Schneider adorns her classroom with French learning material which quite literally fills the room with French | Mik Horvath/MBC
In Ontario secondary schools it is mandatory for students to take a French learning course up until grade nine.
St. Joseph’s Catholic High School French Secondary Language teacher Rebecca Schneider has been recently working with the Neurolinguistic Approach (NLA) method of instructing French.
NLA is a method of teaching people French, developed by retired Newfoundland and Labrador’s Memorial University professor Joan Netten and retired Université du Québec à Montréal professor Claude Germain.
It’s a different approach in that there is a greater emphasis on the speaking part of the linguistics course to routinely develop speaking and listening comprehension skills.
Schneider utilizes cue cards with about a dozen or more questions to direct different stages of a French conversation and students use the cards to have those conversations with one another.
It’s a lot of call and response and the questions are about daily life to add context to the content.
Schneider said it’s a much more involved method that really drills in the application of French vocabulary rather than reading textbook prompts over and over.
In her more than 20 years of instructing this course, has noticed a big jump in the students’ ability in learning and speaking French.
She has gotten a lot of positive feedback from parents who have said their kids are picking up the language faster and are able to hold longer conversations.
Schneider mentioned there were some people from France on exchange and they also saw how well SJHS students could speak the native tongue.
The style of discussion also helps the students to develop general communications skills which can improve overall academics.
Schneider said that style works in tandem with the school’s more strict policy on cellphone use in an effort to maintain a stronger connection with their students.
NLA has been so effective that Schneider will be adopting it into her lesson plan for the foreseeable future.
One of her favourite aspects of NLA is how easy it is to incorporate it into other lessons which makes it a very versatile teaching tool.
(Written by Mik Horvath)
