| Body | By Renée Marshall, CASLS Curriculum Consultant
This activity provides a way to use a corpus with a guiding question or hypothesis in mind. In French the word "donc" is used often in L1 speech but not often in L2 speech. This activity has students listening to an interview and paying attention to when and how the speaker uses "donc." After brainstorming and discussing some of the different usages of "donc" in French speech, students use lextutor.ca to find other similar examples to what they found in the interview. To adapt this to another language, pick a word that is commonly used in spoken speech by L1 speakers but not by L2 speakers. You can use one of the corpora discussed in our February 2, February 9, and February 16 Topic of the Week articles. Otherwise, you can search for a corpus in your target language using Google or a similar search engine. If you cannot find one for your language you can make your own corpus like our editor, Lindsay Marean, describes in this week's Topic of the Week. While the activity here uses a French example and French corpus, the handout is in English so that it can be easily adapted for use in other languages.
Objectives:
- Students will be able to identify and hypothesize L1 usage of the word "donc" in spoken speech.
- Students will be able to use a corpus to identify similar examples of L1 usage of the word "donc" in spoken speech.
Resources:
How do Francophone speakers use the word "donc" in conversation? handout
Teacher Resource sheet
Procedure:
- Let students know that today they are going to be active language learners and create hypotheses of how language is used based on examples from L1 speech in an interview and from a French language corpus. If you have not talked about or used language corpora in your class yet, you may want to briefly discuss what a corpus is and why one might use it.
- Pass out the How do Francophone speakers use the word "donc" in conversation? to all students. Have them read directions for #1 (or go over as a whole class).
- Play the interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEFiWwqG06c) for students three times. You may, on the third listen, want to pause and replay a few of the places where Romain Duris or the interviewer uses "donc." (see Teacher Resource handout for the time stamps of when "donc" is used in the video) You may also want to transcribe some of the sentences used in the interview that include "donc" so that students have the visual, written form in addition to the spoken.
- Move to #2 on the handout and have students work with a partner or group to examine the way "donc" was used in the interview. Their goal is to come up with different ways "donc" is used. If they are having trouble with this task, you can model one usage as an example with them. For instance, in the interview Romain Duris uses "donc" combined with "euh..." a few times. In this case, what does "donc" mean here? What is its function? It's used as a filler word, just like "euh..." in French or "um..." and "so..." in English. One hypothesis then of "donc" usage is that French speakers use "donc" as a filler or pause word.
- Move to #3 on the handout. You may want to model how to navigate the website and go through the steps as a whole class before having them do it themselves. You can also assign #3 as homework and then complete the rest of the lesson in the next class. In Step #3 students are using a corpus of French language to find examples of L1 usage of "donc" in spoken speech. The goal is for them to find 3 examples of usage of "donc" that coincide with ONE of their hypotheses from #2.
- After students collect their three examples, have them discuss their findings with a partner. Then as a class, using student hypotheses, their examples, and examples from the interview, highlight some common usages of "donc." Refer to the Teacher Resource handout for a few examples of "donc" usage. (Note that different sources like websites or books may group together the various usages of "donc" in different ways.)
- Encourage students to try out using "donc" more often in their conversations.
Note: Often spoken speech and written speech are different; certain rules may apply for spoken usage while different rules may apply for written usage. The http://lextutor.ca/conc/fr/ website also includes an option for searching for "donc" in written speech if you would like to examine that in a future lesson.
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