Cric Crac! Teaching and Learning French Through Story-Telling

Cric Crac is a book for teachers who would like to tell stories in French to their students and teach them to tell stories themselves. The book argues that narrative is an important but neglected mode in language teaching and learning. In the everyday use of our native language we give high value to listening to and telling stories, anecdotes, personal experiences, potted histories, incidents and accidents. Cric Crac aims to help teachers foster the abilities needed to bring stories into the modern language classroom. A prominent feature of Cric Crac is the detailed help it offers to teachers. It contains stories for the teacher to tell and for re-telling, reading and writing by the students. Cric Crac suggests a variety of ways in which teachers might prepare their students for storytelling, and proposes a wide variety of activities for teaching the language of the stories and the processes of storytelling. The author insists throughout that the foundation stone of good language learning and language use rests on the integration of listening and speaking, reading and writing, and suggests ways of combining them appropriately. The three levels consist of five texts each for learners with 2/3, 4/5 and 6/7 years experience, respectively. A picture version accompanies the stories of Level 1. Levels 1 and 2 offer a large format unpunctuated version of the stories for language sequencing purposes. There is a variety of activities for teaching the language and the processes of storytelling for each level.