How to teach history & culture while remaining in the Target Language
I love history. In fact, for a long time I wanted to be a history teacher but the draw of field trips to France tipped the scale. So I love to be able to incorporate history lessons into my French classes and make connections to their other classes while exposing them to a wider range of vocabulary in context. They get to learn new facts and new language and I get to share my love of history.
One lesson I love to do is a historical comparison with my 8th grade class. It is actually a four part lesson. The first lesson is on the Grand Dérangment, a historical event that I didn’t know about until preparing for this lesson. For information on the Grand Dérangment you can visit this page. I use a slideshow to summarize and tell the story of the Grand Dérangment and the tale of Evangeline and then together we write a summary trying to incorporate all the questions words - Who? When? Where? What? Why?. I have found it is better to talk about the Grand Dérangment on the first day and then tell the tale of Evangeline the next. In 7th grade students studied Québec and we talked about how it was a French colony and then English so it was nice to be able to build off our knowledge from the previous year.
The following day I displayed the title slide on a presentation about the Trail of Tears. I had students think for a moment and write down some words to describe what they know already about the Trail of Tears. I found my students didn’t know much so I was glad to talk about something new. After the slide show we again wrote a summary on the Trail of Tears.
For the next lesson I did the same brainstorming and summarizing activity on a presentation about the Holocaust. I found that my students knew a lot more about the Holocaust than the Trail of Tears since they had studied it in Social Studies and they had visited the Holocaust museum on their trip to D.C. Since it was not new knowledge it allowed them to take in more of the vocabulary.
The following day I gave them this Graphic Organizer:
The key to teaching history and culture in the target language is to limit the information, break it down into simpler sentences and use lots of visual support.
See more posts on teaching history and culture in a Novice class
I asked them to summarize what was unique to each event (the who, what, where, when, why) and we copied it onto the chart. You could do this in French or in English. We then discussed what the events had in common (a group of people who were forced from their homes).
I loved how this lesson allowed us to make connections to their other classes and to previous lessons and had students engaging with French in another way.
This group of 8th grade was very interested in World War II history so I added an additional lesson on the German occupation, French Resistance and the Rafle du Vél d’Hiv.
Wishing you and your students all the best,
Robyn