French Dictation Teas Game by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I
learned abut French Dictation Teas in the Anjou region of the Loire Valley when
my family visited one of our relatives’ homes in the town of Saumur (France).
Saumur
is a town located on one of the tributaries of the Loire River. The town is home to the Cadre Noir Equestrian
School, Quarts de Chaume and Bonnezeaux wine vineyards, and Crémant de Loire
sparkling wine outlets.
Saumur
is most famous as the setting for the de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet. (This novel has also been made into a
film.) There are “troglodyte” cave homes
along the river decorated with window boxes of red geraniums dangling against
the white rock of the hills.
I
learned from our family member that senior ladies gathered for a cup of tea and
cookies every week to this day to do their weekly tea dictation party, which is
run as follows:
The
leader chooses a paragraph from 3 different literary works by authors usually
poets. The rhythm of poetry preserves the
French language best.
Before
guests come to the leader’s home for the tea, the leader makes sure that she
can correctly pronounce all the words in the three passages.
The
leader also uses punctuation as an aid for listeners’ to better understand the passage.
On
the day of the Dictation Tea, the group leader reads the first paragraph as
guests listen.
Then,
the guests ready their pens to write their weekly exercise to preserve the
French language. Each time the Germans
have invaded and occupied France, French school children were made to learn
German at school. These Dictation Teas
helped preserve the language in these circumstances.
The
leader reads one sentence in the passage slowly as participants write the
passage. When the participants are done
writing, the leader repeats the sentence allowing the participants to
grammatically correct their sentences.
When
that sentence is done, the leader goes on to the next sentence and repeats the
process for the next sentence.
The
leader continues this process until the paragraph is finished.
As
a final step, the leader reads the paragraph again slowly, so participants can
do their final edits to the paragraph.
The
next step is for the participants to compare the edits they made and have a
recorder (secretary) make a final copy of the paragraph that is the group or
team project.
Then,
the leader hands out a copy of the paragraph with a note about the source
(title of the book where the paragraph came from, author, and the date of the
publication) to correct against the team’s paragraph.
The
group goes over the original text versus the copy the participants produced to
correct the group paragraph. This little
game helps participants keep French grammar, pronunciation, and literature in
the Anjou and Touraine regions standard.
The
group leader and participants then repeat this process for the next two
paragraphs chosen by the leader.
At
the very end, the leader reads the Dictation of Mérimée for fun. (See my blog on this dictation on the Savvy
Mom Ruth Paget website for information about this dictation.)
The
group attendees see how many errors they made on this dictation once the leader
finishes reading it. The participant
with the fewest mistakes gets to be Prince Richard Klemen von Metternich, the
Austrian diplomat, who beat Napoleon by making fewer mistakes than Napoleon did
on this dictation.
I
am not sure if this is traditional, but I would make the dictation winner, the
player who leads off a card game of euchre, which is also called Napoleon.
The
French Dictation Tea can be used with children and teens to teach French
pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and the rhythm of the French
language.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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