This article is from page 18 of the 2011-10-11 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 18 JPG
FRENCH TEACHING lessons at St Anne’s Community College in Killaloe have been described as “well structured” by the Department of Education.
Inspectors visited the school and monitored the teaching of the subject, after which they made various recommendations.
According to the inspectors, the lessons are “well structured and paced” and instructions to students are clear.
There are three French teachers at the school.
It stated that there is a good atmosphere in classes, along with a good classroom management, with students “purposeful” in their work.
“However, in a small number of instances, more time could profitably be spent on preparation for an exercise before the students begin to work on it on their own.
“The modelling of answers or the use of a cloze-type exercise as a preliminary activity would provide support for students and would lead to a more successful learning experience.
“This is of particular importance when dealing with mixed-ability classes.
“Some students may need extra assistance from the teacher while the more able students could be encouraged to work independently by checking their answers against the relevant verb tables in the text book.
“Monitoring students’ progress through checking whether students found an exercise easy or difficult would also help in gauging the effectiveness of an activity,” stated the inspectors’ report, which was published last week.
“Where students are found to be having difficulty with a particular concept or with a key element such as numbers in French, this could form the basis for a concerted effort by all the teachers to address the issue over a period of days or weeks,” added the report.
A number of significant strengths were found during the evaluation. It found that there is a strong com- mitment to the provision of modern foreign languages in the school and the majority of students study a foreign language. The report also noted positively a mentoring scheme that is in place to assist new teachers and the target language is well used by the teachers for classroom communication and for teaching lesson content.
The teaching of grammar is a particular strength at the school, while there is a good emphasis on oral assessment in the senior cycle, according to the report.