Language competences in lower secondary French-as-a-foreign language classrooms

4 
Findings 
4.1 RQ1: How much classroom time is devoted to the explicit teaching of grammar, vocabulary 
and pronunciation? 
Figure 2 provides an overview of the distribution of subject content activities that occurred in the 
classrooms. In addition to subject content matter, each class spent time on organisational activities, 
such as task instructions and the organisation of group work.
3
In the following, I present data for 
time spent on subject content only. 
The schools varied in how much time they spent on the different content areas in general, and on 
the different language competences in particular. School C spent half of the subject content time 
on grammar, while the other schools devoted from around 5% (school D) to slightly above 15% 
(school B) to grammar. In school F, there was almost no focus on vocabulary, whereas schools E 
and A spent 40% and 30% of the subject content time on explicit vocabulary teaching, respectively. 
The remaining schools devoted slightly above 10% (school D) to 20% (school B and C) of the 
subject content time to explicit vocabulary teaching. Very little time was devoted to teaching 
pronunciation. In five of the schools, explicit teaching of pronunciation was practically absent in 
3
Note that organisational activities are not necessarily devoid of subject content. An example is teacher A’s 
presentation of learning objectives and task instructions. She often performed these activities in French, meaning that 
the organisational activity also required listening comprehension, although this was not necessarily introduced as an 
objective of the activity. An overview of language use in the six classrooms (TL vs L1) can be found in Vold and 
Brkan (2020). 

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Eva Thue Vold 
the four recorded lessons, whereas school E spent about 10% of the subject content time on 
pronunciation issues.
Figure 2: Overall d
istribution of subject content activities in grades 9 and 10 (for school A, data from grade 9 only). 
Bars indicate the number of minutes.
In sum, there were important between-school differences for all three language competences, but 
overall, pronunciation received very little attention.
4.2 RQ2: To what extent is the teaching of the language components linked to ongoing or 
subsequent communicative activities? 
In this section, I delve into the teaching sequences of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, 
whether they are planned or incidental, to see how they are framed and how they are linked to 
communicative language use. There is no room in this article to give a detailed account of all the 
sequences, but I will summarise the observations for each school for each language competence 
and give an overall summary of the findings. A more detailed account of the grammar teaching 
episodes can be found in Vold (2020), and a more detailed account of the teaching of pronunciation 
will be available in Brkan and Vold (in preparation). 
4.2.1 Grammar 
In school A, there was explicit grammar teaching in two of the four lessons. The topics included 
prepositions and locative expressions. The teacher asked the students for examples of prepositions, 
and she handed out a sheet with exercises and explained different prepositions and their meanings. 
She illustrated the meanings by positioning herself differently in relation to objects in the 
classroom. She offered help during the students’ work with the exercises before she summed up 
in a plenary session. The work on grammar was clearly linked to communicative language practice, 
as it was a preparation for a later activity in which students would describe rooms and residences 
25
40
42
27
54
188
7
105
97
179
20
97
505
11
59
34
24
10
138
21
30
29
48
21
13
19
130
11
71
167
16
18
25
307
42
80
54
37
110
4
327
29
33
20
10
18
56
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
School
A
School
B
School
C
School
D
School
E
School
F
Total
Speaking exercises
Written activities
Reading comprehension
Reading aloud
Listening comprehension
Grammar
Vocabulary
Pronunciation
Culture & society

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Language competences in lower secondary French-as-a-foreign language classrooms 
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to each other, and in order to give an adequate description, they needed prepositions and locative 
expressions. This objective was clear to the students. 
In school B, there was explicit grammar teaching in five of eight lessons. In 9th grade, the topics 
included the partitive article, the ‘futur proche’, prepositions and the verbs ‘aller’ and ‘venir’. In 
10th grade, the topics included the use of ‘de’, relative pronouns, word order and linking words. 
The students listened to the teacher’s presentation, asked questions and completed exercises in the 
book, mostly translations of isolated sentences and fill-in-the-gap exercises, for example, where 
they had to choose between qui or que, but also a more input-oriented task in which they were 
required to put sentences together in the right order. There was no explicit mention of what use the 
grammar they were learning might have, and the students did not put the recently acquired 
grammar into communicative practice during the observed lessons. The learning objectives 
targeted the acquisition of grammatical phenomena per se and did not focus on mastering any 
communicative situations or functional use. However, in a sequence on the partitive article, the 
students made a shopping list for the grocery store, which can be seen as an attempt to make the 
grammar relevant for real-life language use.
In school C, there was explicit grammar teaching in all but one lesson. In 9th grade, the topics 
included prepositions and the verb ‘faire’. In 10th grade, the class worked with pronouns, 
imperatives and interrogative clauses. As in school B, the learning objectives targeted the 
grammatical phenomena themselves (e.g. ‘today we will continue working on personal pronouns’), 
and there was no indication of how this grammar could be used in communicative situations. While 
there were no examples of communicative language practice involving the recently acquired 
grammar, there was pre-communicative use of the learned structures. For example, students 
practiced the learned structures in short, written exercises. Moreover, the teacher drew several 
comparisons with a large range of other languages and contrasted Norwegian and French grammar. 
Making similarities and differences explicit can help the students remember the correct usages and 
thus help them in their future communicative practice. 
In school D, explicit grammar teaching only occurred in 9th grade, but then it was part of three out 
of four lessons. The topics were the ‘futur proche’ and the ‘passé composé’. The sequences were 
quite short and linked to homework that the students had done. The teacher went through the 
homework, which consisted of exercises in the textbook that required students to insert the correct 
forms of verb tenses (non-communicative learning). The teacher provided everyday examples (i.e. 
the examples seemed natural and not artificial), but there was no explicit link to usage in 
communicative situations. The students listened to the teacher’s presentation, asked questions and 
answered the teacher’s questions, but they did not use the acquired structures in real or simulated 
communicative contexts. 
In school E, most of the explicit grammar teaching also took place in 9th grade. Topics included 
verb conjugation (irregular and regular verbs) and amalgams. In 10th grade, grammar teaching 
occurred only as brief comments during vocabulary sessions. The session on amalgams included 
a link to communicative practice. The learning objective of the overarching activity was to acquire 
vocabulary about body parts, and this was done through an exercise in which the students described 
(to a doctor) where they felt pain: j’ai mal aux orteils, etc. The exercise in itself was not 
communicative. The class did not simulate a doctor’s visit, but the teacher told the students to 
translate and pronounce sentences such as ‘My eyes/head/fingers hurt’. A mixture of natural and 
unrealistic examples was provided. The need to learn about amalgams arose from this exercise —

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Eva Thue Vold 
through this pre-communicative language practice, the students experienced a need for grammar 
knowledge. Although there were no examples of communicative practice, the students got an 
impression of situations in which they might need to use the learned linguistic structures. 
In school F, there was not much focus on grammar, but the class worked with the passé composé 
in one of the lessons in 9th grade. The teacher provided explanation and examples, and the students 
completed fill-in-the-gap exercises in their textbooks. There was no mention of how to use this 
verb tense or the situations in which one might need it. We observed no communicative language 
practice in which the students were expected to use this tense. The students were assigned a 
communicative task as group homework – specifically, the students were instructed to make a film 
in which they presented a topic of choice –, but the teacher did not link the use of the passé composé 
to this task.
In sum, the grammar teaching sequences were rarely linked to communicative use. When students 
practiced the learned phenomena, it was through non-communicative or pre-communicative 
activities, with the exception of in school A. School A was the only school where a grammatical 
phenomenon was introduced because the students would need it in a communicative task they were 
supposed to perform later. In the other schools, acquiring grammatical phenomena appeared to be 
a learning objective in itself. 
4.2.2 Vocabulary 
In school A, there was explicit teaching of vocabulary in all four lessons. The teaching of 
vocabulary was usually framed in one of two ways: 1) as preparation for solving tasks, such as 
describing a room or a residence, or presenting one’s family; 2) as a means to understand the 
teacher’s instructions. In the first context, the learning of vocabulary was a means to achieve a 
communicative goal. The acquired vocabulary was subsequently used by the students in these 
activities, which could be classified as communicative language practice in Littlewood’s terms. In 
the second context, the learning of vocabulary was linked to authentic communication that took 
place within the classroom. Since teacher A regularly gave instructions in the TL, the students 
needed relevant vocabulary in order to understand. The teacher explained necessary vocabulary 
during and after the instructions to ensure understanding. The acquisition of words was facilitated 
by considerable repetition across lessons and teacher comments on semantics, such as synonyms 
and polysemy. The teacher also regularly commented on word grammar, such as words that take 
the plural ending –x instead of –s, and on pronunciation. 
In school B, there was explicit vocabulary teaching in all but one lesson. The vocabulary teaching 
was framed as preparation for communicative language practice. In 9th grade, it prepared the 
students for a role-play in which they pretended to be guests and waiters at a French café, and in 
10th grade, the vocabulary sessions prepared them for the task of describing persons. The class 
learned vocabulary related to food and drinks as well as expressions used when ordering and 
paying and words needed to describe people’s appearance and personality. They learned these 
words and expressions through different types of activities, some traditional (translation of isolated 
sentences from the textbook) and some more playful (board game). The teacher regularly 
commented on orthography, pronunciation and noun gender. 
In school C, there was only explicit vocabulary teaching in 9th grade, where it was part of four out 
of five lessons. The instruction was not directly linked to any communicative language activity but 
rather to parts of speech, in this case numbers. The class worked with numbers from different 

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Language competences in lower secondary French-as-a-foreign language classrooms 
11 
perspectives, all relevant to future language use: how to name floors in a building, how to express 
regent numbers, time, school grades, prices and amounts, fractions etc. The teacher consistently 
made comparisons to Norwegian, English and other languages and explained how words were 
built and altered using prefixes, suffixes and derivations. The students performed written exercises, 
which mostly consisted of translating isolated sentences and expressions from Norwegian to 
French. One exercise on the worksheet asked the students to make and read aloud calculations to 
each other. This could be considered communicative language practice, as the student who was 
supposed to solve the calculation did not know what to say beforehand. In the observed lessons, 
however, we did not see this activity being performed. 
In school D, explicit vocabulary teaching occurred in all lessons in 9th grade but hardly at all in 
the recorded 10th grade lessons. The teaching was framed in one of two ways: 1) as a means to 
understand texts in the textbook, but also an authentic video clip, either before, during or after text 
reading/listening; 2) as preparation for dialogues, in this case about food habits, in order to provide 
students with the necessary tools to conduct a dialogue on this subject. The dialogue was performed 
in class, and the students used the words they had learned. The students learned the relevant 
vocabulary through game-like activities, informal vocabulary tests, brainstorming and listening to 
the teacher, who facilitated students’ memory by offering synonyms and telling personal 
anecdotes. There was considerable repetition of words within and across lessons, and the teacher 
often commented on noun gender and articles. 
In school E, vocabulary teaching was the most salient subject content activity. It was most often 
framed as a means to understand texts in the textbook, but it was also used for preparation for 
structured oral exercises in which the students were expected to use the learned vocabulary. These 
exercises included the use of pictures, photos and post-it notes, and the students were asked to 
describe what they saw in the pictures or translate sentences given by the teacher. Hence, they 
belonged to the categories of non-communicative learning and pre-communicative language 
practice, but their objective was to prepare the students for real-world communication. For 
example, the teacher mentioned that students would learn and practice expressions that are useful