Cognitive Science in Practice

 In a previous post I wrote about the Cognitive Science ideas that are so current in schools today. I characterised them as being uncontroversial, fairly obvious, and as giving no actual precise answers as to how they make teaching and learning go better.

That post wasn't really attacking the Cognitive Science. It was about the dangers of the right wing Knowledge Curriculum which is using the Cognitive Science as a Trojan Horse. More on that toxic Knowledge mutation here. 

The Cognitive Science has been pulled into this in two main ways. Firstly as cover for the toxic Knowledge mutation. And secondly by the "Research" mutation. Instead of research into the messy complexity of teaching and learning, this has come to mean a policing of teaching and how it conforms to a neat and very basic model of learning. 

None of this is the fault of the Cognitive Science. So in this post I will try to set the record straight a little and find a middle way!

When it comes to the Cognitive Science, I think that being basic (fundamental), uncontroversial and vague are positives. Yes, even vague. The sooner we can get away from polarised models and magic bullets, the better. True research is in the messy middle ground. Cognitive Science tells us, for example, that the balance between challenge and pupils being overwhelmed is a vital sweetspot. It doesn't tell us how to find this. Of course not. But we look for it in every lesson. Teaching and research into learning ought to be about looking at this rich interplay, not a tidied up version with arrows, outlines of heads and memories forming as a spark across a synapse.

Here's an example to get us going.

When I use dual coding to teach food vocabulary in French, I have used these pictures.

As in comfy chair

As in moooootard

[Ironically the only magic bullet Cognitive Science offers is misunderstood to such an extent that I am often told this is NOT in fact dual coding.]

Pupils doing a single transition taster lesson in French in July of Year 6 still remember most of the words when we come to do them 8 months later in March of Year 7. From a single lesson. So dual coding works - go back and click on the link above if that makes you want to read more.

But it doesn't work equally well for all the pictures. Jam works great. This particular picture for moutarde doesn't. And if you pay attention in the lesson, you will see why. There is always a pupil whose immediate reaction is to shout out, "Why is that cow pink?" And the answer is because I really liked the picture, I thought it would be fun and maybe even memorable. And then the Cognitive Science whispers, "Too memorable." Too memorable and too distracting. The pupils have remembered "pink cow" not mooootard. So time to try a different cow picture that's less the centre of attention.

This applies to everything. Not just pictures. What is helpful? What is attractive? What is distracting? Like the Millennium Falcon, we are stuck in some kind of traction beam between attraction and distraction. The Cognitive Science can alert us to our fate, but we still have to figure it out for ourselves on a case by case basis. Sometimes you can just bypass the compressor. And sometimes you have to fly straight at the Imperial cruiser and hide until it jettisons its trash.

And it gets really quite complicated when we move away from just images. Our whole approach to teaching languages comes into question:

Authentic texts. Genuinely engaging, interesting and meaningful? Or leading to a superficial reading based on guessing, alienating pupils who need to understand the words, are overloaded by the content, and aren't that interested anyway? Attractive or distracting?

Using language to communicate, be creative, express yourself. Is this exciting or overwhelming? It brings with it the overload of having to think up what to say, and having to interact with other people. And incredibly complex decision making of how to express yourself using the limited language you have, balancing accuracy and communication. 

We don't need Cognitive Science to tell us this. We know that all these aspects need developing: learning the language knowledge, and learning to use the language. But we should listen to the Cognitive Science here. Because it is trying to escape from the paralysing  Knowledge Curriculum tractor beam paradigm of "Novices and Experts." Learners can and should be learning to develop how they use their language. Because we understand the Cognitive challenges that are in play here. We don't give up on it and say that learners can't use their language until they are "Expert." We know to break down the demands and develop knowledge of language and how to deploy language, working on both.

Grammar or Meaning? When I teach pets to Year 7, I know that un and une, and j'ai and je n'ai pas de are more important than chien in terms of their French over the next 5 years. But I also know that for pupils at this stage, links and patterns internal to the language are insignificant, compared to links between the language and the real world. Their real world. When they go round the classroom asking, Tu as un hibou qui s'appelle Archimedes ? until they find that person, I know they are practising phonics, gender, the verb to have for asking and answering, negatives, question forms, how to interact... But from their perspective... They are finding out who has an owl!

Like the pink cow, I need to watch and make sure that it's not a distraction. But without this, it's not language learning. It's memorisation of some sounds and letters with no meaning other than that they can be translated into English. But the kind of meaning that means referring to reality - the reality in the classroom, the reality of the owl - that needs to be in the balance too.

And when I teach je n'ai pas de... Cognitive Science doesn't tell me how to do it. Should I explain how it's formed, with Mr Apostrophe eating the letter e? Or should they learn it by chanting it over and over to a video of an accelerating steam train? Should we meet it when we do the grammar of the verb to have? Or should we do it when we are doing a dialogue and someone finds they need to say, "I don't have an owl"?

We do all those things. But in what order and in what balance? Cognitive Science doesn't tell me. Experience tells me. Trying it and coming back to it again tells me. Constant observing and monitoring tells me. Talking to the pupils about it tells me.

And that's just fine. Cognitive Science isn't the answer. It is a question. A dynamic question of balance that is never going to be answered and which will always be asked in every single lesson, every single day. In every single classroom of real pupils and real teachers being human beings.

Differentiated Dictransalation.

 Yes. You read that correctly. Today Y11 did Differentiated Dictransalation.

The translation was a model text on the topic of Work Experience mainly from words in their repertoire, but with plenty of non topic high frequency words as well.

Depending on how much support I thought they would need, different pupils were allowed different approaches.

1. Allowed the text in English and a pen. So when I read the text in Spanish, they can write down any words they had half forgotten or get the verbs or try to write any unknown words as a dictation... But I read it too quickly for them to be able to write down all the words.

2. Allowed the text in English but no pen at this stage. So they can read and follow the text as I read, to check they know words, to listen out for any word order changes or unknown words. But not write them down.

3. Not allowed the text yet. Just have to listen. This group will be further subdivided later in a final twist!

So then I read the text in Spanish. Quickly enough that the group with pens couldn't write down all the words.

Then they did it as a translation.

Group 1 had written down most of the words they might have been missing.

Group 2 had kept any tricky words in their heads.

Group 3 had at least heard the Spanish.

And I invented a group 4. Most of group 3 now got a copy of the text in English to translate just like the others. But group 4 just got a piece of lined paper to try to reconstruct in Spanish the text that they had heard me read.

You need a class who are up for a challenge and won't feel aggrieved at being treated differently. And as part of the challenge they have to understand that there will be mistakes and guesses and things to learn. Watch out the first time you do it, for group 1 writing down words they already know instead of listening out for the bits they need.

We will come back to it tomorrow and see if they can all reproduce a version of the text from memory. And then adapt it to talk about their own work experience!

Using AI to plan lessons

 The government have suggested that teachers need to harness the possibilities of AI to help them plan and resource lessons. The idea is that this will save time, and may help new teachers or non-specialists to come up with useable lesson plans.

A year ago to the week, I wrote a post looking at AI and some aspects of language learning. It found that AI was very poor at manipulating language. It could explain in general terms, but as soon as you tried to use it for specific examples or exercises, it started to go wrong. Its examples didn't match its explanation, and it couldn't stick to the brief. And it was sexist and racist. So not a good start. But let's look at how it fares with lesson planning.

We should get the howlers out of the way to start off with.

We know from last year that AI struggles with analysing letters in words.

(By the way, looking at pronunciation in the above example was from my wrangling with the AI. It would never come up with something as focused as that.)

It still struggles with taking words apart.

(And people laugh because it doesn't know how many rs there are in strawberry!)

AI thinks that je vais meaning I am going, can be explained because it is made of the French word va + the English word is

(It didn't randomly come up with this. It was as a result of me asking for clarification.)

AI designs an activity where the teacher reads out the pupils' name and age (11) and the pupils have to guess who it is.

Admit it, you tried saying it to see if there's a difference.

I asked it how long it expected this task to take. It said about 30 minutes. There are not enough words in the dictionary to complete the task!

Writing out the French alphabet for homework. (It's the same as the English alphabet.)

So it makes mistakes. Mistakes with language, mistakes with tasks. And sometimes they are enormous and obvious and hilarious. Although I have to say, that one of my own kids was actually set that very task of writing out and illustrating (with English words) the French alphabet for homework. I may still have it in the loft!

But how does it do in terms of planning lessons?

It always produces a very similar lesson plan. It starts with a warm up, then a repeat after me, then a matching activity, then a write your own paragraph, then listen to some native speakers, then do a role play with a partner, then write a paragraph for homework. Oh. And I forgot flashcards. It loves flashcards.

A sequence of activities, with very little focus on what language is being taught and how the lesson should evolve around knowledge of the teaching points required by the specific content of the lesson. It treats every lesson as some language to be heard and repeated, with some grammar to be explained. As a result, there's no care or attention paid to whether the tasks can be done using the language that the pupils have. So most often, its lessons would not work because the tasks pupils are being asked to do, are not doable.

I have then had to engage with it in a protracted conversation where I give up my time and experience and expertise in order to coach and coax it into producing something better.

Here's an interminable conversation where I tried to get it to focus on teaching the language rather than just a series of activities. Click here to see me wrangle with it.

Here's another one where I tried to start from a language point rather than a topic to see how it did. Unfortunately, its grasp of French is so poor, it was never going to work. In case French isn't your specialist subject, hardly any of the letters it claims are silent are actually silent. Click here to see me trying to help it.

So, far from being time saving, this is taking up hours of my time to try to get it to produce something workable. And far from being suitable for new or non-specialist teachers, it requires huge experience and expertise to try to guide it round horrible pitfalls, and try to get it to focus on teaching language, not stringing together activities.

I have tried it for science lessons too, with the same result. It comes up with activities, with no notion of what it is actually trying to teach and how to engage pupils in that learning. It doesn't use the experiments to tackle fundamental concepts or address misconceptions. In fact at one point it said that a balloon flying along a guide string was demonstrating Newton's Third Law, because the string moved in the opposite direction to the balloon. Here's a summary of its science lessons in a thread unroll.

So I could be quite insulted by the government. They are always on our back and telling us that good enough isn't good enough. But if they recommend this half baked unskilled nonsense, then they clearly have no knowledge or respect for our expertise.

BUT...

But I think I have found a use for it. Just it's the opposite of what the government is suggesting. Clearly, AI is no use at all for new teachers or non-specialist teachers. Or for saving time. It takes an immense amount of expertise and time to coax it towards something useful. It has no knowledge of pupils. It can quote some insight into teaching principles but struggles to apply them. Its subject knowledge is a worry. It likes to string together activities, rather than build learning around the specific concept it is teaching. Does this remind you of anything? 

It reminded me a lot as I was doing it, of the way you can work with a very new trainee teacher to develop their ideas into a workable lesson plan. Of course trainees arrive with differing levels of experience, but this seems to share so many of the things that they have to hone. Spotting flaws, refocusing on what matters, avoiding distracting activities done for the sake of the activity, factoring in knowledge of what will work with pupils, targeting concepts and misconceptions, building in progression.

Here's one where I try to persuade it to change its focus to really think through the language needed for the tasks. After a couple of hours, we did get somewhere.

So maybe we have discovered a useful tool. It was a rehearsal/simulation of how as a mentor, I might work with a trainee. So perhaps this could be used for mentors to hone their patience with new trainees. Or for course tutors to use with their trainees to live-model lesson planning. It would be great if there were a use for it!

Cheating Translation - a neat trick

 I am very much enjoying working through the new GCSE textbook as I plan for the new GCSE starting in September. They have achieved a good balance between progression and accumulating language, and sharp focus on developing pupils' exam skills in a cultural and motivating context. It's a great fit for the overall vision we have in our school of how we want the course to work for our pupils. I have been creating a booklet to go with Module 1 to really draw this out and get us off to a great start.

In this post I am going to show you one clever way to make use of the texts and activities in the book: Cheating Translation.

Put simply, Cheating Translation is where you have a series of texts for pupils to translate - some from English into French, and some from French into English. And what you do, is you hide the language pupils need for one translation, inside one of the other texts. So they can do most of the translation using language they know, but if they are stuck, they know they can hunt for the words in the other texts on the page.

Here's an example from our Year 8 Unit 1 booklet.

You can see that text B helps pupils with text A. And text A helps pupils with text B. This is great for a cover lesson where you need a worthwhile activity that works smoothly for the cover teacher.

So how does this work to make using the new GCSE textbook go smoothly?

This is from the Module 1 Booklet I have written to go with the new textbook.

You can see from the list that there is an awful lot going on on this page. Irregular verbs, plus jouer à, jouer de, faire du sport, j'aime le sport and important time words. All of these things must not just be seen but actually learned. With attention drawn to them and planning for how they will be met again and again, and added to the repertoire of French which pupils can use confidently and accurately.

Here's the first text on the page:

Pearson AQA GCSE French

This "Manon" text is in fact one of four in the first exercise. And what the book does is ask the pupils to look at all 4 texts and match them to the pictures. This is a perfectly logical way in. The pupils have a first read through of the text, picking out the vocabulary for the activities (cooking, cycling etc) and matching them to the pictures. It's a natural and important way to approach the text. But it works entirely by asking them to find obvious known language or cognates, and ignores entirely the features of the text which are actually useful.

Of course there are follow up tasks. Firstly to translate the sentences in blue which contain the irregular verbs. And then secondly to find mentions of other people in the texts. Although this will need teacher input to steer pupils away from just listing her brother, her friends and actually focus on nous and the verb endings.

The various other features such as jouer de, faire du, are picked up in grammar boxes on the page, but I want to get as much as possible out of the text itself.

Let's look at just the Manon text again:

It's fabulous. It's just what's needed as pupils move from KS3 to GCSE. They are already brilliant at saying what they like to do and why, adding if sentences and linking it up. They are poor at adding convincing detail, nuance and they are only just starting to work out how to move from talking about themselves to talking about other people, either as a conflict of opinions or as working together.

I want to get at the move between je... mon frère... nous... on... And I want the nuance words like tout and plusieurs, the time words like après and normalement, and the handling other people words like ensemble.

We know in an AQA markscheme for the reading exam a candidate who writes "They cycle a long way with their brother" might get 0 marks if AQA insist it has to contain the words several and together. We know they do that in the current GCSE. And in the new GCSE with its increased focus on high frequency vocabulary, they are just as likely to work this way. And in planning our teaching for the new GCSE, I am also determined to keep the focus on these non topic words which can appear in any text. And which also make the difference, in pupils' own speaking and writing, between a good candidate and an outstanding one. Ultimately these are the words which allow pupils to frame narrative, move coherently from one idea to another, and to develop longer, detailed answers.

So where does Cheating Translation come in?

Have a look at this translation text and compare it to the Manon text.

It is designed so that pupils can translate almost all of it from their repertoire of French. But it is deliberately a mirror of the text they are going to meet when they get to the Manon text in the book. So when they meet a word they don't know, they can find it in the Manon text.

It is doing two things, both as important as each other. In doing the tennis/football translation, it is showing them how to extend and give detail/nuance to an answer they can already produce. They see that the words in bold type naturally fit well into their repertoire and enhance their expression.

And secondly it means that the first time they encounter the Manon text, it's not as a problem or a threat or a challenge. It's as a useful helping hand. It gives them the words they need. Instead of tackling the text as a skimming for known words exercise, it takes them straight in to looking for unknown words. And very useful unknown words!

But that's not even half of how Cheating Translation works! Next you can do this!

They move from translating my mirrored text into French, using the Manon text for help, to translating the Manon text into English, using my mirrored text for help if needed. And then they shut the textbook and translate it back into French. You can choose whether to do this as a sequence of translations in one lesson, or if you want to spread it out over several lessons to boost the requirement for pupils to retain and retrieve what they learned in the previous lesson.

So instead of fishing around in the Manon text for known words and then new grammar, they are straight in to working with every word in the sentence, for comprehension and for extending their own repertoire of French. The support is there to make them successful, the challenge is there, and the vision of how it all builds their learning is definitely there.

This idea of rewriting texts from the textbook on different topics is something I am going to continue. Either as here to anticipate texts, or to deliberately revisit them in new contexts later. As well as revisiting being important for retaining vocabulary, you can see from this example that it's even more important for switching the focus to the non topic words and for how they are integrated into the pupils' repertoire, ready to be deployed.

New GCSE Module 0 Booklet

 I have created a booklet for our Year 10s called Module 0. Why Module 0? Because it's for before they start the textbook. And because the 0 is the shape of the snowball of French I want them to have so it doesn't melt and so more French sticks to it. And because a 0 Module approach is lurking behind this GCSE, where as much as possible we are not sticking to one topic at a time and then moving on.

And I've put all that in the booklet for the pupils too. Here's a slide from the powerpoint that introduces it:

The first thing we do is to ask pupils to analyse their own snowball from KS3 with this double page activity. They place the French they know and always use at the core, working outwards to French they don't know yet. In 2005 I wrote that this is all the grammar that you need for GCSE - what matters is how well you use it. And nothing has changed!

Then we go straight in with 3 key aspects in turn. The Role Play, the Unexpected Questions, and The Conversation.

For The Role Play, I have picked out from the Sample Assessment Materials all the Role Plays that I think pupils can do successfully using their snowball of French and the vocabulary they have learned in KS3. The questions are in English and they can write down their answers. They should write short answers in a sentence. The answers aren't about their own lives; they are role playing a conversation between two imaginary people.

This will give the pupils and the teachers the opportunity to see how well KS3 has prepared them for GCSE, and any gaps that will need to be filled. It tackles exam technique from the start of the course, and immediately demonstrates the power of the snowball of French.

The messages I hope to come out of this are:

• You are already well on the way to GCSE French.
• You have to think about how to use French you know, to give a correct answer.
• You may want to say other things. We have 2 more years to work on that.
• There may be things you can't do. In particular asking questions or describing. We will work on that.
• Many of the topics are familiar, but there are more topics that we will cover.

Then we look at the Unexpected Questions. There are four of these and for AQA they all follow the Read Aloud task. This is a big step up from the Role Play questions, firstly because you don't see these questions written down. They are fired at you by the examiner. And secondly because unlike the Role Play, you are expected to give some development of your answers.

The first thing we do is to say you may NOT fully understand the question. We know this from the current GCSE where the Role Play contains one unexpected question. The stress and confusion of the exam situation means very few pupils process the question fully. I must remember that I have an excellent example of this to share with you once we are out of the exam purdah period. So the first thing in the booklet is how to deal with this emergency situation:

Imagine this is what it feels like in the exam. Can you still give an answer and hope it gets some credit? This is exactly what happens with the current GCSE unexpected question. For the new GCSE, this is only the starting point, because we are really going to be working on this!

Next we do some work on Question and Command words. So the pupils are seeing the questions written down, and can also plan their developed answers in writing. The Box the question word relates to a whole school policy of BUG where pupils Box, Underline and Go over elements of an exam rubric. 

The point in Module 0 is for the pupils to see that they do have the French to do the task. So they do see the questions printed in the booklet:

The booklet then asks the pupils to work with a partner, reading questions to each other. Can they get the topic of the question? Can they get the exact question? Can they give an answer? Can they develop the answer? Again, they have questions from the Sample Assessment Material, so they can see they are using GCSE questions already.

This is just a taster, as responding to unexpected questions is going to be a major focus in every Module we do. The key messages are:

• Don't panic, pick up as much as you can of the question and always give an answer.
• Thinking up what to say is often as hard as knowing the French. How do you extend an answer to "Where is your school?" especially when you are both sitting in it!
• Use French you know in order to answer the question, then use your snowball to give further follow up details even if this takes you away from the original question.
• Throughout your GCSE course, starting right now, make the most of opportunities to practise speaking. It's not the French. It's how good you are at using it.
• Do something with scaffolding one lesson, but come back in future lessons and see if you can still do it without the scaffolding.

Then we tackle the Conversation.

The conversation has changed in some respects from the current GCSE. There is no longer any mention of the word narrate. And the exemplification of "extended answers" given in the AQA materials is just 3 clauses. But the pupils will have to talk for up to five and a half minutes on just one theme, which is much longer than for the current GCSE. And the AQA notes do recommend that teachers use follow up prompts such as Why? And? For example? So I will carry on teaching pupils to develop their answers and respond to prompts for more details.

The first thing is a model answer done as a listening (or a reading if needed).

The pupils listen and tick when they hear each of the elements of the answer:

Then they listen again and take notes on what is said for each element. Then they write up their version of the answer in French.

This answer models:

• How to use their snowball of French to create an extended and coherent answer which meets exam criteria and shows off the range of their language.
• How one thing always needs to another in a logical development.
• How to have a formula or trigger that helps you decide what to say next - thinking up what to say is harder than coming up with the French.

Then they transfer this across to other topics, either in writing and then in speaking:

This has taken the pupils way beyond what is tackled in Module 1 of the textbook, but this isn't about progression in French. The pupils' snowball from KS3 already contains all the French they need for the Conversation. The message to pupils here is that it's about having 2 years to get good at using their French.

The rest of the booklet contains a selection of Keep Talking sheets, to transfer their French across a range of topics, and to scaffold their answers. These may look like what people call Sentence Builders, but they are different in two key ways. Firstly, they are all built around the same snowball of language. And secondly, they are designed for building extended answers, not sentences. Here's one example:

One key page, which I will also be making into a poster, gives them a repertoire of activities for speaking that they can come back to throughout the GCSE course, and take ownership of making their speaking lessons purposeful and productive:

Many of these activities have their own posts on this blog, so it's worth checking them out:

Links to Speaking Activities 1. Links to Speaking Activities 2.

This is post number 200 on this blog. And I am glad that we are still talking about teaching GCSE pupils that it's not just knowing more French that matters. It's how well you can use it to express yourself and develop increasingly coherent and personal answers. That feels pretty good, I have to say!

The Best of Both Worlds

 It's been tempting over the course of the last couple of years, to feel as if we are being asked to choose between two different visions of language learning.

On the one end of this spectrum, is the idea that language learning is all about Meaning. Creating meaning by saying things and communicating. Understanding meaning by listening, reading and interacting. It's important that language learning isn't just learning and being tested on your knowledge of a collection of vocabulary and grammar items. You shouldn't wait until pupils have mastered the whole system before showing them they can use the language to communicate.

At the other end, are the new exhortations from the Ofsted "Research Review" and the new GCSE panel, that language learning shouldn't just be a collection of things that pupils can say or understand. We shouldn't be learning by osmosis to give set phrasebook style answers for different situations. It is primarily about learning vocabulary and grammatical concepts. Communication can wait.

Here is a slide from Steven Fawkes from an ALL talk to enthuse new MFL teachers. Here are things that we have always thought are the strongest points of our subject:

and here's a snippet from Common Ground by Florencia Henshaw and Maris Hawkins:

Language learning happens when pupils use the language for real, for purposeful creation of meaning or understanding. Not just by practising the language.

We are being asked to consider what if this approach is not just wrong and misguided, but dangerously counter-productive.

When pupils struggle with language learning and seem frustrated or unmotivated, we reach for the levers of communication, relevance, authenticity, culture, creavity, expression... And we expect these to switch on a love of learning and engagement, a sense of purpose.  But might it be that these levers are the wrong ones? By doing this, we are increasing the cognitive demand on pupils, asking them to communicate too soon? Is it a successful approach only with those learners who come equipped with the cultural capital, awareness of language, confidence, self-efficacy and literacy skills needed to cope with this "in at the deep end" approach? The danger of sink or swim is that some just sink.

Instead, we are being asked to consider an approach focused on the language. Vocabulary and grammar, carefully selected and sequenced. Not so that pupils can say things or understand things. But so they can see how the language works. With everything explained clearly, with no guessing or glossing over or assumptions about what pupils can work out or don't need to know.

That's the thinking behind this slide from an Ofsted webinar accompanying their "Research Review." It is a view of language teaching where everything is planned and sequenced logically, boiled down to the essentials and carefully avoiding rich and complex contexts.

The examples given in the webinar are that we should teach pupils to say red dog, red tortoise but we should avoid green dog, green tortoise because this brings in adjectival agreement. And leaners already have enough on their plate with learning the vocabulary and the word order. A logical step-by-step teaching strategy. But one which is totally distanced from learners using the language to say things they want to say.

This has huge implications for things like our Year 7 French Art Exhibition.

What if...

What if we are focused on the product not the process? There's a deadline and we skip over important learning because we need to get the picture and the text done.

The pupils' attention might be too directed towards the meaning and not enough towards the forms of the words.

What if the pupils' descriptions bring in random words that they are never going to need again? 

What if pupils are trying to say things they can't? So they fall into error but we gloss over it because they are "communicating well."

That could mean that the things we think are the best for our learners turn out to be the worst!

Let's look at that spectrum diagram again. Is it really how it has been painted? How about we move things about a little.

Are those positions really incompatible?

Let's move the things we do want from language learning, into the middle. Language Learning is about Understanding and Creating Meaning. And about Knowledge linked by Conceptualisation. Sounds good to me. Spot on in fact. I want all those things.

How about the things we don't want? Language Learning isn't just a collection of knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. And neither is it a collection of phrasebook style things pupils can say. Absolutely spot on.

So instead of being asked to choose, in reality we are being given the best of both worlds.

So when I teach Year 7 j'ai un chien, I know that we are not going to be spending 5 years remembering words for pets. I know that the important things are j'ai and un/une and the sound-spelling link in oiseau and poisson. But the pupils are focused on a game where you have to guess if people are telling the truth about their pets and their names. Because the meaning and communication and link to reality matter to pupils. More than links and patterns between words at this stage.

And when I teach je n'ai pas de..., we will spend time looking at contractions of je - j'ai and ne - n'. But we will also chante je n'ai pas de over and over again to a video of a rhythmic steam train. The best of both worlds.

And I know that when I teach Year 8, we will separate out the process of randomly using the language in a ridiculous world record length "sentence" and then later working on coherence and quality of expression.

Because both are important, and there is no conflict.

And when it comes to the Year 7 French Exhibition. Why do we teach the grammar of word order, adjectival agreement, definite and definite articles, prepositions and high frequency words? We teach it so that 200 pupils can all create their own art work and they can all write about their own picture. Grammar is creativity and communication. There is no incompatibility.

Pupil Voice in Modern Languages - Year 9 Options 2024

Two years ago I wrote a post on Year 9 pupils' thoughts about GCSE languages and how they were generally positive. Then, last year a similar survey discovered a high proportion of Year 9 pupils who thought that languages was not a useful GCSE for employment or for university application. So we acted to address this, including supportive messages from the Headteachers. In our school, languages are very much supported, although not over and above other subjects. But in this instance we were addressing a specific misconception, and numbers in the current Year 10 were definitely boosted as a result, compared to what our survey had shown in September.

This year, a similar survey in September didn't ring as many alarm bells, with 80% of pupils at least considering taking a language, before they saw the structure of the options available. Our interest this year wasn't focused so much on overall numbers, so much as on looking into why certain groups are under represented in GCSE languages. We are very successful in attracting learners with lower prior attainment. Often it's the pupils who you know would "excel in French" or be "a natural linguist" who aren't picking it as an option. (Here's a post where you can see exactly why I am resisting those labels.)

Susannah Porsz of the Beeleigh Languages Hub interviewed a panel of eight high flying Year 9 pupils, some of whom had and some of whom hadn't picked a language at GCSE.

Here's some of what they said:

General Attitudes

They were all very confident in their progress and test results in French. This was something we had been deliberately setting out to achieve with our revised KS3 assessments. And I know some of the pupils had also received emails to parents congratulating them on their results and progress.

They were very positive about the usefulness of languages, mentioning travel, careers and meeting people, and the fact that a language is something that it is "nice to know." They included mentions of parents' attitudes as positive, but other pupils' attitudes as negative. Some of them spoke other languages at home or had international family connections, which were seen as important and positive. They were positive about their lessons, although some said, "It's just not for me." And one said, "I don't dread it, but it's not my favourite either."

Picking Options

When it came to talking about Options, most had been considering taking a language, but were in the situation where there were "Too many choices and not enough options." Several had put French down as a second choice. This is interesting because any changes to the options offer structure would ultimately follow pupil numbers. Are a significant number of pupils putting French as a second choice when there is another column where they would have put it as a first choice if it were on offer?

As we had also discovered in previous years, our pupils make very detailed and specific career decisions very early. Before Year 9, they already had clear ambitions, which included scholarships and international study. But a language didn't seem to them to be directly relevant to their specific career choice.

They spoke about how teachers for each subject "hyped" their own subject. They felt Geography, for example, had been particularly well sold, and some were even starting to wonder if they should have chosen French instead. This reinforces the value of the work we do in talking to pupils about the value of languages. And highlights the importance of them hearing it from third parties such as University outreach or careers advice, because their French teacher "would say that, wouldn't they."

Some pupils talked about hearing from older pupils that French GCSE is hard and a big jump. One interesting comment was that if other pupils talk about taking history because they have heard it is "easy", then you might end up in a class with lots of people with the wrong attitude!

Experience of French in KS3

As we regularly find in the feedback we get from pupils as part of their assessments, their overall aim in learning French is "to have a basic real conversation." Most pupils wanted their lessons to be more varied and to have more speaking French. They were very much aware that this depended on having someone to work with who also wanted to practise speaking French. Someone you would be comfortable working with. They greatly valued it when they could be trusted to work with a partner and to take responsibility for working together. It is important to remember that when it seems easier to manage a class if we reduce the demands of interaction and speaking, these pupils wanted (like us) to be developing speaking. It's important we realise this and we can use this knowledge to make sure it happens.

There was discussion around how much repetition was necessary in French. They again compared it to Geography where they felt there was more variety and excitement. Although they were realistic about the need for scaffolding in a language. This was something I was particularly wondering about, in terms of the level of work and the level of interest for these particular pupils. 

They did mention that they wanted more cultural input. They could list some things they had done, for example food, places, songs, videos, the Windmill Art Exhibition and letter exchanges with France. But they didn't think it was enough. They talked about CLIL immersion approaches they had seen in the video of the school in France we look at, where they do maths in German. They thought this was a great idea but didn't think it was practicable. And on the other hand, some thought that French should be more transactional rather than doing things like the unit on the Environment. "More trips" was their emphatic answer to what would make the biggest difference.

Listening to them comparing Human Geography and Physical Geography, I wondered also if they could talk about French in the same way. Do we give them metalanguage and categories and labels? Would these pupils enjoy more explicit grammar to learn and terminology to make their learning feel more intellectual and less implicit? They mentioned adjectival agreement and a few other linguistic areas, but otherwise were mainly thinking of French in terms of topic content. Do we have work to do here?

But their understanding of their language-learning did come through very strongly in their comments on the school's "Learning Cycle." They immediately said that this was exactly how their lessons worked. Explanation, modelling, scaffolding, practice and feedback. And dual coding also got an enthusiastic mention from more than one pupil.

Feedback

If anything, I think the experience of giving feedback in itself was the most important thing. The more we can give pupils the opportunity to voice their thoughts on their language-learning, and for these to be taken seriously, the better. And for this to be with a neutral third party makes them feel their experiences are being valued. I will think how we can do this more often and systematically, perhaps by involving languages teachers from a nearby school on a reciprocal basis. And I'll have to think about how we can show to pupils that we've listened and discussed their feedback, because I don't suppose they read boring language teacher blogs...

The Messy Middle.

 Last week I wrote a long post about Language-Learning and the arguments between Knowledge and Skills. I looked at the lovely idea that Skills are not just a result of some people being "skillful". Their skills can be broken down into steps (knowledge and concepts) that can be taught explicitly to all pupils. These steps can be practised until pupils are fluent in them and become "skillful".

This lovely and useful idea has been taken up by the Knowledge Rich Curriculum project and broken. Instead of focusing on analysing and then building up skills, they have taken a different starting point. They started from Knowledge. From the expert's overall view of how the complete system works and can be conceptualised. Instead of breaking down the Skills into Knowledge, they have broken down Knowledge. And then concentrated on force feeding the Knowledge to pupils. And they haven't even been surprised that this doesn't add up to acquiring Skills. Because they have forgotten that part entirely. Or maybe they were never actually interested in it at all.

This post is now going to be much shorter and sweeter. And from now on, entirely focused on Language-Learning.

In fact, here's the whole post in one table:

Where do you see yourself and your teaching for each of these aspects?

In Language-Teaching, the Knowledge/Skills debate is also framed around Learning/Acquisition. You will remember from my post last week, that I am not in favour of neat binary extremes. It turns out lots of the "Research Based" ideology is about judging conformity to an idea of how learning should be. Not looking at the reality of learning in the classroom.

I have tried to look at different aspects of language-learning and find "The Messy Middle" for each of them.

This is how I try to teach. In every case it's messy, it's real, and it's focused on the learners. It builds up their knowledge and their skills in tandem. I monitor their knowledge through what they can do with the language. And I deliver the knowledge that they need in order to do more with their language. I work on the increasing independence, accuracy, fluency and coherence with which they can deploy their language.

Instead of splitting into camps and looking for simplistic doctrines and magic pyramids, can we start to get stuck into the Messy Middle? That's the question I posed in the following snippet right at the start of my previous post. Let's enjoy the Messy Middle. This is us:

Nitty Gritty Teaching

 Time to reflect on some of the things we put in place in the light of the Ofsted "Research Review". One idea was that we had been pulling the wrong levers in order to engage young people with learning languages. We always thought that communication, meaning, interesting content, culture and authentic material would engage. Whereas grammar and accuracy would confuse, frustrate and demotivate.

We were asked to think about this the other way round.

What if our focus on communication and culture put cognitive demands on pupils that pushed language learning further out of reach? What if authentic texts were full of little words and grammar that we told the pupils to gloss over in search of meaning from context, leaving pupils frustrated and confused that no-one ever told them what all the little words meant? What if we taught them whole phrases without telling them what the individual words meant and how the grammar worked? Was this the true obstacle to making language-learning accessible?

One thing we brought in was our Fluent in 5 lesson starters. At first to recycle language from previous units, but then increasingly in order to focus on the little words that we might skip over.

The lesson starters were a first step to all teachers tweaking the focus away from the "big words" of topic content, to the "little words" that make sentences work in all topics.

So this is where I find myself with Year 7. All year we have come at it from both angles. We learned "je n'ai pas de" by looking at how Mr Apostrophe ate the e of je and ne. But we also chanted it to a video of a steam train puffing up a hill:  "je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de."

And now we are doing rooms in the house. They have learned the rooms using dual coding. They learned the furniture by watching a house tour video in French. And we are focusing on recycling all the words we have done in Year 7 like il y a, j'ai, nous avons, est... All seems to be going well.

Then I got to this exercise in the booklet:

You can see what it is trying to do. It is giving the pupils the "big words" and asking them to focus on the "little words."

Of course it didn't work. Firstly, most pupils just read the English sentences and put in the words they thought made most sense: a bed, my desk... Not a problem. We often talk about the idea of getting things wrong and then sorting it out, and how powerful this is in learning. Because you remember your mistakes. And because you focused on the detail.

So next step was to ask the pupils to circle in the French the exact words that were meant to go in the gaps. They could do this. We checked the difference between un/une/le/la/des. Here we started to find the problem. The pupils who knew it, knew it perfectly and easily. The pupils who didn't know it, knew the concept and knew they were supposed to know it. But they just didn't care. They were not interested.

I'm not sure what to say to them about it. When I was learning French, getting un/une right mattered so much that when I went to France on my own, I ordered two of everything I bought, rather than get it wrong. Or I avoided saying things. I'm not entirely sure that was a good thing. With my own pupils, I have seen that the time masculine/feminine really starts to matter is when the exchange pupils are here, and all of a sudden it's important to get the gender right when telling a boy what you think of him!

Here's the next exercise in the booklet:

Pupils can see it is to help them describe their house. They can see that it's helping reinforce different verb constructions so their sentences aren't repeating il y a all the time. They can see it's testing if they can spell the words they have learned or if not, to know to check the spelling.

Do they see it as an invitation to express themselves and talk about a real or imaginary house? 

Or do they see it as a grammatical exercise checking if they correctly use le/la/les/un/une/des?

How can we balance these two? Pupils tend to see it as an invitation to communicate. To think about their house, think of the French words, and build the sentence. And I don't think we would want it to be the other way round. A pupil who isn't fussed about what they are saying, but knows they have to get un/une/le/la correct. I don't seem to have a lot of those pupils in my class. And I think that's probably alright. As a teacher, I need to make sure they know how to use the right articles. And I will slowly try to encourage them to see the importance of using the right one. I don't want to make it something that becomes an obstacle, where a pupil panics so much about picking the article, that they lose their focus on communicating. But there seems very little risk of this. The pupils who get it have no problem with it. And the other pupils just aren't bothered.

I'm not sure where this leaves the idea that we were frustrating pupils by not focusing enough on these words. It's not turning out to be a magic bullet. And the answer seems to lie in the middle ground between the two extremes. Which sums up most educational debates! 

Planning the new GCSE: The Vision

 As I start to plan and resource the new GCSE, my vision is this:

A lovely snowball of French. The pupils' French is compacted together into a big ball. It won't melt. It can roll around between topics. More and more French will stick to it. It belongs to them, and they can have fun with it.

I don't want an even covering. An even covering looks pretty, but you come back next lesson and your French has all melted.

Are textbooks good at building a snowball? Or are they designed to create an even covering? What if they cover everything once, ticking it off on a contents page? What if the language in one topic doesn't transfer to another?

In my teaching I want to recycle the same core of language in every unit. I want as much time as possible for the pupils to get good at using that core of language.  I want it to be the language they need in order to perform the exam tasks and to meet the exam criteria. And I want it to be of GCSE standard from the start.

There are plenty of other posts on this blog about the core of language I want my pupils to be confident using on any topic. Here's some examples of work - you can see the same language in every case.

Holidays

School

Shopping

So the first thing I am going to do is to write a Speaking/Writing booklet pulling together pupils' core repertoire from KS3, and using it across the exam topics. It will have GCSE tasks from the Speaking Exam and the Writing Exam. And it will show pupils, even before they start the course or open the textbook, that they have the French they need to tackle the tasks.

The message will be:

• You have the French. You need to get good at using it.
• You can do the exam. You may not be able to say exactly what you want to say. We will work on that.
• You can do the exam. You may not be getting the grade you want yet. We will work on that.
• You have a snowball of French. Don't let it melt, and more French will stick to it.

Then we will start the book.

I am not entirely sure we will work through the book in order.

Some topics are very similar and are a great opportunity for pupils to practise using their core of language and to practise transferring it across topics: Free Time, Holidays, House, Town and Region, School. As in the examples of work above, I want pupils to be able to deploy their language confidently on any of these topics.

Then topics like Jobs, the Environment, and Technology are slightly less familiar but use more or less the same core language. Pupils can still talk about what they want to do, can do, should do, hope to do, plan to do, usually do... Once they have the snowball of French from the familiar topics, the French from these topics will stick to it.

What topics are left? The ones which are less First Person. Both grammatically and in terms of content. Celebrities, and Culture. We will deliberately tackle the ways in which the language for these topics can be made to stick onto the same snowball. Not to form a separate snowball.

And then there's Self, Relationships, Family. Possibly the most melty topic. Irregular verbs, adjectival agreement. Ser and estar. Short descriptions that don't develop into the same sort of narrative answer. I would want to think about delaying this topic until the snowball is big enough for it to just stick. If it was the first topic, I would be afraid it wouldn't form a strong enough core. I will look very carefully at the role of description in the exams. There are a greater proportion of adjectives on the list than previously. And the sample role play questions (AQA) do ask for a description of someone.

But a short simple description is something I would want to pop into every unit, so it fuses. Rather than trying to build a whole unit out of short descriptions that have nothing to stick to. Reminds me of the rainy day on holiday when I tried to make a man and a dog out of wotsits. If you make the ends wet you can fuse them. But they have no structural integrity and when they dry out they all fall apart. Probably have a photo somewhere.

So I am thinking of re-ordering, combining or revisiting topics. With booklets that sit alongside the textbooks. I am going to deliberately rewrite variations on texts in the book, re-versioning them for a different topic. This will highlight the words that get kept across topics, and make sure they are deliberately revisited.

And in these booklets, I will want to tackle more of the things that perhaps a book can't do well. Things like Unexpected Questions. In the current GCSE there is one unexpected question in the Role Play. And if pupils say a random thing they may or may not get lucky. I have a fantastic example to share from this year once the exam results are all out. In the new GCSE there are 4 of this type of questions. And pupils have to think about giving a developed answer to them. This isn't going to happen without work.

Here are sample unexpected questions (AQA):

The pupil won't see these questions. They will hear them from the examiner. They have to process the question and give a developed answer immediately. What I am doing, is writing texts based on these questions.

We can work on the texts. Maybe for reading aloud or for comprehension, or as model texts. Then I will fire the unexpected questions at the pupils. They will have to process the question. And then the answer is located in the text. They can read it. So the focus is on processing the question. Then we can move on to the pupils giving their own version of the answer.

This kind of work on questions can be done across topics, including coming back to texts we saw in class in previous units. Or we could use texts from the coursebook, that we come back to in later lessons and the pupils have to answer quick fire questions using the text in the same way.

And the last thing that was worrying me was the pupils' snowball of homework vocabulary learning. It will need to:

• Revise words seen in lessons.
• Prepare them for the next lessons.
• Revisit words from previous units.
• Consolidate topic and non topic vocabulary and the highest frequency vocabulary that is in every topic.
• Practise the core repertoire.
• Cover the vocabulary list.

 But it's not worried me before, so I'm going to stop worrying about it now. If I can plan enough revisiting, recycling and crossing over of topics, then when I put together the vocabulary learning for each week, then it should all be taken care of. In a nice big snowball.