I am an advocate for teaching in whatever way works best for you and your students. It may be a more traditional method, or maybe the latest trend in language acquisition strikes a chord with you. It might be something that only fits you and your students, and it might be a blend a few different methods. Ultimately, no researcher or education guru knows you and your students better than you. Whatever your method, rock it! Perfect it! And then be open to including new ideas along the way.
No matter how you teach, adjectives that precede the nouns they describe play a role. Some teachers teach these adjectives before really putting them into use, and some may use them first and break down the “why” much later. Either way, here are a couple methods to teach the small group of adjectives in French that precede nouns.
Method 1: an acronym
I grew up learning this group as the BAGS adjectives. Over the years, I have come to prefer BANGS because it includes ordinal numbers:
B – BEAUTY (joli, beau)
A – AGE (jeune, vieux, nouveau)
N – NUMBER (autre, premier, deuxième, troisième, etc.)
G – GOODNESS (mauvais, bon)
S – SIZE (petit, grand, gros, court, long)
One drawback to using the BANGS acronym method is that each category only includes a few words, not all words that relate to Beauty, Age, Number, Goodness or Size. So, for example, you might have a student try to put moche (“But it relates to Beauty!”) or génial (“But it relates to Goodness!”) before nouns.
Method 2: a song
Personally, I’m a huge fan of teaching with music. Music sticks in kids’ heads better than anything I’ve ever used myself or tried with students, and I love having kids report years after graduation that they still know any given song. I have posters in my classroom that display the tune and the concept it goes with, and students use those during quizzes and tests. They don’t give any answers; rather, they are strictly memory triggers.
(sur l’air de “Farmer in the Dell”)
Petit, Grand, Gros
Court, Joli, Beau
Autre, Long, Mauvais, et Bon
Jeune, Vieux, Nouveau
The only drawback to using this song is that it doesn’t include the numbers. Because of that, I pause after the last line of the song and then sing “Et les numéroooooos” to finish it off.
There you have it: Two ways to introduce the adjectives that come before nouns in your French class! Students can use this page to practice descriptive adjectives (BANGS and regular), and I continually add new links. If you have other ideas or memory tricks that have worked well for your students, please share below!
From Thursday, March 19, through Sunday, March 22, 2020, my BANGS adjective introductory handout is FREE in my TeachersPayTeachers store here!
