S’amuser avec le théâtre français

Workshop conducted at Ethiraj College, Chennai on 21/1/2023.

My journey with French began at the Department of French at Ethiraj College for Women, it will always be an honour to return to share my expertise with the students in any way possible. When Dr. Adeline Albert invited me to conduct a theater workshop for the second language french students, I was delighted especially because I teach french theater myself at the university. The process of conceiving an interactive workshop about french theater for second language french learners was an interesting one. My prime concern was to make sure that while students received facts about famous genres, important playwrights etc. I also did not want it to turn into a lecture. So I split the workshop into two parts; the first part where I share some important facts in french and english , and the second interactive part with two exercises.

Activity 1 : Je suis, Nous sommes…
Students are paired up, given a flash card with a noun on it (word and image), they then have five minutes to decide how they will get their classmates to guess what the noun is. A lot like charades. However they end the activity by saying “Je suis ____(noun)_____” individually and “Nous sommes ____(noun)____ ” together. The objective of the activity was to get the students to be comfortable getting on stage and saying a very simple sentence in french and get used to the idea of using their body to act out simple gestures / sounds etc in front of their peers. This was more of a warm up activity.

Activity 2 : Sketch reenactment
I chose three simple sketches using beginner level phrases and displayed them on the slide. The pairs could choose any one sketch, practice it and act it out on stage. I intentionally chose sketches that were not all the same format to cater to the heterogeneity of the class. The first sketch was more of a ‘dialogue’; the second and the third one were different. In these, students had to say the same sentence in French but with difference in tone because of changing subtext. It was interesting to see that most pairs preferred doing the 2nd and 3rd option because they saw it as being easier compared to the dialogue. My objective behind this task was to get the students to be more comfortable saying simple phrases in french and to get them used to pronouncing the words correctly.

The third part of the workshop was a quiz where I asked them simple questions in french using words I had repeated several times. The students were able to understand my questions and were able to give me the right answer. It was very easy for me at that point to show them that they indeed do understand french and that they can learn more if they worked on it. It was rewarding to see that the students indeed agree with me and were pleasantly surprised that they were able to understand and respond.

This lead to me giving them some links where they can find such exercices and other resources that will help them discover french plays.