NPP 19: Cognitive Load and Inclusion

 

In an earlier post in this series on our National Priorities Project, I looked at how thinking about our Year 7 French Art Exhibition helped us write our Department Inclusion Plan. Thinking about how we wanted all pupils to engage with the language learning itself as well as communication and creativity, helped us think through how we can remove barriers to learning. It is important to balance explicit learning of the linguistic concepts and content, with developing pupils' ability to use their language. Especially as we are coming to the conclusion that this is what makes language learning make sense and stick. We made our Plan out of all the things we already do.

But there has to be more to a Plan than what we already do. It has to be a Plan for what we can do better and how we can constantly monitor and share the impact.

In this post I will look at one example of something that revealed barriers to learning. And where a focus on deliberately engineering tasks around what we want pupils to learn, can help us boost the learning and remove barriers.

Here is an activity in the Year 8 booklet on My Town.

Originally it was meant to be easy! We have given the pupils the text in English as well as in French. What could possibly go wrong?

Well of course, lots of things. For a start, reading two texts at once. Both in terms of physical eye movements and keeping your place between the two. And in terms of working memory, keeping enough information in your head from the text you are not looking at, to compare it to the one you are looking at. 

Then there's the difference between looking at individual words, and understanding the sentence. The first thing that happens with this text is it can encourage pupils to stab at individual words like a heron catching fish, instead of reading the text carefully. Pupils may try to match English words to French just by the approximate layout on the page, but even without the question of word order, the two texts don't match up in this way. They may be able to spot some familiar words. Or they may spot words that jump out as looking similar. Or they may see a word beginning with a c and assume it means crocodile.

This seems like a barrier. But it's actually something I want from this task. I want pupils to learn that stabbing at words like a heron catching fish isn't how to read a French sentence. So I am prepared for some degree of bad guessing and pupils just expecting the answer to appear easily. And with some pupils (and some classes where they are set), after a few stabs, they realise they can carefully read the two sentences and locate the words.

The important thing is to think why it is that I am giving the pupils this task. In the booklet, it is on page 9, after many of these words will have been introduced and become familiar. But I don't use it this way. Because it goes with a timelapse video of Bordeaux that I show to pupils early on in the unit as an engaging hook, I use it to introduce many of these words for the first time.

So I am deliberately using it to make them have to think hard in order to find the words. The words are not random. They are deliberately chosen as the key words they are going to need in order to make sentences with the places in town they already learned using the dual coding technique. I contend that by thinking about the words for themselves, making sense of the French, finding patterns, making hypotheses, then this makes the words and structures more memorable already. Compared to just being told.

We should hang on to this idea for when I come on to talking about using this task with a different group.

There are a couple more aspects of the task that trip pupils up. One is that there are words underlined in the English to find in the French. But also words underlined in the French to find in the English. This was again originally intended to simplify things by not having too many words next to each other underlined. But it threw some pupils whose eyes automatically went to the underlined word in the French and thought it must correspond to one of the underlined words in the English. Again, with this group, it did momentarily throw some pupils, but I spotted what they had done and got them to think about how to read more carefully, using the English text to help.

Then there was this grid to fill in. Some pupils were again initially flummoxed by what words to put where. When we sat down as a department as part of this National Priorities Project to take apart our KS3 curriculum page by page, several members of the department commented on this grid and the unexpected difficulties it threw up. Watching pupils, it seemed to be because they had a lot of words underlined (correctly) but didn't know which word to put with which.

With this group, when this happened, I saw it as a useful exercise for them to overcome. They had just gone through the text identifying the words as they went. But at the end they weren't quickly and easily able to say which French word went with which English word. So making them do the grid was a valid activity. It made them think again, gave them another encounter with the words, and another opportunity to spot patterns. As did Exercise 3, where they successfully translated the French into English using words in their grid.

I must also add that as we checked our answers, their pronounciation of je peux and je dois was perfect. I asked them if they had seen the words before, and they answered in bemusement that no, but in Year 7 they had learned eu like jeux-vidéo and oi like poisson and that final consonants have gone on one of those expeditions to the zoo.

So although the text and the task had some design features that brought up obstacles, they acted as alerts that pupils weren't reading carefully enough, and were expecting the answers to pop into their heads. The pitfalls were useful in making sure the pupils were thinking hard and reading carefully.

With my other set, I had to take the barriers caused by the task more seriously. I did not want them to become barriers to learning. Keeping too many things in short term memory while looking at too many things at once. Moving between two texts and losing your place. Getting stuck on looking at individual words rather than making sense of a sentence.

BUT... But I still wanted them to meet the same key structures. I still wanted them to move from the video of Bordeaux to the text about Bordeaux and then the text about Dereham. Did I still want them to have to read sentences carefully, using the English to make sense of the French? Did I still want them to figure out the important words for themselves rather than being told? Did I want them to spot patterns for themselves? The answer to these questions was Yes. And just like with the other group, I wanted them to have to engage with an appropriate level of difficulty rather than expecting the answers to present themselves.

Here's what I did with the page.

You can see the text is identical and the task is essentially the same. I have split it into single sentences one at a time. I have half filled in the grid. And I have made the translation at the end into separate sentences too.

I also approached it differently. First we used blue felt tips to locate the words underlined in English and make sure we had read the English sentences. Then on the whiteboard, pupils came up and underlined what they thought were the first few corresponding words in the French. This helped spot the danger of selecting où in the French just because it was underlined. I had thought of removing the underlining in the French. But decided to keep it in to make sure they were essentially doing the same task. After doing a few on the board, they did the task themselves on the worksheet. Then we changed colour felt tip to pink and located all the words underlined in the French. And then found the corresponding words in English.

Most pupils did it very successfully. Some made mistakes but knew that was all part of the process. Some moved through the task independently and quickly. Others needed me to pop back and check on their thinking. And it was the thinking that I was interested in, not the completion of the task. So for a pupil having to hunt through two lines of text, one in a foreign language, to realise that there were several chunks beginning with je and they matched to English words with I in front of them, was a key moment of realisation. It's the first thing I will come back to next lesson and ask if they can explain the pattern in je peux, je dois, je veux and ask the class how it relates to j'aime, j'adore, j'habite. Because thinking something through is much better than being told. Once the other barriers have been removed.

I have also asked them if they think it would be a good idea next lesson to try the original version in the booklet - they understand that it's the same task but with different layout. And they understand that I want them to challenge themselves and also that I want to include them in the conversation about what are the obstacles to learning that teachers don't realise they've created.

The question for our Department Inclusion Plan is how to apply this example across our resources.

You often hear the mantra of "Teach to the top and scaffold it down". But often when I rewrite a resource to be more scaffolded for a particular set, that version ends up in the booklet for everyone because it was removing unnecessary barriers that weren't essential for what was being learned. Or we could include two versions. Or we could have different booklets for different sets or individual pupils.

Does the example in this post help make some of these decisions? We can see that a text can create barriers that are unintended. But also that in overcoming these barriers, pupils are having to read carefully and think hard. And that whatever we decide to print, a key thing is to give pupils agency in reacting to challenge, and teachers really paying attention to what the multiple demands of a task are.

I know this is already a long post. But one thing I want to add about how this post fits in with our learning through this National Priorities Project: Once we spotted them, removing the barriers was easy. What needs thinking about is what we want to leave in. What is the important learning, in terms of the language but also in terms of literacy, skills, meaning and challenge? These are the questions our project is exploring.

NPP 18: The French Art Exhibition itself

 It has occured to me that after 17 posts on our National Priorities Project, I haven't really outlined our Year 7 French Art Exhibition in any detail.

It is hosted every year in a local Windmill which is a community exhibition space. We don't have to pay for the space, but visitors (except the Year 7 exhibitors themselves) pay a small entrance fee as would any visitor to the Windmill. Before exhibiting at the Windmill, we previously held the Exhibition in school and one year (before Brexit) the work travelled to a partner school in France. Some years we hold a vernissage early evening event with nibbles and fizzy cordial to open the Exhibition and invite carers and parents and the local press.

The work is on display for a month in the spring, before being taken down. Some of the artwork is given back to the pupils and some is kept for things like Open Evenings. As it's a Windmill it has steep stairs to several floors, so we also make a video of the work to be shown on a screen on the ground floor for any visitors who can't access the upper floors. I think it's safe to say that most of the visitors are carers and family members of the pupils, although visiting Windmill aficionados also get to see some nice French.

Every pupil's work is displayed and there is a variety in the quality of the artwork and of the French. We hope that the fact that it is going on display challenges the pupils to take responsibility for producing their best work. Mounted on colourful paper, it has a naive charm and is always a great success.

There isn't a theme for the topic of the artwork, although it's best if it's a picture with several items, so that there's enough to talk about in the description. Some pupils complete the artwork in French lessons and some complete it at home. This may include painted canvases and objet d'arts. But most are A4 and in coloured pencil.

The description in French is attached as a card below the painting. It contains details of things in the picture, their relative positions, the colours, what people and creatures are doing, and some comments on the style or how it makes you feel. Pupils also write a fictional biography of themselves as an artist, modelled on examples of real artists in the booklet. They adopt nom de plumes and can claim to have travelled, worked and studied across the world. Bearing in mind that the work is to be displayed publicly, they don't use their real names. But it is important they put their name on the back of the card and the back of the picture, unless you want to play a very big game of match the picture to the description when it comes to mounting them on the coloured paper. Sometimes the name written on the back can also give an indication of which way up the picture is supposed to go, if there is any doubt. I will talk in another post about the language content of the unit and the resources.

Talking of "match the French to the description", this is in fact what many of the visitors do. Parents and carers are put on the spot to read the pupils' French, and the picture can be quite handy in giving clues. It's nice for pupils to hear their parents showing off their French. And generally the public are very impressed with the pupils' work. I have written here about the accuracy of pupils' work.

A couple of top tips I have picked up from the school's art department in case you like the sound of this as a project for your pupils... Once the pupils have selected the items (and the vocabulary) that are going to go in their picture, I make them sketch it in a very very small rectangle. The items need to fill the canvas and be bursting out. They shouldn't just plonk things in the middle, but should think about whether something is very close, or only partially fits in the picture, or is behind something else. Things like bridges or rainbows divide up the picture and fill up the background. Because the second tip is that there should be no white space. It's not a picture of some things. It's an artwork, and every inch of the paper is used. And the third tip is when you staple the work (on big sheets of coloured paper) to the display boards, tilt the stapler so that only one of the staple's little metal feet goes into the board properly. That way when you take the exhibition down, pinchnose pliers can quickly and easily pull out the staple.

I plan to use a future post to look at the language learning content and our resources - but you can get an idea already if you have a good look at the examples above. The idea is that it makes a different start to Year 7 that isn't repeating what pupils have done in Primary School, and which shows them that they can already be creative with their French and use it for an audience.

Meanwhile, the next post is about Inclusion: Barriers, difficulty and challenge.

NPP 17: Transactional Role Plays

 

 Our National Priorities Project is using the lens of our Year 7 French Exhibition to examine the rest of our curriculum. And Transactional Role Plays are directly analagous to the Art Exhibition. The fundamental questions are the same. Is this a Unit where the language is learned for the purpose of an attractive but one off task? Or does the Unit introduce and recycle language in a planned sequence?

Our Year 7 Unit on Food already includes giving opinions (J'aime la pizza avec du jambon et j'adore les tomates et le fromage mais je n'aime pas la pizza avec de l'ananas. Je préfère l'ananas dans une salade de fruit.) Which brings with it definite and partitive articles. And dipping our toe into the infinitive manger and the first person forms je mange and je ne mange pas. This is exactly the language that will be picked up in Year 8 for topics such as Free Time, My Town, My School, My Holiday. Along with work on being able to give opinions and justify them in answers which are increasingly spontaneous and well developed.

So should Transactional dialogues in a café, restaurant or shop situation be cut from the booklet if they don't directly tie in to the development of this repertoire?

I wrote in a previous post about whether we then shoe-horn language into transactional role plays, in order to make them more akin to this core repertoire of language. For example, insisting on "je voudrais un croque monsieur" rather than just "un croque monsieur, s'il vous plaît." Because in Year 8, I would like is going to be useful for talking about what you are planning to do next weekend. The ambiguity of whether we are learning the language in order to do the role play, or doing the role play in order to learn the language, can end up deforming everything!

When we sat down as a department to review our KS3 curriculum as part of this National Priorities Project, I was quite prepared to cut transactional café role plays from the booklet.

The department were unanimous in disagreeing. And I think they were reflecting the pupils' view on these lessons too. (Pupil surveys to follow as part of the National Priorities Project!) The idea of learning the French to be able to order food and drink when abroad, still has a strong purpose for our pupils. It has much more of a point to them than learning the difference between j'aime le chocolat and j'aime manger du chocolat.

We have come across this discrepancy before, between the long term aim of the teacher and the immediate communicative demands of the pupils. For example when we learn to talk about pets, I tell the pupils that the important things are j'ai and je n'ai pas de and un / une and the phonics. Whereas pupils just want to find out who has un chien. 

Teaching pupils to say things they want to say, and teaching pupils to conceptualise the grammar of the language are not incompatible. We can do both.

And there is also the dynamic of lessons. Constructing sentences from atomised words following grammar rules is not conducive to confident fluent speaking. The idea of learning a script and performing it with a partner is familiar to pupils from English or drama. And it is something that many of them enjoy. And it can lead on to more fluent, flexible and spontaneous speech from their own repertoire.

This is what a script in our Year 7 Food booklet looks like:

Pupils can practise reading aloud. Pupils can practise until they know it from memory. Pupils can vary the underlined items of food/drink/prices from items on a menu. They can act it out and swap partners to get used to talking French confidently in the classroom.

But importantly, they don't have to remember the script verbatim. They can skip the je voudrais and just say the drink. They can repeat anything else? rather than saying is that all? And they can listen and respond in case their partner skips a question or asks it in the wrong order.

And instead of varying the underlined words, they can plan to change the rest of the sentence.

This works both ways. A pupil who wants to be ambitious can decide to use a different expression. A pupil who can't remember whether they are supposed to say, et comme boisson ? or et avec ça ? can say which ever one they want. And a pupil who struggles with Vous désirez ? can just say, et pour vous ?

So pupils are learning to speak with confidence. They understand that it's about creating meaning, not parroting "correctly". They handle the interaction, challenge themselves, rehearse and polish their performance. They can see the point and the purpose of learning this language and being good at using it. And (remembering this National Priorities Project is around the idea of Interculturality) it casts them in the role of someone who may well one day soon find themselves or at the very least dream of finding themselves ordering food in a French café.

That feels like a good place to end this post. But I do want to tie it up with the ideas we have explored in these first 17 (!) posts leading from the French Art Exhibition Project. Because there are some strong ideas emerging. Over the last few years, we have introduced more explicit nitty gritty grammar with explanations and exercises. We have tried to make sure we have a core of language that is recycled, and cut down on language that is learned for a one off and never seen again. Our discussions as part of this National Priorities Project, including going through all of our KS3 resources page by page, seem to be leading us to a strong consensus that mechanical exercises for the sake of learning the language, do not lead to long term learning in the same way that tasks requiring the creation of meaning for a purpose do. Even in terms of "learning as a change in long term memory", pupils seem to learn best what has meaning and communicative purpose.

I don't think I am coming at this from some romantic notion. I was quite prepared to countenance the opposite view - that if we wanted pupils to be able to express themselves, then we had to take care of the nitty gritty. And of course, there is complexity and overlap and compatiblity between the two. But I think there is a degree of unanimity in our discussions that we have all observed that pupils learn best what has meaning for them.

If you like the sound of our French Art Exhibition from some of these posts, the next one is an outline of how it works and some practical top tips. Click here to read on...

NPP 16: Rewriting KS3 Booklets - examples from the Food Unit and House Unit

 In the last post, I showed how I rewrote our French Art Exhibition Unit in the light of our reflections on self expression, accuracy, engagement, distraction, short term and long term learning objectives. Looking at our Art Exhibition has been particularly instructive and the insights can be usefully applied to all our other units.

Here are some examples from the Unit on Food and Drink.

I should stress that not all pages in our booklets look like this. I am focussing on the ones that we had inserted in order to work explicitly on grammar features.

The idea behind this page originally was that puzzling out words rather than being told them, helps you remember them. The idea is still valid, and the lesson did work, but for some pupils the amount of text and the number of items was overwhelming.

Here is the new version. I have improved the layout, reduced the number of items and introduced pictures. 

We are alert to the dangers of images being decorative or distracting. But in this case they provide clues to help scaffold the task and make it successful, while still requiring the pupils to work out the meaning of the French words. These were easy decisions to make in the light of our discussions. And the vocabulary items retained are ones which are regularly recycled later in the unit.

This unit follows on from the Art Exhibition unit, and we continue with work on definite and indefinite articles, adding partitive articles so pupils can say some chocolate as well as the and a. This page from the old booklet was supposed to help make these slippery and potentially frustrating little words explicit.

Pupils could (despite the layout) mechanically pick the correct article and say what it meant. But as a purely mechanical exercise, it didn't guarantee that the knowledge would be transferred to when they wanted to talk about food they liked to eat. In fact it was more likely to make them stop and panic that they might be picking the wrong word.

We have replaced it with a page that still explains the different articles, but then instead of asking the pupils to mechanically produce the right one, it lets them see them in context and work with differentiating meaning. And then it quickly moves on to starting work on giving opinions.

The Keep Talking grid allows them to enjoy talking about combinations of food they enjoy and don't enjoy. They can guess if their partner's sentences are true or false. They can use and / but to continue and develop longer answers. And as they do this they are supported by the grid in using the correct articles but without having to stop and worry about them.

There were similar examples in the unit on House and Routine.

This was supposed to introduce pupils to the idea of dictation.

The emphasis on delayed dictation is to not try to write down sounds as you hear them, but to concentrate on processing meaning, remembering what they say their house is like, and then reconstructing the description using French you know. It didn't work. Pupils were unable to process the sentences quickly enough and therefore couldn't retain anything.

The idea of the dictogloss is that you don't have to transcribe every word. You listen and process the description of the flat. Then you make notes that give the information. Then you write French to convey the information. That didn't work either.

I haven't got rid of it.

For the first dictation, I have supplied the English. This means pupils can process the French because they know what it is saying. When the teacher reads the sentence aloud, what they are doing is giving the pupils the answer. They are giving it to them in French, but they are giving them the answer. This is a different and much more positive way of looking at dictation!

For the second glossed dictation, I have supplied a picture. This can be projected on the board and the pupils can predict what they are going to hear. Then when the teacher reads the sentences, it makes it much easier for the pupils to process the French.

Here is an example from the House unit where a task could be completed mechanically by the pupils. But with very little impact on learning because it was divorced from meaning.

The first task was designed to focus attention on the articles as the only words missing from the translation. It didn't work. Pupils invariably ignored the French and inserted a word in the gap that fitted the English sentence.

The new version still has the same objective:

The way I've re-written it tries to get a better balance between looking at the grammar and keeping a focus on meaning. The first task separates out looking at the articles, before requiring an accurate translation of meaning. The second task asks for a translation, with a picture to support the details, allowing the pupil to focus on the articles.

At least, that's how it's supposed to work. We will find out...

Next Post, continuing the topic of Food, is Transactional Role Plays. Like the Art Exhibition, do they risk one-off learning that doesn't fit with the development of a grammatical repertoire?

NPP 15: Rewriting our KS3 Art booklet. Meaning, Mechanics and Distraction.

 I have spent a week re-writing our KS3 booklets. This was as a result of our day working as a department to pull apart our curriculum. We started with our Year 7 French Art Exhibition Unit and examined our resources, commenting on coherent long term learning as well as on how individual resources worked in the classroom. Our reflections centred on 4 main issues:

• The balance between meaningful and mechanical exercises.
• The balance between expression and accuracy.
• The balance between engagement and distraction.
• The balance between immediately useful language and long term learning.

It seemed that exercises which were purely to practise a language point were "doable". And that such mechanical exercises had a role in cementing conceptual understanding. But that once done, they were quickly forgotten and had little impact when it came to pupils using the language to express themselves. At the same time, we were aware of the danger of using "communication" as an excuse for glossing over important and potentially confusing details. This came to a head when pupils ended up worrying about the details or mistakes and became inhibited and learning stalled.

One of the raison d'êtres of the Art Exhibition Unit is to work on definite and indefinite articles. So that pupils are confident with words like un / une / le / la / les. Some of these exercises were too mechanical to be memorable. Others focused too much on meaning without the articles being relevant. This page from our original booklet is guilty of both of these in turn:

I should stress that not all pages in our booklets look like this. I am focussing on the ones that we had inserted in order to work explicitly on grammar features.

In the new material, I have tried to balance it so that the meaning of the articles is much more integrated with the quality of the description of the image. So that while there is still the long term purpose of confidence in using the articles, the pupils' task is strongly focused on creating meaning:

In this unit, we were particularly aware of the danger of giving pupils language as a "one off" to help describe their picture, but which would never be seen again and would soon be forgotten.

This has led to some pages in the booklet being removed. This page helped pupils go beyond describing what was in their picture and add some comments on the style and mood.

In theory, they could work on their fluency on using these expressions to talk about several pictures, before applying it to their own:

But in reality, it was only really ever used to concoct some sentences about their own artwork for the French Exhibition. While it looked good, a few weeks later they had forgotten what it meant, and the vocabulary and structures are not revisited later in the year. There may be some pupils who enjoyed the impression of sophistication the structures allowed them. But on balance, this page has been cut.

For other pages, we took the opposite view. This page was intended to act as a way to construct a model text getting away from the repetition of il y a...

Again, it did the job of scaffolding pupils' writing and adding sophistication to a description. But the objective was the short term one of creating a description for the Exhibition rather than an objective for learning to be retained and deployed fluently.

You can see in the pages with the Kandinsky and Hockney pictures above that we introduced these more varied structures much earlier in the unit, rather than as a last minute sophistication boost. We included a lot more examples for pupils to practise describing. Here they work with a partner to talk about a picture and see if their partner can recognise which one it is:

This also works well with pupils selecting a picture and the teacher having to guess (in French sentences) what shapes there are without looking at any of the pictures.

The overall outcome of our reflections was that it's the dynamic equilibrium of all these competing factors that has to be managed. Both in the creation of resources and in the classroom. Picking the Art Exhibition Unit as our focus sharpens attention to things like the balance between making things attractive and distracting.

In this next example, the page on the left was already in the booklet. It picks up on French the pupils already know for saying "I have a dog who is called..." and repurposes it for saying things like, "There is a dog who is swimming". I needed to create more opportunities to practise this so it would start to be internalised, with pupils learning about the endings of -er verbs for 3rd person singular and plural in the present tense. The original page on its own was too mechanical and divorced from creating meaning for anything to really stick. In creating the page on the right, I had to be aware of the danger of using artwork that would help make it more engaging, but simultaneously could shift the focus away from the nitty gritty of the language and onto the weird and wonderful ideas in the paintings!

On this occasion it was a risk I was prepared to take. If pupils are intrigued by looking at paintings by Chagal and their imagination is sparked, then that's not something I want to stamp out. If the resource is well written, there is the possibility that the art could make it more memorable. And using vocabulary they already know for animals, and structures that they will see again in Year 8 (-er verbs), I am happy that this shouldn't be a "one-off" and soon forgotten.

This is a good reminder that we are not looking for simplistic answers of what is good and what is bad according to cognitive load theory. We are examining the messy and diverse reality of learning in the classroom. We will report back on how it works...!

Next Post: How do these ideas play out when we rewrite other booklets?

NPP 14: In which I temporarily lose some patience with the argument for mechanical accuracy over self-expression.

 ln our National Priorities Project we are examining whether our Year 7 French Art Exhibition drives language learning or detracts from it, and the lessons we can learn for our wider curriculum from answering questions around accuracy, communication, creativity and self-expression.

In previous posts on the argument that language learning should be a process of careful repetition and practice of controlled and sequenced grammar patterns, I have tried to argue that even on its own terms, freer self expression has a useful role to play. And that errors are revealing of the true state of pupils' emerging grammatical understanding. In the last post, I concluded that there is no definitive answer and that we should enjoy exploring how these arguments play out in the complex and dynamic reality of the classroom. That felt like a great place to end the post. But I have another example that I wanted to include which would have upset that carefully balanced even-handed conclusion.

So in this post I am going to air some frustrations with the idea that we should be cautious about asking pupils to express themselves because it supposedly just inevitably leads them into error.

Here's a piece of work from Year 9. It's in test conditions, and is the result of discussions with the class (full detail here) about exactly this topic of whether to stick to French you know is accurate or whether to try to express yourself:

You can see some of the things that we have been talking about. Errors which could reveal confusion in concepts, such as the accents on "méré". But which in fact reveal that one element of learning is a kind of picture or feel for a word rather than analytically thinking through its construction. This is also seen in how they sketch out spellings for "aujourd'hui" at the top, searching for the spelling that "looks right." These are features of someone who is trying to get a feel for the language, ownership of the language, a love of the language. This is what leads this pupil to squirrel away little idiomatic expressions like "c'est simple comme bonjour" that they have learned on their own initiative and to try them out for their own amusement.

But back to our question of whether asking pupils to write more freely is inducing error. There's a mistake in there which is very revealing. This pupil knows how to say "I want". This pupil knows how to say "my friend". This pupil knows how to say "to be rich". They have put it all together to say, "I want my friend to be rich". But of course, that's a mistake. In French you can't say "I want my friend". You need the subjunctive. "I want that my friend be rich."

Out of all of the French in this piece of work, this sentence would be one where the pupil was most confident that they knew all the words. It's built entirely mechanically from French they have been taught. Each chunk is accurate. There is no way they could have known that French has an entirely different way of saying "I want - my friend - to be rich".

What does this say for our argument about whether asking pupils to express themselves pushes them into error?

They don't need pushing. The ways in which French diverges from English are unknown to them and can be found even in the most apparently mechanical building of sentences from French they know.

I am happy for this post to be less carefully balanced than previous ones, so I am going to throw in a few more bold statements while I am at it.

The drive to say things using language you know is not something you want to squash.

The selection and sequencing of language which is a feature of the "keep it mechanical" approach is all about the powerful language which can be recombined. This emphasis on recombinable language is great, but it naturally goes with the idea of pupils creating meaning from these recombinable elements. And will inevitably lead to error as they meet the limits of their language knowledge.

And while I am making bold statements...

The idea that pupils must not ever see la poulet in case the error in gender becomes permanent, comes from the same people who tell us that as a low frequency word, poulet isn't worth teaching because it won't be seen often enough to be learned. These two strictures seem incompatible.

In case you have forgotten where these arguments come from, here's a slide from an ofsted webinar on how the curriculum should be designed.

The idea is that language teaching should heavily focus on the explicit and direct teaching of the language itself, boiled down to the essentials and avoiding rich and complex contexts, with no incidental knowledge, ensuring pupils are 100% secure and accurate before moving on. This clashes with the ideas behind our Year 7 French Art Exhibition that we are interrogating in our National Priorities Project. I hope you will allow me this one intemperate post and maybe understand a little more context as to where the central questions of this Project are coming from.

Next Post: Rewriting the Year 7 Art Exhibition booklet in the light of these considerations.

NPP 13: Attitude to Error and the wider curriculum

 In our National Priorities Project, we are looking at our curriculum through the lens of our Year 7 French Art Exhibition. What lessons can we learn from the work on the Exhibition for the relationship between communication and grammar, self-expression and accuracy, nitty gritty language learning and Interculturality? And how do these reflections cast light on the rest of our curriculum?

One of the points of interrogation for the Art Exhibition project is error. Does asking pupils to write more freely to describe their artwork for the exhibition lead them to make errors, and is this inherently problematic for language learning?

In my last post I showed examples of pupils' work for the exhibition. I argued that asking pupils to write more freely didn't create the errors. It revealed them. Pupils who could complete a mechanical grammatical exercise accurately, made mistakes when describing their own picture. These mistakes revealed underlying confusion in their emerging grasp of grammatical patterns. The task didn't create the errors. It revealed something important about their learning. What the exhibition project was delivering was an opportunity for teachers to see into how pupils' knowledge was forming. And an opportunity for pupils to test out how well their knowledge could be articulated into a working system. Even on their own terms, for someone primarily concerned with pupils developing coherent and accurate language, the Exhibition project was playing an important role in revealing pupils' underlying conceptualisation of the grammar.

How are these arguments born out elsewhere in our curriculum? How does our attitude to errors affect teaching and learning?

Here's an example from another Year 7 topic.

The pupil is trying to write up his opinions on different foods. You can see firstly that it is full of errors when it comes to words like le, la, les, du, de la, des, de. And secondly that the pupil is aware of these errors. He has commented that he was so worried about these words, that he hardly wrote anything.

In my experience, this attitude from a pupil is actually quite rare. Many pupils will happily pick any of the alternatives for "the" and use them seemingly without caring. When they are trying to convey a message about what they like and don't like, the gender of the word for "the" is not a salient feature for them. Both in terms of conveying their opinion and in transfering meaning from English, gender has no important role.

Its role for a learner of the language is one of indicating intellectual diligence rather than communication of primary meaning. Sometimes I wish pupils had the internal mechanism that I have that makes me physically wince when I see incorrect gender. Something in my education meant that when I went to France I would rather ask for two of something in a shop than risk getting the gender wrong. Expensive and calorie rich, but at least I didn't let myself down with errors of gender.

Do I really want my pupils to think like this? I would say the answer is Yes. But not at the expense of being confident in trying to say what they want to say.

You can see at the bottom of the error-strewn piece of work above, he then went on to write a "With Help" version. Which looked like this:

A much better piece of work. Firstly the articles are largely accurate. Secondly, without the obstacle of worrrying about the accuracy of gender, it shows what the pupil is capable of saying in French. I wish he'd been able to go for it in the first place.

We are told to be worried that allowing pupils to write more freely leads to error. We can see here that the opposite argument also applies: worrying about error inhibits pupils writing more freely. I am not going to argue that one of these positions is right and one is wrong. We have to be aware of both and how they play out in the reality of the classroom. In fact we can see in this case an example of how teacher and pupil worked through the complexity of language learning, with set backs and steps forward.

I quite like the model we've seen in this post, of challenging yourself to write what you can "from your head" as specified in the title for the pupil's piece of work. And then reflecting on it and using support to check for accuracy in a second draft. It's one of the things we took from this National Priorities Project to inform our Department Inclusion Plan.

There are deeper considerations. How exactly are we expecting pupils to learn to select un, une, du, de la, des, de l', de...? Is it because there are important concepts to be grasped? If you have written des fromage, you ought to know that there's a mismatch there? Or is it by learning from musical memory? You would never say la fromage because you've always heard le fromage and it sounds right. Or should pupils always know it's OK to look up a gender of a noun, because while it's important to get it right, it shouldn't be an obstacle to saying what you want to say? Or is it just simply more important to say what you want to say regardless of getting a gender wrong, because it is no impediment to communication?

We can still have the conversation about what drives pupils to be better language learners. Is it being able to say things? Or is it being confident with the nitty gritty of grammar and not being overwhelmed by the demands of communication? But this argument shouldn't be theoretical and shouldn't imagine it is going to come up with a clear cut answer. The answer is going to be in the complex and dynamic reality of the classroom, where experience shows that all these things are in play.

Next Post: A reindeer of the ideas that suggest we have been doing things wrong.

NPP 12: The Art Exhibition and Attitude to Error

 Here are some examples of pupils' work for the French Art Exhibition from 2026.

Most people's initial reaction is that this is a beautiful display and a lovely project to do. But one of the ideas that we are exploring in our National Priorities Project is the idea that the Art Exhibition Project risks pushing pupils into inaccurate work. Should we be asking pupils to be creative in their French, to focus on creating individual descriptions and creating meaning for a real audience? Or should we be rehearsing well-sequenced grammar and vocabulary for the sake of accuracy?

When we zoom in, there are errors in these pieces of work.

This one shows the kind of language we are expecting pupils to deploy. We have worked on il y a and how to say has and is. We have worked on gender, word order and adjectival agreement. Pupils are using some prepositions and some simple opinions.

What do the errors show and how important are they?

The gender of the word forêt. A word the pupil has learned for the purpose of this description. What does it show? That the teacher gave them the word without the gender? Or that the pupil looked it up and because it's a cognate, paid slightly too little attention to the gender and the accent? The transformation of the s on the end of chauve souris into an e. Is this a sign of the pupil "correcting" the French spelling so it conforms more to patterns of gender and number? They are making a feminine singular noun end in an e rather than an s precisely because they know a rule? And what about j'ai adore? What is going on there? There is confusion in the meaning of je / j'ai which may go back to a confusion in the phonics and pronunciation?

I am not shocked by these mistakes. I am interested in them. They are revealing. They reveal a pupil who isn't carefully copying the spelling of j'adore. They reveal a pupil who is operating at the next level up, where they are building sentences from French they think they know. And where their mistakes reveal the nascent formation of rules and patterns. 

As the teacher, this is incredibly useful in seeing the learning process in action. I know when I give this pupil a carefully controlled mechanical exercise, they will produce accurate French. By asking them to create their own picture and describe it in their own French, I get much more information about what is going on with their emerging conceptualisation and memorisation of the language.

Here's another example of exactly this:

We have already taught pupils how to say J'ai un chien qui s'appelle... So now to describe a picture, they learn how to say il y a un poisson qui nage... It was supposed to neatly extend what pupils know, and be a first glimpse into dealing with -er verbs. The mistake this pupil has made, is to think of this as "There is a flying bat" and "There is a climbing mouse". Again, in their booklet, the controlled practice sentences would have looked fine. It's only when they move to a freer self-expression, that the errors occur.

Except that last sentence is wrong. It's not that the errors only occur when they move to freer self-expression. The "error" lurking in their thinking was there all along. Asking them to write more freely has revealed the "error" in their thinking. So even if you think along the lines of accuracy being important, and carefully structured conceptualisation of the language being important, then this "freer" writing is revealing exactly what you need to know.

Of course, we can also view the "errors in thinking" as not so much "errors", but as the nascent recognition of patterns, the emerging formation and application of rules. The pupils are learning how the language fits together, how it diverges from English, how one word affects another. And you can see this in the very nature of the mistakes they are making.

What would a much more accurate example show us?  It might be that the work has been corrected by the teacher and redrafted by the pupil. It may be that the pupil stuck much closer to scaffolding and support. You don't write j'ai adore like the first pupil did, if you are simply copying. A much more accurate example may be showing us a pupil checking more carefully or perhaps more reliant on copying or adapting from a model answer rather than revealing the workings of their own thinking.

I love this picture and the French. But I don't believe for a second that it would indicate that the pupil isn't on exactly the same journey of discovering French syntax as the examples above.

I hope that the people who insist on the importance of accuracy aren't just doing so for the superficial sakes of accuracy for its own sake. I hope they are doing it because it's an indication of the development of the pupil's underlying grammatical understanding. And on those terms, I think this post argues that asking pupils to use their French more freely in order to describe their arwork, focusing on what they want to say, is not inimical to the process of mastering the rules of French syntax. It reveals the complexity of the task and the progress the pupil is making in internalising rules and patterns. I am not arguing this from some romantic notion of identity, self-expression, creativity (although I could). I am arguing it's actually an important part of the nitty gritty language learning.

Next Post: How do these insights into Error impact the rest of our curriculum?

NPP 11: Mechanical Exercises and Meaning Making

 I have been reading more about what Littlewood had to say about the Continuum of Communication. In a previous post I outlined my interest in the idea of the way when we say "meaning" is important in language learning, what we mean by "meaning" can range from semantic meaning (I know chien means dog) to communicative meaning-making (saying something you want to communicate). Our own reflection as a department on our National Priorities Project is leading us to question what is the importance of these different degrees of "meaning" when it comes to successful language learning.

We are looking at how a creative and Intercultural project meshes with the nitty gritty of language learning. We are examining our Year 7 French Exhibition, where pupils create an artwork and describe it in French, and we want to see if our insights into this creative project also apply to the rest of our curriculum.

I wanted to see if Littlewood saw his Continuum of Communication as a progression model. With mechanical exercises a necessary starting point and communication of meaning as an ultimate goal. And if so, is it a remote goal (as suggested by the Ofsted research review Novice-Expert model)? Or is creativity and self expression something that can be injected much earlier as we seek to do with our French Exhibition?

Through the National Priorities Project and UCL, I was able to access this excellent article Developing a Personal Approach to Teaching Language for Communication - ProQuest in which Littlewood sums up the principles of Communicative Language Teaching. While he doesn't explicitly set out a progression model based on the Continuum of Communication, he seems to take it for granted that this is how teachers work. It seems necessary to start with a focus on the form of the language (let's not get into Focus on Form versus Focus on Forms today). And then to progress through questions which require understanding of meaning, but which aren't really communicating anything of great import. And then finally to projects or Tasks. Littlewood points out that maybe the bulk of learning gets stuck at the middle point, where the learner is communicating some meaning, but primarily to practise the language and without any real communicative purpose. He stops short of evaluating this, simply describing what we might see in the classroom.

So as things stand, I think we are free to see what insights our National Priorities Project can offer in terms of our own answers to this question.

As we examine our resources as a department and discuss what is most successful, it is becoming clear that the exercises we have found to be least successful are the ones that seem most mechanical and least "meaningful". Here is one example from the Art Exhibition Booklet practising turning the indefinite article into the definite article.

I have to say straight away, that our booklets are not full of this kind of exercise. As we move on to looking at changes we are making to the booklets as part of this project, I will share more. But in response to the Ofsted research review, we have boosted the attention to nitty gritty grammar, alongside more communicative and meaningful tasks.

Pupils can mechanically complete the grid. In fact they seem happy to do so and feel they are doing useful "work". To emphasise how mechanical this is, some pupils filled in le and un repeatedly down the columns before writing in the nouns. In a slightly less mechanical exercise, they can fill in a subsequent grid where they have to pick the correct masculine or feminine article depending on the gender of the word. As a check of the broad concept of gender and articles, it works. Teachers can see who is and who isn't picking the right article.

But it seems that beyond the concept, it's too mechanical for meaningful learning. Pupils can fill out the grid repeatedly but it doesn't mean that in the next lesson they will associate le with un, or remember the gender of the nouns or be able to pick the correct word for the or a. And I think we would be fooling ourselves to think that they even care. When constructing meaning, for example to say that there is a red circle behind the blue square, while the teacher thinks that the gender is important, to the pupil communicating meaning, it's the least important aspect of the sentence.

What has been learned mechanically doesn't transfer up the continuum to more meaningful communication.

It reminds me of this post, where Year 10 pupils who had written practice paragraphs, just to rehearse their language repertoire, when it came to Year 11, were starting from scratch. Whereas a pupil who had written a personal story was able to retell it. Firstly because it was meaningful and memorable when it came to thinking back. But also because when he wrote it, he was engaging his Spanish repertoire to create personal meaning, not just practise some language.

So in line with the suppositions of translanguaging and task based language learning, we are going to tweak the most mechanical exercises such as the grid above, to increase the level of "meaning". We will share what we do and how it works in the classroom.

This feels like a step towards an answer. But I have another answer. Or maybe another question...

When it comes to the purpose and meaningfulness of exercises... And when it comes to the purpose and meaningfulness of a Task or Project... And when it comes to the purpose and meaningfulness of communication... although some of that can be engineered by the teacher, how much of it comes from the individual pupil?

A pupil can take an open Task, and turn it into an exercise by carefully rehashing language they know the teacher wants to see and without any real personal communication. Other pupils will ignore the strictures and set criteria of an exercise, and embark on something they want to try to say for their own amusement. In this post we see this play out with a Year 9 group. It tells the story (with examples of work) of how I tried to curtail the more fantasmagorical and error-strewn writing of some pupils and what happened when I tried. But the most important question is how does this relate to language-learning. And I can't shift the strong feeling that the pupils who carefully stick to the criteria might do well in tests. But the pupils who put more of themselves into their work are the ones who if you dropped them into France would be the strongest language learners. Click on the link earlier in the paragraph and see if this is born out in their work.

Is this a romantic notion? It seems important, and the posts on Translanguaging and Task Based Learning have been building up to this question. I think in this series of posts, there is a strong rationale for meaningful, purposeful communication to have a very rational role in language learning.

On the other hand, I don't think that I can argue that learners who produce work demonstrating careful accurate application of the language the teacher has selected and sequenced for them can be labelled as "bad learners".

I am enjoying the journey this National Priorities Project is taking us on, in looking at the synergies between nitty gritty language learning and Intercultural communication. Like Littlewood, I am happy to describe what I see without having to adjudicate. Let's get stuck in to what we see happening in the classroom and how communication, grammar, accuracy, expression, exercises and Tasks all overlap...

Next Post: What does pupils' work for the Art Exhibition show us about error?