Dantzel+Cenatiempo+Lesson+Plan+(French)




 * Lesson Goal:** Students will learn how to listen to a text in French and prove comprehension, analysis, and beginning translation skills.


 * Instructional Standards:** Listening comprehension ability, vocabulary skill set, beginning translation skills.


 * Student Level:** Intermediate level high school student or Advanced level immersion student.


 * Materials required:** Internet access.


 * Technique:**

For my lesson I wanted to use Librivox.org to provide student access to listening comprehension activities. The entire lesson is based around listening and responding to a French poem read into the public domain on Librivox.

My lesson plan meets several instructional standards for high school students. It asks them to practice their listening comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and it stretches their abilities into the realm of beginning translation. By slowly escalating these activities in difficulty, I can provide students with adequate scaffolding. It also helps to build one phase on top of another while using the same poem, thus keeping the Zone of Proximal Development about where it should be.


 * Procedure:**

The poem is called "A Une Passante" by the famous French symbolist poet, Charles Baudelaire. For this lesson, I would first have students listen to the poem once in its entirety.

Whether I have recorded the poem myself or whether it is read by another contributor, students can listen to it by clicking on the link I provide:

[|A Une Passante Audio File]

After listening to the poem once, students would then fill out this short worksheet. It asks them to listen to the poem two times with the sheet in front of them, circling any words they hear.

Baudelaire Worksheet 1

For the second part of the activity, students are given the text of the poem and asked to listen to the recording with the text in front of them.

A Une Passante French Text

The final component of the activity moves toward eventual translation skills. Students are asked to underline or emphasize words in the text of the poem that they didn't understand, and use their dictionary to look up the meanings of these words. Afterward, they are to fill out a beginning translation worksheet that I provide:

Baudelaire Worksheet 2

After making their own translations of key sentences, students will read my translation of the poem into English. This will serve as a conclusion to the entire activity and bring them full circle from hearing the poem for the first time without reference, all the way through analysis to synthesizing their own interpretations.

English Translation

For those of you who don't read French and don't want to click that link, let me just post this for you. Reading a good poem never hurt anybody (that we know of.)




 * To a Passing Woman**

The deafening street screamed around me. Long, thin, in widow’s black, such majestic pain, A woman passed, with one neat, delicate hand Holding up the petticoats of her long dress;

Nimble and dignified, with her white sculpted leg. Me, I was drinking in, anxious like a lunatic, The sky blue of her eye with its hint of storm, That sweetness which can fascinate, that pleasure which can kill.

A lightning bolt…then blackness!—Fugitive beauty Whose glance into my eyes has made me suddenly reborn, Will I never see you again, except in the hereafter?

Besides, that is so far from now! Too late! Never maybe! For I don’t know where you are running to; you don’t know where I am going, O you who I could have truly loved, O you who surely knew it!

//–Charles Baudelaire//