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Histoires à écouter - authentic listening and reading



Here is a lovely authentic resource for listening and reading French at intermediate level or above. It's called Histoires à écouter from Shortédition and you can find it here. These are mini-story podcasts which you can either just listen to or read or listen and read together. They happen to be a very good way of ticking that literature box for GCSE and could be exploited in a number of ways.


  • Pupils could just read and listen for pleasure independently. There are a huge number to choose from, read and written by various native French speakers and writers. You can choose the length of story too; you can select 5, 10 or 20 minute pieces.
  • You could copy and paste sections of text to do further tasks such as gap-fill and questions in English or TL.
  • You can simply print off the stories to use as a classroom reading resource in the traditional fashion.
  • You could set sections for translation into English.
  • You could play them out loud from the for version for pupils to read.
  • Since the subject matter is story-based, many extracts will lend themselves to other creative exploitation.

All this seems to be free, the raison d'être being as follows:

"Ils sont romanciers et ils soutiennent Short Edition, l’éditeur communautaire de la littérature courte !
Pourquoi ?
Parce que… Ils veulent encourager l’écriture, le plaisir de travailler son talent, le bonheur de cultiver son jardin secret… et de l’ouvrir de temps en temps à des lecteurs visiteurs. Ils apprécient la valeur du format littéraire court… reconnu dans la littérature anglo-saxonne. Pas tellement en France… et dans les pays francophones ! Ils pensent que la lecture peut prendre différentes formes, se glisser dans différents moments de la vie et sur différents supports (le papier et le numérique), envahir les écrans – les grands et petits, les sédentaires et les nomades – et… revenir à ce bon vieux papier." 

 What a super resource! The clarity and speed of the recordings is just right (done via Soundcloud, by the way). I could imagine using the shorter podcasts with a good GCSE class and the longer ones for advanced level students. See what you think.

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