Reading in French can be a struggle for beginners; however, there are ways to improve French reading comprehension. First of all, it is an excellent way to improve fluency, learn new words, expand vocabulary, get a better understanding of how the language is structured, and of course, connect you with the culture.
But how can you implement reading in French without boring your students to death? How can you keep them interested in learning and engaging in a meaningful way? My 3 Step Guide to French Reading Comprehension for Beginners gives you the tips you need to improve student reading comprehension in French.
step #1 for improving french reading comprehension is to Pick appropriate French reading material for beginners
Even the best learner can dread reading in French if the reading material is something they aren’t interested in at all. To help get students excited about reading, you need to connect with them, and then find out what their interests are and what they like to read in their native language. A simple idea would be to do a quick survey or to have a class discussion. Compile a list of themes or genres.
Of course, you will eventually need to cover other themes that aren’t their favorite in order to expose them to more vocabulary and language diversity, but this is a great place to start.
Another criterion is to pick reading material adapted to your students’ levels. It wouldn’t make any sense to start students off with a 500-page chapter book written by Alexandre Dumas. Instead, you will need to use highly contextual and predictable texts for beginners. At times, I use texts that I know my students will understand easily in order to boost their confidence, and at other times I switch to materials that are a little bit more challenging that feature new sentence structures and themes.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of texts that are great for improving French reading comprehension for beginners:
Pattern books
Picture books
Magazines
Movie descriptions
Comics
Cereal boxes (yes, sometimes they have little stories or games on the back. Anything really that will pique their curiosity.)
Songs lyrics
Short poems
Restaurant menus
Grocery lists
Simplified infographics
Beginners are more successful when they can anticipate the information in the text, so it needs to be simple enough and should feature repetition. Readings in French class must be shorter than readings in their other classes, with many cognates to English and a large number of repeated words.
step #2 - Having pre-reading strategies in place for your beginners improves french reading comprehension
Now that you have successfully determined your students' interests and figured out which reading material you’re going to use according to their level, what happens next?
It’s time to prep your crowd! You want to make sure that they know enough to be able to understand some of the text. Invoking prior knowledge pertaining to a text will increase students’ comprehension.
My first advice would be to extract the most important vocabulary words and grammatical concepts and create an activity to reinforce their retention. Some of my favorites are:
Taboo
Students have to get their teams to say the word on the card without using one of the five taboo words listed on the card. Create your own cards using the vocabulary that you will be seeing in the text you’re planning on reading. If 5 taboo words is too many pick only one or two.
Cloze Activity
Cloze activities consist of sentences or paragraphs with words missing. These missing words are represented by blank spaces. To complete this activity, students are required to determine the best word to go into the blank. Students can have access to a word bank, if needed. This can be used as a tool for vocabulary or grammar practice or assessments.
If the text that you picked presents any grammatical challenges, it would be a good idea to do a quick review of the concepts. Per example, if you work on the ER Verbs in the Present Tense, maybe review how we conjugate them before giving the cloze activity.
Dominos
I created domino games to help my students practicing French ER, IR, and Irregular Verbs in the Present Tense. Click here to find them. I found it to be a good alternative to boring, old-fashioned worksheets.
To play Dominos, students are given a pile of dominos. Each domino contains either a verb tense or a verb. On their turn, students will need to read both the verb and the tense and determine if they can connect it to another domino already on the board. Students continue connecting dominos until one student has no dominos left. That student wins.
The goal of these pre-reading activities is to make sure students are equipped to understand the text they are about to read. Of course, these are only a few suggestions. There are plenty of other options out there that you can use. I think the important thing is to vary the supports and teaching material. Remember, we all learn better if we have fun!
step #3 for improving french reading comprehension is to Have French students read independently and listen to you reading
Now it’s time to read! Yay!
I would like to start by talking briefly about read-alouds. Read-alouds consist of the teacher reading a text out-loud to the class, usually picture books to younger kids. And now I’m going to ask you to take a moment and really think about how awesome this practice could be for your older students. Of course, they know how to read, but you have to remember that most of them aren’t really exposed to French outside the classroom. Read-alouds can play an important part in helping students to eventually achieve fluency. You might be wondering how? Well, it is crucial for them to hear a fluent speaker read daily. Hearing patterns of French from a fluent reader helps students imitate the patterns when they then read independently.
When having your students reading remember to prioritize extensive reading over intensive reading. Think about it the same way you think about practicing music. It is better to play your instrument 10 minutes every day than 1 hour per week.
Reading in French will improve your students’ comprehension and production of language. It isn’t necessary to go into the details of the reading material. No need to highlight every single word that they don’t understand and/or look them up.
Speaking of student comprehension, sometimes we do want students to practice so that we can determine how much they are understanding the information that they are reading. One way to do that is to give students short comprehension passages to read independently followed up by comprehension questions that correlate.
I created passages to help with this. These passages cover a variety of topics in French such as around the house, holidays, and seasons, among other things. Simply assign these as independent work and have students complete them during class or for homework.
Do you feel like your students need more support? Consider allowing students to read and discuss the passage with a partner first. After, give students the questions to answer independently.
Are you ready to help your students grow their French reading comprehension? These tips should help you to choose materials at the appropriate level, pre-teach key vocabulary, and have students reading independently. These steps are all that it often takes to get your students engaged in learning the language and reading for enjoyment.