How to Make Teens Actually Care About French Class...Without Reinventing the Wheel

Let’s face it… getting teenagers excited about French class can feel like a losing battle. They’re distracted, busy, and quick to disengage if the content doesn’t speak to them.

You don’t need magic. You need real content, real culture, and a way to talk about how you center your lessons on teen-relevant themes (Mbappé, Emily in Paris, music, identity, AI, etc.) and use authentic resources.

• Use authentic media: short YouTube clips, memes, songs they’ve actually heard of.

• Connect to their world:  make lessons about them: their opinions, their habits, their digital lives.

• Make speaking low-stress: mini debates, polls, pair convos on fun topics (favorite influencers, pet peeves, music opinions).

• Give them a role in the lesson: let them react, rank, choose, respond, create.

• Don’t over-plan: sometimes less is more. A good prompt + real media = gold.

  
  

Here are some of the Francophone, teen-friendly websites I use to get my students motivated, inspired and to make my own teaching easier:

Whether I’m looking for a short video, a discussion prompt, or a pop-culture angle to liven up a grammar lesson, these are my go-to sources for authentic, youth-oriented content from the Francophone world:

🎥 Kombini

Think BuzzFeed, but French and cooler. Short videos, interviews, opinion pieces, pop culture, identity, music, social issues. Perfect for engaging older teens with authentic spoken French and real-world topics.

📱 Brut

Bite-sized news stories and human-interest videos — all super visual and teen-accessible. Great for IB/AP classes or for introducing social topics and media analysis.

🎶 Topito

Articles, memes, humor. Not always “school clean,” so curate with care, but students love the format. A fun way to work on opinions, ranking, superlatives, or just to add humor.

🎧 Radio France / Mouv’

A hip-hop and youth-oriented branch of Radio France. Great for getting authentic music, slang, and cultural insight — especially if you're working on themes like identity, race, or urban culture.

💬 Lumni

An official educational platform. Short, well-made videos across all subjects, including history, citizenship, language, and society. Great if you want structure but still want authenticity.

📸 Franceinfo junior

Simple interviews, real topics, slower-paced audio. Great for listening comprehension and vocabulary building.

✏️ Tip:

I often pull a video, a quote, or even just a headline from one of these platforms and build an entire class discussion around it. Students are way more engaged when they feel like the material was pulled from the real world, not a textbook.

Bonne classes!

Sandrine