Monthly Archives: August 2017

Using Martine by Marlier for French Extensive Reading Practice

My Comic Books, Resources, Reviews, , , , , , , , , ,

The Martine series was recently recommended to me for children learning French. I managed to purchase a couple of books from the series from FNAC. My review is of course biased by my own preferences in reading (and writing), and clearly I am not in the 5-12 age range for whom they were recommended, but hopefully it will be useful nevertheless.

I read Martine à la ferme, which is one of about 60 books in the series, which tell the adventures of Martine, a young girl. This particular book is about Martine visiting a farm with her friend Lucie.

From a story perspective, there is no driving narrative. It’s just a bunch of twee pastoral scenes with text. It is beautifully presented, and for children who love animals and dream of interacting with them, it may be an enjoyable experience. I found it dull, however.

From a language perspective, the series can be quite useful. It is authentic French in present tense, so great for learners to get reading practice without getting bogged down in passé simple. Plus, with 60 volumes to go through, that’s a good amount of practice at the level of the books – if you enjoy the genre.

There are 18 pages of illustrated text to read in the book, with about 60 words per page, making approximately 1000 words per book. The vocabulary and language appear to be sufficiently generic to be useful, and easier than other French children’s books I have seen in that regard. Sentences are fairly straightforward, and rarely longer than 15 words in length.

Vocabulary will be the main difficulty for foreign language learners. A sample of the first ~130 words had a vocabulary of 94 (including names and apostrophe’d words as separate words), making a vocabulary density of ~72% (unique words divided by total words). To put this into context, here are some vocabulary densities on the first ~100 words of other texts.

Consuelo 76%
Le Petit Prince 74%
Minnesota spoken corpus 68%
Gnomeville Episode 3 (not yet released) 58%
The French Bible 52%
Gnomeville Episode 2 46%
Gnomeville episode 1 43%

Basically, any normal native French text is likely to have a vocabulary density of about 75% in a sample of ~100. (The density typically drops a little as the length of the text sample increases.) Conversation (eg. Minnesota corpus) seems to be lower, and translations may also be lower. To get lower than that requires stories that are intentionally written with a small vocabulary, such as the Gnomeville comics listed above, and some Dr Seuss stories (in English) – especially Green Eggs and Ham.

So, in summary, if you are after authentic French text that has easy grammar, then the Martine series will be very useful for those who enjoy the genre. The books are also fairly short, allowing children to feel a sense of achievement in finishing them sooner than for a longer work like Le Petit Prince. Personally I would prefer to read more books that are specifically written for language learners until my vocabulary was large enough to read books that are more entertaining. The J’Aime Lire series of books for French children is much more entertaining and written for the 7-11 age group. The difficulty of the text does vary quite a lot though, depending on the author, so expect to occasionally struggle or skip stories. My current recommended sequence for primary-aged children is:

  1. Gnomeville series (for English-speaking background only)
  2. Mary Glasgow series (English-speaking background)
  3. EMC’s À l’aventure! Readers (English-speaking background)
  4. Aquila’s readers (English-speaking)
  5. CLE International’s Collection Découverte
  6. La Spiga Grand Débutant series (150 word vocabulary)
  7. ELI for children
  8. Martine or J’Aime Lire books

These are not a strict reading sequence, since the various series overlap in levels of difficulty (except Gnomeville). There are other series out there, such as CIDEB, Edition Maison des Langues. There are more books for adolescents, such as Teen Readers, and the adolescent FLE series by Hachette.

I will publish more detailed up to date lists as I become aware of more books and series. Stay tuned.

 

 

Advertisement

Two Great Language Acquisition Resources

Reviews, , , , , ,

German Extensive Reading Stories

I’ve recently been reading the ebooks by André Klein. He provides a collection of reading material in authentic German for beginners and intermediate learners, with comprehensive glosses of expressions used in the stories.

I have now finished reading the first four in his Dino lernt Deutsch series for beginners. I think they are a fantastic resource for German learners. Now, as a caveat, I must say that I’m a false beginner for German, since my Dutch background makes German pretty easy to understand, so how it reads for someone of purely English-speaking background or other language backgrounds I can’t comment.

Each book consists of ten short stories, but all follow the adventures of Dino, as he lives in and travels through Germany. I’m guessing the format is as it is, so that when commencing reading, the learner can feel that they have achieved something by reading one short story.

The stories are not greatly dumbed down, in that there are smatterings of dialect (also translated), which somewhat increase the load on the learner. As I’m generally interested in language, I find this quite interesting. However, it may make the stories somewhat more challenging for the beginner.

He also has a couple of picture story books. These have little text and the language is not necessarily easier in terms of vocabulary load and grammar. They are, however, pleasant reads. I think the language is somewhat more constrained in the Dino series, so they are probably more useful for extensive reading.

André Klein’s books are found on Amazon, Smashwords and elsewhere. He also has more language resources on his website.

French Listening Resources

I’ve been floating around some Facebook groups about languages lately. One provided a link to the series Extra French. I hadn’t come across this before, but for me it is entertaining, in sit com format, and simple enough to follow. It’s probably a good place to start for listening practice, other than the practice of listening to stories while following the written text.

Another resource I’ve heard about recently is related to specific CEFR levels. Find French oral comprehension activities there. Good practice for those wanting to sit DELF/DALF exams.