The Super 7 – can you tell any story with these?

If you’ve been around the CI world at all, you’ve probably heard of the Super 7 – a group of 7 verbs that can be used to tell almost any story you like. Many CI teachers start with these verbs and spend time getting students to know them very well. Why are these verbs so useful and popular?

What are the Super 7?

The super 7 include the following phrases/verbs:

• il y a
• il/elle dit
• il/elle veut
• il/elle a
• il/elle est
• il/elle aime
• il/elle va

Why are the Super 7 so powerful?

These 7 verbs cover most of the activities a person in a basic story might want to do. Of course there are many other verbs that are useful, and eventually you will get to them. But you could easily come up with a month’s worth of stories using only the super 7. They are a good starting point for a story that has an actual plot – you can have someone want something, but they don’t have it, so they have to go looking for it.

You can have someone be a certain way, and they need to change for some reason. The language you use will be very simple – and probably feel like “caveman talk” at first, but it is accessible and comprehensible to your learners. It also leads to repetition and circling, which is the name of the game.

How to use the Super 7

Step 1: Start with the basics – simple is best. Practice the original 7 with your students. Ask lots of questions. Circle. Play blooket/gimkit or whatever you prefer to get these verbs into your students’ heads. They should understand them without thinking too much. You can put posters of the Super 7 on a word wall so that they are easily accessible.

Step 2: Now that they have the basic vocabulary, it’s time for a story. The story should be simple – very simple! Fun details will come later. Stick to a basic plot – someone wants a (put a cognate here) but instead has a (similar to the cognate but not the same). The person goes to (place name – use proper nouns to avoid too much vocabulary) and says “I want ______!” but there is only (similar cognate but not the right thing). You can have the person go to a variety of places to fix the problem. In the end, he finds the thing he was looking for and says that he likes it.

Step 3: Time to add more detail to the story. Start using ne…pas. Keep the circling going. Add a new character that doesn’t have the same problem. Talk about that character NOT going to the same place. Maybe the person gets an item and DOESN’T love it.

Step 4: Add some more detail, this time adjectives and adverbs. Describe the person in more detail. Add some colors and other descriptive words about the thing he wants. Talk about how he goes – quickly? slowly? like an elephant?

Step 5: Time to add more vocabulary! This time as you go through the story, describe the places. If he goes to McDonald’s, you can now describe McDonald’s – is it a restaurant? a fast food place? a school? Add the reasons as well – why does the person decide to go to McDonald’s, even though he wants pizza? This is when you can start using the connecting words to make the story more interesting – he goes to McDonald’s even though he wants pizza because a girl is at McDonald’s! Or maybe he goes there because a pizza is $12 and he only has $3.

Step 6: This is where you can start really expanding, depending on the level of the students. For level 1 students, you might start retelling the story from the first person, to get the Je form. Make sure to add lots of tu questions with your circling! If it’s level 2, you might retell the story in the past tense. For later levels, you might even retell the story from the point of view of a person who wouldn’t have done things (for the conditional past) or someone who wants someone else to do things for them (subjunctive).

As you can see, just because the super 7 are very basic verbs, that doesn’t mean that they are useful only in the beginning levels. With a little creativity, they can be used in any class.

Using the Super 7 for student output

The steps above are focused largely on student input – but you can use the Super 7 for student output! I have found that despite my use of the verbs to show students that they can tell almost any story by simplifying their ideas down to the basics, they still have a hard time being creative with the verbs at first. They immediately want to write a fanciful story with lots of new vocabulary and structures they’ve never seen. So they turn to online translators and you end up with a story that nobody else in the class can read, and the students haven’t done anything to improve their French.

This year, I’m starting my students with a story sketch – a basic outline of the story that includes the verbs and plot, but leaves out the details. They will need to choose the nouns and adjectives of the story, but I’ve already chosen the verbs. They can use any words we’ve learned in class, but for new words I will give them a list of cognates and a list of adjectives.

Now their stories will be simple but detailed, but more importantly – their fellow students will be able to read them! There is also a space for them to draw an illustration for their story, so they can be creative and add details that they might not have the language for…yet.

The story outline is simple, but until my students get the idea of what I want from them, it provides them structure and guidance at a time when they want to be creative but don’t yet have those skills. It allows them to write in French without feeling that they have to be ‘fancy’ – I’m showing them exactly what the boundaries are, but letting them fill in those boundaries with their own ideas.