Teaching French to young learners through DDL

Abstract

In recent years, the potential of the DDL approach is being increasingly considered in the teaching of French as a foreign language (FLE). While most studies published are mainly concerned with the use of concordances and corpora in the teaching of FLE at university level, this chapter reports on the potential of concordances with an audience of young French L1 students. In this chapter, I describe lessons for younger learners of French incorporating activities involving concordance analysis for the study of certain morphological and syntactic phenomena, including the use of demonstrative adjectives and interrogative determiners, verb conjugation, and expressions of quantity. This research highlights the many advantages of using the DDL approach for materials preparation in FLE teaching and for providing young learners the opportunity to experiment with new learning methods.