses with your teacher.
It’s good to practice writing in a useful and authentic context for example: writing a letter to friends, writing emails, invitation, professional correspondence etc..

French learning methods

You'll find here a list of Books to learn French as a foreign languages from French publishers. Those are called "méthodes FLE" in French.
https://www.france-education-international.fr/ressources/repertoire-methodes-fle