KS3 · French · Year 8
Good and bad experiences: feminine adjective agreement
Friends and family: comparison with adjectives and adverbs
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/10
Your learning goal
I know how to make adjectives feminine, in order to accurately describe and compare masculine and feminine nouns.
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Good and bad experiences: feminine adjective agreement: slides adapted from the imported teaching text; recall questions created from its keywords, learning points and common mistakes. Self-check practice, with no automatic grading or XP. Answers stay on this page and are cleared when you leave.
Original teaching resources
The original illustrated PowerPoint is available as well as the IllumED text slides. It retains the publisher’s design and credits.
Download original PowerPoint ↓What you’ll learn
I know how to make adjectives feminine, in order to accurately describe and compare masculine and feminine nouns.
Key learning points
- The SSCs [om] and [on] are nasal sounds. Before a consonant they have the same nasal sound, like in ‘bombe’ and 'monde'.
- Before a vowel the 'm' and 'n' are pronounced, like in 'omelette' and 'monotone'. They are different oral sounds.
- In French, the ending of an adjective matches the noun it describes. This is called adjective agreement.
- There are various ways to make an adjective feminine, including adding an -e and changing -eur to -euse.
- Some short masculine adjectives ending in -n, -l or -s double the last letter before adding -e, e.g. gentil, gentille.
Words to know
- [om]
- sound-symbol correspondence pronounced as in 'nom', a nasal sound
- [on]
- sound-symbol correspondence pronounced as in 'non', a nasal sound
- adjective agreement
- when the ending of an adjective matches the noun it describes in gender and number
Common mistakes
The SSCs [om] and [on] always sound the same.
When [om] or [on] appear at the end of a word or before a consonant, they have a nasal sound and are pronounced the same. However, before a vowel their sounds are oral, the 'm' and 'n' are pronounced more clearly, making these SSCs sound different.
For parents, carers and teachers
- As we are at the beginning of practising comparisons in this lesson, the importance of the gender of French nouns comes into play. Games where pupils hear the noun without its article and have to indicate whether it is masculine or feminine, are a good way to encourage engagement and accuracy.