Coffee Break French Reading Club for schools

The Coffee Break French Reading Club for Schools provides resources for teachers to help learners increase their understanding and practise the vital skills of reading for comprehension and translation.

This resource is being provided free of charge to teachers during the 2021 COVID pandemic. Each week we will be providing two or three texts along with accompanying resources:

1. PDF 1 - the 'presentation' version of the text which features a full-screen version of the text over one or two "slides", plus a slide with comprehension questions and an additional slide featuring a section of the text for translation.
2. PDF 2 ("Answer scheme") - a "handout" version of the text, comprehension questions and answers, plus a "suggested translation".
3. Audio - the audio of the text which includes a version of the text read at normal speed, then at a slower speed, providing listening practice for your students.

This resource is for teachers

Please do not share the link for these resources to your students or their parents. We are making these resources available to teachers in order that you can share the audio and text resources with your learners in the most effective way. You should not click on the "sign up" button unless you are a teacher.

How to use the resource with your students

We understand that teachers will want to use these resources in different ways. For this reason, we have made all the resources available for download. You can therefore download the audio file and both PDFs and share them on whichever virtual learning environment you are working with. We have included only minimal instructions on each slide of PDF 1, so you may wish to provide your own instructions for your students. There are various ways to make use of these resources:

• Your students can work independently through the reading text, using the audio version to aid comprehension, completing the questions and the translation challenge, then use the Answer Scheme to check their answers and the translation challenge.
• Alternatively you could choose to set a listening task for your students, and share the audio file in the first place. Thereafter you could share the main document (PDF 1) which will provide the text and optional questions and translation challenge.
• You may choose to provide additional activities to your students. We have deliberately not provided specific tasks as we understand that every teacher will come up with different tasks for their own students. Tasks which have proved popular include "identify all the imperfect tenses in paragraph one"; "find the French for "..." in this text"; "make a note of any feminine adjective endings in paragraph two"; etc.