Input processing: Le pass compos.

introduction:
Many students of French find the pass compos difficult to understand and to use
correctly. Students are confused because no real equivalent exists in English. As an
example, the form in French is Jai mang which is translated in English by using the
preterit I ate. Students would tend to translate literally jai mang they would use the
present perfect I have eaten, having a similar form to the pass compos. Moreover for
the pass compos students have to understand and learn when to use the auxiliaries tre
or avoir and the past participles of the verbs.
Past grammatical markers are low in communicative value for different reasons. In one
hand, a student can be understood with some interpretation even if he uses the wrong
auxiliary with a wrong past participle, And on another hand, they can understand because
students tend to look first at the lexical item first to get the meaning more than the form, for
instance looking at, Hier jai mangdu pain students look first at the lexical item which
is here hier to understand that the action is in the past.
Presentation modules:
In this lesson, were focusing on the form of the use of the pass compos.
The first set of activities will consist of structured input activities. These activities are
exclusively comprehension-based. At this point, students are not asked to produce the
target structure but they have to select right or wrong answers, or give their opinion
throughout the activities in order to keep meaning in focus.
The second set of activities consists of our Structured output activities. Students are
asked to produce the target structure always in a meaningful context. We decided to focus
on one form (3rd person singular), using different types of activities, oral and written ones.