It’s Alive! Teaching French grammar with Mindmup

A response to the It’s Alive! Activity
created by Ivan Chow (@chowivan)

Number of views: 268

As a French instructor, I find it challenging to motivate students to learn grammar. Students with a francophone background often lack grammatical knowledge to explain why they form sentences the way they do and why certain sentences are ungrammatical. Novice learners think of grammar as abstract and complex concepts.

My challenge for this module is to incorporate Mindmup to explain French grammar by building flowcharts. I start by breaking down grammar topics into steps. Each step consists of a question to gather information and an actionable decision based on the collected data. I created a prototype for the subject of selecting the correct preposition of place (préposition de lieu). The first step is to determine the directionality (towards or away from the target), which helps differentiate à/en/chez from de(+article). Further questions on the types of prepositional objects gather data to zero in on the right choice.

By creating a flowchart with Mindmup, I represent grammar in a visual organization and break down complex tasks into ordered actionable steps, much like a computer programmer. I hope to help motivate students to learn grammar once they realize it consists of tangible steps with actual results.

Since not all students are familiar with Mindmup and flowcharts, I plan on walking students through using Mindmup to create flowcharts the first time I use it. Once students are familiar with the idea, I am hoping to take a collaborative approach in the future and get students involved in creating additional flowcharts for other grammar topics.