Abstract
The chapter contains the description of a didactic unit in French as a foreign language which corresponds to the variant of a "developing teaching unit" according to the terminology presented in the book. The teaching unit belongs to the field of "motivational" activities.
It was made in a Prague primary school with children aged 10-11. The teacher with a dozen students worked some basic phrases from the field of making contact (say Hello, Goodbye) as well as the vocabulary of animals using the activities based on the game and gestures.
The analysis of this teaching unit focuses on the description of the conceptual, thematic and competency levels, it explains the approach based on the imitation and the positive transfer and shows why the results of this kind of teaching are mostly very satisfactory. At the same time, the authors address some more general didactic and pedagogical questions, such as motivation, the structure of a didactic unit, multilingualism, learning strategies, game in the teaching/learning process, the difference between learning and language acquisition or humanistic values in education.