Progression to Contextualized Exercises
After students have worked at home and in class on the Préparation du vocabulaire exercises, they progress to exercises in the textbook and the videos online in which the vocabulary items appear in a richer context. The presentation of contextualized vocabulary begins with sentence-level usage of the lexical items which gradually leads into discourse-level usage. These exercises also follow the sequence of input to output. An example of this progression of exercises in the book would include Chapter 2, Exercises 8, 10, 26, and Dictogloss 2. The vocabulary in these exercises deals primarily with pastimes. Let's look at each of these to understand how the lexical items are gradually contextualized:
Exercise 8: Signature Exercise. In this exercise, the vocabulary appears in rather simple sentences, framed by the topic, Tes passe-temps ("your pastimes"). This would be an example of an exercise in the beginning of the progression.
Exercise 10: France Télévisions This is an example of an exercise in the middle of the progression, in which the lexical items are imbedded within a richer context. This is an authentic document in which students must rely more heavily on context and knowledge of cognates, a strategy with which they are already familiar.
Exercise 26: Tu es plutôt sérieux/sérieuse ou frivole? This exercise assumes that students have had ample exposure to the lexical items so that they know and understand their meaning. This is a production exercise in which the students have to use their vocabulary knowledge to draw conclusions about their classmates, based on their findings as a result of using of the language.
Dictogloss 2. In a dictogloss, students listen to a dictation read by the teacher. They must then reproduce what they have heard on paper, and finally, compare their results with those of several classmates. The students work together to reconstruct the dictation read by the teacher, and engage in metatalk to accomplish the task.
The result of the progression witnessed in these exercises is an increasingly heavy cognitive load.