Students will be “seeing” and hearing French at Conisbrough.

January 1964

South Yorkshire Times January 11

Students will be “seeing” and hearing French at Conisbrough.

Teaching method new to this area.

Some 500 students of Conisbrough Northcliffe High School are to be taught conversational French by a new audiovisual method which is probably unique in this area.

The scheme is believed to be the latest result of research at the St Clux language research establishment, and was stressed at him Ministry of Education conference in Paris, attended by Mr A.M.Wilson, so Senior Master and head of the schools French Department.

Tapes and Slides.

The equipment consists of a tape recorder, a projector and specially prepared tapes, and slides. The tapes have been compiled from research of the past five years.

Mr Wilson said this week, “this is the best possible example. The children could have. It will take a great burden of the teacher, for no matter how good your French is, you can never speak it as well as a native. The strips are designed to realise a situation visually – for instance, by showing someone going into a Cafe – while the tapes develop a conversation orally.

“After a time the children will learn to repeat the conversation with less emphasis on pronunciation, and more on rhythm and intonation.”

As a Nucleus.

With specially prepared textbooks, using the vocabulary of the tape recorders, the Northcliffe students will probably follow up this initial course with written work.

Taking part will be 23 on-screen classes, each of which will probably use the apparatus once a week as a nucleus for other French lessons.

Mr Wilson thinks it is possibly the first of its kind in the area. Although the system has been adopted in some Leeds schools.

This is not the only way in which Northcliffe is tackling the problem of teaching spoken French, for the school already holds occasional assembly services and prayers in simple French, when even the assembly notices are translated.