A Question about Teaching Listening Processing - answers welcomed!

Last week I did a listening activity with Year 10, where they listened to the same track several times, tracking their level of comprehension on a live graph. I explained in an earlier post how the activity worked. Above the line indicates that the pupil felt they understood. Below the line meant they weren't following it anymore. (The image on the left will give you a very good idea of what it looks like, but it isn't the actual graph from a pupil in this lesson.)

The text we were working on was from the OUP GCSE Spanish textbook that I co-authored for the old Controlled Assessment version of the GCSE. It is the very start of a unit on talking about where people live. The book has the text printed as a reading, but also as a listening track. For most of the activity, pupils were in fact listening to me reading the text aloud at different speeds.

In between readings of the text, we did different interventions. For example simply pooling words the class thought they heard on the board. Or working with a partner on a list of topic words, testing each other. Or discussing the main structure of the text and key signpost words. Or talking about tenses we thought we heard. At one point I gave them comprehension questions in English, which they didn't have to answer, just to show how they help scaffold understanding. And also at one point they opened their textbooks and we read through the text together.

All of them had graphs which showed increasing level of comprehension and ability to follow, as we used the different ways to tackle the passage. I also came back to it the next lesson and we did it again a day later.

The graphs weren't scientific enough to see which interventions had most impact. But we discussed what had made the most difference. With many classes, seeing the questions really helps structure their understanding of the text and give signposts to follow. Very rarely is it vocabulary that is the issue. 

With my Year 10 class, they said the thing that really helped was seeing the text. But not as you might think because of being able/unable to turn the stream of Spanish sounds into words. Their phonics are secure. It was their ability to process sentences, holding in their heads enough to be able to put ideas together in detail. This had me wondering just what is involved in this mental processing and how we can develop it.

In another lesson this week, we were in the computer room with headphones, working on the same listening. Each pupil was able to pause or rewind the track as they wished. And they transcribed the whole passage word for word in Spanish. There were some errors - "tanta gente" as "tan tajente" but by and large they were transcribing accurately, including making good decisions that required understanding of the sentence, not just transcribing sounds.

So this brings us back to what they wanted to emphasise in our discussion in the lesson before. They hear sounds accurately and can make them into words. They can read the passage and make sense of all of it. But as a listening, we are going to have to work on their ability to process sentences in their heads.

There are micro skills we can practise around building processing power in Listening: Dr Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith are very clear on these in their excellent book "Breaking the Sound Barrier", full of focused and practical activities for developing Listening.

I would like to know more about developing Listening for the GCSE style word-by-word texts which pupils have to parse in their heads. These texts have all the normal listening cues removed, such as normal speed and intonation and exchanges between speakers. All the things that I wrote about here in discussing listening to authentic speech. Is this a realistic expectation that can be successfully developed in language lessons?

To be absolutely specific: 

These Year 10 pupils can transcribe the passage accurately. 

They have the phonics knowledge. 

They can read and understand what they have transcribed. 

They have the vocabulary and grammar knowledge. 

But doing those two things simultaneously in their head is where they find it difficult. 

Is that a feature of knowledge of the language we can work on? Or a skill that can be broken down? Or is it an ability that we can acquire through long term immersion? An innate cognitive ability? Or a skill that is gradually acquired in other areas of life outside the language classroom? 

The GCSE panel are keen for the Reading to be a test of what can be learned in language lessons. Is there a similar situation in Listening? If pupils who have the knowledge of phonics, vocabulary and grammar find that there is a further demand. And a very high level of demand in terms of processing the Listening. 

I would love to know your thoughts...

The Year 7 French Art Exhibition

 I spent an hour this afternoon wandering through a virtual Art Gallery created by our Year 7 French pupils. Normally it is held in a local Windmill, a community arts space with a nice café and
beautiful crocuses when I turn up each March with the Exhibition in a huge portfolio folder. Finding this newspaper article about the 2014 Exhibition made me realise that this would have been the 8th time we have done the Exhibition. This time it's online only. We are using the amazing Gallery slides from SlidesMania and sharing it with parents and carers as a virtual exhibition.

Every pupil in Year 7 creates an artwork and describes it in French. Then their work is put on display and members of the public pay good money to see it. The Year 9 International Leaders host a Vernissage event, and the local press get the chance to make headline puns in their school boy French. Top tip for parents and visitors: if you look at the picture, you can mostly make out what the French is saying!

We use this as one of the ways to handle transition from KS2 to KS3. We have pupils coming in from many different feeder schools, all with different experiences of studying languages. The exhibition is a way to cover important topics and grammar, with a different focus, avoiding going over old ground again. I have written in other posts about how our pupils work towards creative projects for real audiences and the impact this has on learning. The Windmill Exhibition is another example of this. The pupils know that their work will be appreciated by a real audience, and we have to equip them to be able to deliver an impressive piece of French.

Early in Year 7, once we have crunched the phonics, the Art Exhibition unit tackles: shapes, colours, word order, adjectival agreement, and prepositions. Pupils also demand a range of sentence structures to avoid repeating "there is..." Once pupils are changing their sentence from "There is a tree" to "The tree is in front of the moon," they also need to work on indefinite and definite articles. I suppose each individual description is quite simple, but it is the amount of language that we need to embed for each and every pupil to describe their own unique picture independently, that underlies the unit.

We also teach them to talk about the style and how the picture makes them feel. And they write a 3rd person biography of themselves as the artist. We look at videos in French from the Louvre education department and the Palais de Tokyo children's workshops. Some pupils can write independently, others need support from their resources. Similarly with speaking: some can read their description aloud, others can describe it from memory. Others can say something spontaneously about another picture they haven't prepared to talk about in advance.

This kind of project is great for engaging pupils and parents/carers, and driving a curriculum that means we have to equip pupils to meet the challenge of being creative. But it also means that we have a genuine answer to questions like, "What is your department's vision?" or "What do you do for Culture and Personal Development?" We don't have to wonder what to show at Open Evening or what to say if we have "Visitors" asking questions about our Curriculum. I am so pleased the Art Exhibition this year has survived lockdown. We have the Windmill booked for March next year, so long may it continue as part of our curriculum!

Dealing with the Issues of the Old GCSE

 I know this blog is meant to be full of Nice Things, but every so often it is also useful as a way of dealing with Not So Nice Things. And debating the proposed new GCSE has brought up very bad memories of the old Controlled Assessment GCSE and what it did to language teaching and learning.

It was brought in to replace the Coursework based GCSE. Coursework had helped to introduce greater development of writing, as pupils could use their notes and resources to create something much better than the few rote-learned sentences in the previous writing exam. I have written in another post about the developments in the early 2000s, moving away from parroted functional utterances, and by 2005, I was writing in the LLJ about pupils spending time getting good at using a core of language to extend their speaking and writing. In the schools I worked in, we taught pupils to speak spontaneously in response to questions, giving and justifying opinions and giving examples in the past and future. The emphasis was on using the language successfully and confidently.

When the Controlled Assessment GCSE came in, the descriptors wanted the same standard of developed answers as achieved in Coursework, but now in exam conditions. The tasks for Writing and the questions for Speaking were known in advance, to make this ramping up of standards feasible. This is often portrayed as the Achilles' heel of this exam. Leading to delivery of rote learned answers.

But other conditions had to be in place for the real harm to be done. Schools and teachers who were already successful in teaching pupils to speak and write spontaneously, did not think at first that they would have to abandon this approach. They argued that pupils could plan answers built out of the core of language they knew, remember the content of what they wanted to say, and go into the exam confident they could say or write it in the Target Language, without having to memorise it word by word.

This is where other factors came in. Firstly, the board interpreted the markscheme in such a way that it quickly became apparent that "variety" was rewarded much more than a core repertoire. This meant learning fancy one-off language given to pupils for that task, rather than forming part of their core language that they could deploy for themselves. Also the "amount" of information was important, again rewarding schools where pupils were asked to learn a stream of rote learned language off pat. The examiner was allowed to ask follow-up questions, but there was no advantage in putting pupils on the spot.

Secondly, we began to understand that the published success criteria were not what counted. What you had to do was to out perform pupils in other schools. If other schools were allowing pupils to re-take the assessments until they were perfect, you couldn't continue to allow pupils to tackle the exam by speaking spontaneously.

As a result, the speaking exam became completely debased. The average mark in the pre-learned productive skills was much higher than the overall grade. Because most pupils were scoring highly in the Speaking and Writing, they were more or less taken out of the equation for determining the grade. The Listening and Reading were weighted with a lower percentage of the marks, but ended up being the ones that determined the overall result. I won't go in to the deficiencies of the Listening and Reading papers here, but they are still all too familiar to anyone teaching the current GCSE.

As a result, even in schools where teachers were experts at teaching spontaneous speaking and developing writing, rote learning of fancy answers was the order of the day. It was a painful experience in the classroom, for pupils' results, and for teachers' careers.

And it didn't have to be that way. It was the result of a well intended attempt to make the exam "accessible". The Dearing Report said that pupils found the Speaking Exam "intimidating" and so having known tasks was meant to be something to increase take up and make the subject more attractive. I have to tell you that I was one of the teachers representing the Association for Language Learning, holed up in a hotel going through QCA's proposals at the consultation stage. Could we have stopped it? No. Because Controlled Assessment was introduced across all subjects and was non-negotiable. And because I was more concerned to bend Chris Maynard's ear about the tricks and traps in the Listening and Reading papers. And the other ALL representative, despite being from a leading Language College, was thankfully busy repeatedly saying "What about the ordinary teacher?" when bizarre proposals were floated from Specialist Schools for Controlled Assessment to be via video conference link with contacts in France (in 2009?) or recorded on a trip to Spain, or by green screen filming with the French assistant. 

I remember that we did spot that making an exam more accessible changes nothing because the exam still has to discriminate, so with more support, there is going to have to be greater demand, to get the spread of grades. But no-one foresaw that anyone would rote learn long and fancy answers, sometimes without really knowing what it meant. Perhaps that came down to league table competition and pressure to ensure pupils got their target grades.

Funny to think then, that "raising standards" had a direct impact on the quality of language-learning. Turning it into a crazy recitation and destroying the ability to communicate. How can I end this post? By diminishing the pain by situating it in a wider political debate about competition versus collaboration? But that just brings further reminders that this was the period when creativity and collaboration also dried up, as I wrote about here. Perhaps it is by noting that we are in a new age now. Social media, networks of teachers and a continued vibrant role for ALL. A discovery by many teachers that it is possible to teach pupils to respond spontaneously and develop spoken answers. Or for pupils to write at length without support on an unseen question. Can we stand together against the damage that has been done by historic well-intentioned GCSE reform, and stop the same thing happening again?

Developing Listening Skills - Learning to Listen to Nice Things

 "Extra" was a series produced by Channel 4 for KS4 learners. It is in the style of a sitcom and the premise is that an American visitor arrives and has to learn the language. There were versions in several different languages. I have used it for French and for Spanish. It was originally broadcast on terrestrial TV and available on DVD. Then it was on Teachers' TV and now it is on YouTube. It has stood the test of time remarkably well and continues to be popular with pupils. It isn't an "authentic" resource because it was produced for learners. But it features native speakers and an extended plot line over many episodes.

I use it with Year 7. You know what Year 7 are like. They eagerly listen to the French, happy to be following what is going on, whereas a Year 11 pupil might be frustrated at not understanding every word. We do not use the subtitles, either in French or in English. Because I want the pupils to listen.

How do I make it accessible? By asking questions. While pupils watch a segment, I note down some questions (low prep). These questions might be about what pupils can see, or they might be about the French they can hear. In both cases, the questions are framed to scaffold understanding: "Describe the cushion her boyfriend had sent her." Or, "After she's dumped her boyfriend, she says Bon anniversaire -what does this mean?"

I do this as a pub quiz style activity with pupils working in teams. Then I whizz round the classroom and mark their answers on the questions for each segment. Often we then re watch the section of the programme. This means that the pupils are secure in their understanding of what is going on, and comfortable watching it happening in a new language. Doing it, for example in the second half of an afternoon lesson, it can take weeks to watch, quiz, and re watch short sections of a 25 minute episode.

It makes it normal for them to enjoy watching people speaking French, and develops their ability to follow and pay close attention to all the listening cues without worrying about understanding every word. In my current Year 7 class, I have a pupil who likes to shout out everything he understands. It is amazing how accurately he can pick up on exchanges, "What?" "Oh, it doesn't matter." "She never has a problem." He rarely misinterprets and is often word perfect.

I have written in an earlier post about developing Listening Skills and enabling pupils to build up understanding without panicking about not understanding every word. Extra is a good example of how to develop the actual specific skills of Listening: Using understanding of context, relationships and verbal exchanges to keep track of what is being said. Using intonation and conversational cues to follow natural speed speech. And, here goes... Combining understanding words and phrases to understand what is going on... with using an understanding of what is going on in order to understand words and phrases.

As successful speakers of a language, we know that in Listening to natural speech, understanding is not the end product of processing word by word language as if it were a dictation. Understanding of the whole situation, the sentence, individual words and inflections of words are all in a constant back and forth interplay of evaluating what was said, what is meant, and what is going on.

This is where GCSE Listening is not in fact a listening. They deliberately remove all the listening cues such as intonation and natural exchange between speakers. Slow speech is presented as making it accessible, when in fact it is removing many of the features of speech which make it intelligible. The examiners are clearly great believers in such listening skills, because they go to such lengths to remove them from the assessment. Similarly, they use bizarre texts to prevent the use of deduction from context. And the questions are not about the content of what is being communicated. They are not about the pupils' ability to work out the message of what is being said between the speakers. The questions are designed to test pupils' word by word processing: a vocabulary and grammar test masquerading as a listening test. A reading you have to do in your head. A dictation you have to do in your head.

The new GCSE is presented as improving the dreaded Listening exam. But in fact it may perpetuate the current problems or push them further to extremes. It promises a defined list of vocabulary. It promises slow speech. But as an exam, it will still need the same number of pupils to get questions wrong. Having a defined list of vocabulary to learn won't make things better if it reinforces the need to have tricksy questions based on word by word processing and a focus on identifying specific grammar nuance. I suppose at least the dictation is more honest than the current GCSE's crypto dictation. But again, it is presented as a nice phonics check, to make sure pupils are secure in the sound-spelling link. And they forget that an exam can't be a nice check. It needs to be a dictation where a grade 6 pupil on Higher Tier gets half of it wrong. As I noted in a post here, this could be a trap-laden nightmare.

Surely, we are not going to let a new GCSE stop us using TV shows, videos or songs with pupils or taking them on exchanges where they listen to real people? As I tried to convince myself here, teaching a language is still going to be more than teaching to an exam. Even if this exam seems to be designed very deliberately to engineer exactly how and what we teach.

Phonics - the basis for everything

I don't have a copy of Heather Rendall's CILT Pathfinder "Stimulating Grammatical Awareness" (1998) because as fast as I bought them, I gave them away to student teachers. It really was the best book at the time. And the one thing that stands out in my memory, from a book on Grammar, was its emphasis on the sound-spelling link. The sound-spelling link as grammar - systematic knowledge that can be deployed in order to use language successfully. 

 Good knowledge of phonics unlocks successful language learning in every area. And poor knowledge of phonics blocks it at every turn. Pronunciation and spelling are obvious beneficiaries. But also independence in learning words correctly. And Listening (correctly turning a stream of sound into intelligible words). And Reading - whether it be reading aloud or silent reading for comprehension. If reading in your head is like listening to poorly pronounced language, then it won't be easy to understand. And teaching: having to drill all individual items, repeating words after the teacher, instead of being able to move onto the next stage. 

Being able to speak with good pronunciation was a prime objective of language teaching in the 90s. But this was often explicitly done at the cost of developing knowledge of the sound-spelling link. Teachers were told not to show the written word because the pupils' brains were so used to English spelling patterns, that it would corrupt their pronunciation in the new language. As a result, pupils made up their own "written" versions (pwason and wazo?!) because sounds alone are ephemeral and hard to hang on to without a rationalisation or visualisation. 

All the sounds of Spanish from Amigos 2

At the time, Spanish was taught much less than French, but teaching Spanish, it was obvious that crunching the sound-spelling link was one of the advantages Spanish could have over French. A simple
conversation with greetings, a quick personal introduction, and a character called Ángela or maybe Jorge, can teach all the major Spanish sound-spelling features in one lesson. A version of this ended up in the Oxford Amigos 2 text book.   

Not to be able to do so in French was frustrating. In part because of the way teachers themselves had been taught. Those of us who succeeded in French did so by working out the rules for ourselves. Although some rules, for example the pronunciation of "Divin enfant", were learned through other contexts such as music. And others such as the pronunciation of Michel-Ange and other metro stations remain a mystery. So Heather Rendall's Pathfinder was very much a call to arms to tackle this. And of course at the time, teachers were working in isolation, without the easy access to networks we take for granted now, apart from (for example) the once a year Language World conference. 

We started by identifying words that learners met early on which contained key sounds. These were displayed as posters and referred to in lessons. These are pictured here to the left (dated by the inclusion of a certain French footballer who had just signed for Arsenal), and there is a link to them on Dr. Rachel Hawkes' phonics page. 

Comberton's Francophoniques

This is ironic because we soon made the decision to move away from using these key words, and adopt Rachel's school's own system known as Francophoniques. This again chose key words for key sounds, this time matching them to actions. They were deliberately not words that learners would necessarily meet, which adds the fun and excitement of learning more interesting low frequency words such as sorcière or gorille. 

But the key feature was the use of actions. Firstly perhaps to use the combination of text, image, sound and action to stimulate memorisation. (Remember this was in the days before Multiple Intelligences somehow transmogrified into single Learning Styles.) But mainly because having an action allows the teacher to correct or anticipate pronunciation without "giving" the pupil the sound by saying anything. I mentioned in an earlier post on the coherence of the curriclum, the use of the "fish" hand signal to anticipate the pronunciation of "coiffeur". Of course the "fish" action goes with the francophoniques keyword "poisson" and is learned at the start of Year 7 for the sound "oi". If the teacher had to pronounce the "oi" sound, the pupil would just copy it. Making the action forces the pupil to recall the oi sound and apply it to the word "coiffeur".

And it works. Spectacularly. Pupils enjoy learning it in Year 7. It creates a good dynamic for establishing routines and participation. A focus on texts for phonics gets over some of the issues of Primary-Secondary transition with pupils having different levels of comprehension. But most importantly it has a permanent and noticeable affect on pupils' ability to read aloud, deal with new words and spell correctly.

Although we have been doing this for over a decade, sometimes we end up with an unwanted "experiment". Maybe a teacher is away at the start of the year, or we have a new teacher settling in to a new way of doing things. Or for some other reason a class isn't taught phonics in quite the way we would like. Well, the positive thing is that if I pick up a class in Year 9 or if I am observing a class, you can instantly see all the pupils who were taught phonics in Year 7, because of their confidence in pronunciation and in dealing with new words. If I were to headline the important thing that pupils learn in Year 7, it would, without a moment's hesitation, be the sound-spelling link.

That would be a lovely place to stop. Especially given the emphasis of this blog on "Being Nice." I will though add one small footnote:

Small footnote: Hmmm. That's a bit too small.

Slightly larger footnote:

Phonics test in the proposed new GCSE. I worry that what is proposed sounds like a nice check to make sure that pupils are secure with the basics of the sound-spelling link. That's not the purpose of a GCSE. The exam has to give a spread of grades from 9 to 1. The fundamental premise of an exam is that pupils have to get questions wrong. A Grade 6 pupil on the Higher Tier has to get about half the questions wrong. A reading aloud test and a dictation in which most pupils have to get many questions wrong, is not a friendly phonics check. It's going to have to be a tricksy and potentially evilly devised trap-laden nightmare. There are so many benefits to teaching phonics, for Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing, that a reading aloud test and a dictation shouldn't have to be the way to make sure teachers are tackling it.

A Great Way to Learn Vocabulary

Not long ago, I received a message on Twitter from an ex pupil to say, "Sir. It's ten years since I started Spanish [in Year 9] and I still can't forget those words however much I try." I'm pretty sure he was referring to what is apparently known as "the keyword" technique. Here is a "keyword" lesson I use for Primary French taster sessions - when pupils start high school they still remember the words, so I know it works!

We are working on words for Food. The word "confiture" sounds like "comfy chair", so the pupils draw a chair. When we find out the real meaning is "jam", we add splatches of jam to the chair. It's important to make it part of the same picture, not two separate pictures. And the pupils write on the words in French and English. Then whenever a pupil hears "confiture" it brings to mind the idea of "comfy chair" covered in... jam. It helps to test the pupils a few times to make sure they can go through the process of thinking of their initial picture, and then remembering what they put on it.

In the taster lesson we do more foods this way, including ice cream, mustard, marshmallows, gherkins, cheese, pasta and bread.

Then we do a substitution table speaking activity where they can make up fun sentences about what they like and don't like to eat.

"J'aime les hamburgers avec du fromage mais je n'aime pas une glace avec de la moutarde."

And to finish the lesson, we work on a story on the repeat, repeat, repeat, twist model. The characters are a girl and a monster. The girl says, "J'aime la glace". The monster says, "J'aime la glace avec de la moutarde." And so on, with each time the girl says she likes something, the monster agreeing, but saying that he likes it with something yucky! The end is usually the little girl saying she likes monsters. And the monster agreeing that he likes little girls... with mustard, gherkins, tomato sauce... Although pupils often want to re-write it with them being friends or with the girl eating the monster.

A Nice Idea for a Listening Skills Activity

Let me explain the picture. It is, I suppose, along the same lines as a heart monitor print out. You need to imagine it without the different coloured lines, so looking like a very very wide set of rugby posts. The pupils draw these in their books - you may need a couple of them for a slightly longer listening.

Then, when you read or play the listening, pupils draw the monitor line. Above the line means they understand. Below the line means they don't understand. Some pupils will dip up and down almost with every other word. Other pupils will take "understand" to mean that they know what it is talking about even without necessarily understanding every single word. This in itself is useful information and produces good discussion with pupils as to what they mean by "understanding" a listening. You can see that this pupil started strongly, had a couple of dips below the line and then tailed off at the end. The lowest line represents their first listening. Being able to realise when you are losing track or losing concentration and tuning back in again, is one of the first benefits of this activity.

You will see that there are several lines. These are done on subsequent listenings to the same text. Some might be immediately, or later the same lesson, or returning to it in a future lesson.

In between each listening, we use different interventions. Firstly, simply listening again. Or pooling ideas of what we heard on the board before listening again. I might work on some of the vocabulary during the lesson and then come back for another listening later. Or we might read the transcript or a partial transcript in today's lesson, and then come back to the listening in the next lesson. One other thing that can help is to show pupils the questions which go with the listening. Not in order to ask them to answer them, but so they can see how having the questions structures the listening and guides them through it. If you do then move on to asking them to answer the questions, they will be well prepared for them.

You can see that there is a gradual improvement in this pupil's understanding of the listening. You can ask pupils to annotate when each trace was done and what intervention it was associated with. This helps pupils realise how to tackle listening and what sort of activities can make a difference. It is also less intimidating than having comprehension (or incomprehension) questions straight-away.

If you are reading the text yourself, you can also vary the speed. Although in this case, pupils might find it harder to track the same speed as they draw the line. You can also use this for authentic resources, such as videos. But in this case pupils would need much longer lines and wouldn't want to be looking down at their book. I have to admit that I use a different technique for this. Pupils make a little airplane out of a biro and a short ruler, and fly them above their heads as they watch, dipping lower when they don't understand and picking back up when they get it again. But that might be too silly for some teachers.

Nice Lesson with Year 8 - Warning: Talking Dog

 I have written in another post about how in Year 8 we work on building fluency, starting with just being able to speak French, without caring too much about coherence or personal detail. What happens, of course, is pupils do want to be able to speak and write more and more coherently and be able to express what they want to say.

My Year 8 class can talk all day using this sheet. First of all, just producing long sentences without worrying about making sense, and then by picking just 3 or 4 verbs from the middle column, turning it into a more considered answer. And they don't need to use the sheet anymore.

"J'aime faire du sport parce que j'adore jouer au tennis avec mes amis surtout si je peux jouer dans le jardin. Mais je n'aime pas faire du sport au collège parce que je dois jouer au rugby et je déteste le rugby parce que je voudrais jouer au foot."

So this week, we have been using a very similar sheet with the same words in column one, but themed on the topic of going to the beach. We spent the lesson yesterday practising speaking, building coherent answers the same way we did with the simple Free Time sheet. And we started to use I was going to and I decided to as "cheats" to talk about the past tense.

"Quand je vais à la plage, j'adore jouer avec un ballon surtout s'il fait beau, mais s'il pleut je préfère jouer aux salles de jeux. Le week-end j'allais faire mes devoirs mais il faisait beau, alors Bob a dit, "Je voudrais aller à la plage." Alors j'ai décidé d'aller à Cromer". Je peux faire mes devoirs le week-end prochain s'il pleut."

Today we worked on translating a model answer. I put it on the board in French and the class translated it in their books into English. Several of them challenged themselves to do it without looking at the sheet from yesterday. Then I took the text off the board and asked them to translate it back into French. They were allowed to use the sheet as often as they needed. I just asked them to keep count of how many times they needed to look. Of course many challenged themselves to do it without looking at all.

When they finished, I asked them to cover up the French, look at the English, and try to say it to a partner in French. I wasn't expecting them to be particularly successful, but they exceeded expectations. So then I asked them to shut their books and tell the same story to their partner. I explained I wanted them to reconstruct it in their own words, not recite it from memory. This was even better, as they changed and embellished the story using things they remembered or could find on the sheet.

The basis of this is the phonics they did in Year 7. We use Rachel Hawkes' Francophoniques with key words and actions for each sound-spelling pattern. So when we move from a generic Free Time sheet to something more specific - here Going to the Beach - they can do it quickly and fluently without having to drill pronunciation. And then the other magic ingredients come from the class: they want to challenge themselves to be creative and coherent with what they say, and they challenge themselves to do more and more without using the sheet if they don't have to.

To have pupils telling the story in French without support, working from internalised French, each giving slightly different versions because they haven't rote-learned it, was a delight. And it's good to be able to tell them that this will see them a long way towards a good grade at GCSE.

Learning by working collaboratively - for pupils and for teachers

 I've mentioned in another post our links with the Museum at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, and how they commissioned our Year 7 pupils to create a French version of their Farm Stamper Trail.

This ended up becoming part of a whole curriculum built around real tasks and tangible outcomes. Pupils could use their French in an Art Exhibition, a café, the Francovision Song Contest (thanks to Rachel Hawkes), Flat Stanley letter exchanges with pupils in France (thanks to Kate Shepheard-Walwyn) and story books in French for Primary pupils.

The idea was that challenging our pupils to be creative would mean we would have to put in place a curriculum that secured the language needed in order to equip them to be creative. A curriculum which supplied the building blocks and honed their ability to express themselves with increasing independence.

As part of the LinkedUp initiative in 2010, we worked with 3 other schools to run similar projects. Straight-away I need to show you this video. (Click here if the embedded video doesn't load.)

These are pupils from Broadland High School where teacher Catherine Van Battum was one of our partners on the project. There are several things to say about this. Firstly it was a huge event for them. The setting, as you can see is perfect and they had a wonderful afternoon. The company who did the filming was led by a local TV news presenter who brought immediate celebrity status. And the pupils' work was then used by The Broads Authority to advertise the Norfolk Broads abroad. They made videos in French, German and English. This was a big part of the project: Pupils' work to be commissioned for a real purpose, and then for  an external client to provide feedback and celebration.

Secondly, it also fulfilled the other purpose of the project, in that it threw light on the curriculum. When the pupils were first given the task and left to see what they could come up with, they produced almost nothing. The teachers had to work hard to show them how key structures for describing can be put with new words looked up in the dictionary. And how powerful language such as "on peut" can unlock a whole range of sentences. It also showed up different levels of confidence in speaking or reading aloud, including the importance of the sound-spelling link. The project became a powerful driver for pupils wanting to deliver work of high quality, and also for the teachers in thinking through how their curriculum enabled this.

We invited Mark Curtis of Sir John Leman High School to act as mentor to the whole project. Mark was a Senior Leader with responsibility for Curriculum and Learning, but he was also a Technology teacher. In the post on making writing in French into a hands on practical experience, I mentioned how we often use Technology Lessons as a metaphor for the processes involved in language-learning. Mark's input was invaluable, with his interest in Deep Learning. This was the model we adopted for the LinkedUp project and for many of the Units in our curriculum: The task had to be big, meaningful, and authentic; require independence, teamwork and creativity; and be used and celebrated by an external client.

This fits with the idea of Task Based learning in languages, although the "tasks" don't have to be as large scale as this. In fact a task can be an entirely classroom based activity. The difference between a task and an exercise being that for an exercise, there is an expectation that the pupil is practising a certain language point. For a task, the pupil has to draw on the totality of their language knowledge in order to complete the task. It has an important role in developing pupils' awareness of their evolving interlanguage - its usefulness and its limitations.

I should definitely mention the other schools involved in the LinkedUp project. Partly so you can see how their projects fit with the idea of tasks that drive the curriculum, and also to celebrate the wonderful experience of working with colleagues on exciting initiatives. Laura Chapman at Litcham High worked on teaching PE (handball) in French and on another project with Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse museum. This time it was with the museum café, producing an interpretation wheel which explained British dishes (Toad in the Hole?) to Spanish visitors. And Adam Berry at Hellesdon High School worked on producing guides to the local area in French for the Red Cross to use with refugees.

It was a great example of how CPD does not have to be about going on a course. It can be about a rich and enlightening collaboration between schools, involving staff and pupils. And it can have a permanent impact on the vision for languages and the curriculum.

Fun with Cheese and Chunks. (Not Pineapple. It's not 1976!)

 As promised, back to nice things today. With a look back to a special experiment with chunks from 2011. For some reason I took up the challenge of having a group of six Year 9 boys who were not enjoying French, and doing 3 compulsory after school sessions with them!

The idea was to re-engage them with French and help them understand that it was a subject where very practical knowledge could be used to create things they could be proud of.

In the first part of the first session, we played with lego. Well, one pair did. Another pair had meccano, and the 3rd pair had a basic model glider kit. Out of this came lots of discussion of how easy or how fiddly things were to put together, whether you could make just one thing, and what you could do with the thing you had made.

At this point, the Deputy Head arrived with cheese, to check we were getting on OK and because one of the conditions of them showing up was that cheese would be provided (at their request).

We then moved the discussion on to talking about how to build things out of French. We talked about blocks fitting together, fiddly bits that need tweaking, being able to recall set sentences and being able to create your own. Then we spent the rest of the session working with chunks of French to see what we could build - the picture will give you an idea of the sort of things we were working with.

It was important for them to realise that writing in French isn't something that some people could magically do and others couldn't. And that the same skills of building something out of blocks and making something of your own, also applied to French in the same way they applied to lego or meccano.

In the second session (before the cheese) we customised pictures of cars. This is my car, the Deputy Head's car and the Head's car. They have been personalised. And this time the discussion moved on to talking about personalising the French, adding things that worked, and things that wouldn't work. There were also some rather forced references on my part to futuristic adaptations and retro features in an attempt to bring in the idea of tenses.

After the cheese, we set about doing a similar process in French. We called the activity Pimp My French after the car customisation TV show. Each pair had a selection of extra features they could add to the kit from the previous week. We concentrated on personalisation, adding variety and features - customising the French.

The third evening we made a machine for making French. We assembled the machine, sourced the French parts and proceeded to put together amusingly long sentences. The pictures below are not from the after school detentions (sorry, re-engagement sessions) but the design of the machine is the same. It works as a shape sorter on a conveyor belt. The first chunk is selected and placed in the correct shape hole on the template over the conveyor belt. This will be a verb which can be followed by an infinitive. So "j'aime" or "je peux", for example. This is followed in the correct order by an infinitive or a phrase beginning with an infinitive such as "jouer du piano". Then comes a statement of where, when or whith whom. And finally a conjunction, before the conveyor belt is moved on into position for the next 4 chunks. So it produced "sentences" such as, "I love to play tennis with my girlfriend because I can't go swimming with my brother but I prefer to eat chips at the seaside especially if I can ride my bike at the park so I would like to go to Norwich at the weekend."

Of course the "sentence" is random. Although it could have been much more random if they hadn't started to select the words they chose. This was the point of the exercise: to realise that French is built out of components that you select, and that you put together to make something you want to make. It was a metaphor made concrete.

We use other metaphors, often linked to technology - for example the food tech metaphor of making some tasty French out of the ingredients you have. The whole experience was a fun experiment, re-engaging (through cheese) with a group of pupils, helping rethink their attitude to French, and something to share with other teachers about how we can explore the language-learning process with pupils. I am sure the lego versus meccano debate is also relevant to the chunks and manipulation of language debate. You will have to make up your own mind about that...

No More Mr Nice Guy (for now)

Note. In this post from 2021, the references to the "new GCSE" may be to what we now call "the old GCSE."

 Oh well, I suppose it was inevitable at some point. I tried in a previous post to be positive about a new new GCSE and wholesale curriculum change. But I have to admit I am struggling with it at the moment. Best to get it out there and then if it all turns out to be a false alarm, then all shall be well and the Nice Man can go back to being nice.

I don't think other subjects are having a new new GCSE. This seems to be just for Modern Languages, somehow based on the 2016 Curriculum Review. This is the first thing I am struggling with. The Review took place in 2016. Which is the same year we started teaching the new GCSE. So how could they recommend that we needed a new new GCSE? 

Furthermore, it means the Review was based on looking at MFL teaching in the landscape of the old "Learn Fancy Answers by Rote" GCSE which did so much to destroy the teaching of spontaneous speaking. So the conclusions of the Review and the proposals for a new new GCSE are in danger of responding to the wrong problems. 

In addition, since 2016 there has been a sea-change in MFL teaching, with more and more schools starting to teach with chunks of recombinable language. This has been driven by the new GCSE which requires pupils to be able to speak and write in response to unpredictable questions. And the standard of extended writing, for example, is unrecognisable since the days of ofsted MFL reports deploring pupils' inability to write. 

In a video in an earlier post, I describe how I move from chunking to manipulation of language as part of developing pupil spontaneity and independence. This popularity of chunking (pupils learning powerful language which can be recombined without manipulation of inflections) has been a strong movement in UK schools in the years since the Review. But the proposed new new GCSE ignores this and concentrates on manipulation, aiming first for grammatical knowledge rather than for growing communication. Wherever you stand on the manipulation-chunking spectrum, the proposals are based on an out of date Review. If they end up forcing teachers to throw away everything they have developed since the Review, we risk coming up with not just an answer to the wrong problem, but with the wrong answer to the wrong problem.

Much has been made of the use of corpora to define the vocabulary for the new new GCSE. I think we must have some misconceptions here that could be easily corrected. There are absurdities such as the fact that the grammatical content stipulates the difference between jouer au / jouer de for to play sport or to play an instrument. Yet apparently no sports or instruments are in the high frequency language list. This has led to confusion as to what topics will be in the syllabus or whether it can in some way be topic free. In some ways, the debate is irrelevant. Primary teachers will continue to use songs, stories and CLIL teaching, rich in vocabulary. And we should do the same at KS3. So what is the point of the vocabulary lists? 

It seems to be an attempt to solve some of the problems around the Listening and Reading papers. These were problematic in the old GCSE and continue to be problematic in the new GCSE. But thinking that this can be solved by defining the vocabulary to be learned, seems a naive misconception. There will be no change to grading, so the same numbers of pupils will have to continue to get questions wrong. Making the exam more accessible by limiting the vocabulary to be learned, will reinforce the need for the exam board to make questions "tricky". 

We already have questions where there is too much focus on language features rather than meaning. The Reading texts are on deliberately obscure topics to prevent pupils from using context and other reading strategies. The Listening is deliberately stripped of all listening cues, and is basically a Reading you have to do in your head. The new proposals for dictation, rather than responding to this problem, would seem to push it further to the extreme.

The worst aspect of the proposed new new GCSE is the apparent lack of a Conversation element in the Speaking. It is as if they have responded to the old Rote Learning of Fancy Answers GCSE (the Review happened in 2016) by abandoning all hope of pupils learning to extend answers spontaneously, developing their answers in response to further questioning.

I show in the video on a previous post how successful the development of a growing repertoire can be. I believe it is also fundamental to language-learning. It works through a carefully constructed and balanced curriculum, fine-tuned over decades. It ensures that there is progression in pupils' accumulation of language, while at every stage making sure they can use what they are learning to express themselves. And spend time making sure they can use it well. This is more than a "nice thing" to put in place. For any learning to happen, and for language-learning in particular, there has to be a process of systematization in the pupil's mind, a core of learning to which more and more is added.

We know the dangers of piecemeal learning, where what is new pushes out what was learned previously and the learning never adds up to anything. This may be another misconception about the new new GCSE, but I understood Michael Wardle to say in his talk at Language World, that he is happy for the pupil to acquire grammatical knowledge and only be able to use it to communicate at a later stage.

I hope this turns out to be a misunderstanding which can be addressed. But even if it turns out that the idea of a growing core repertoire is one we can hang on to, it seems that the language that makes up that core may have to be scrapped. At the moment, as I show in the video on the earlier post, pupils build proficiency in a repertoire that accumulates: Opinions, reasons (verb + infinitive), tenses, narration, difference of opinion, direct speech, narration combining tenses, disappointment and hope. This is to meet the GCSE criteria based around opinions, reasons, tenses and narration. It seems likely that these criteria will no longer hold sway. So a new core of language for a new purpose will have to be developed.

Ofsted is soon to produce more up to date reports on the MFL teaching landscape. Perhaps these will note the transformation in pupils' writing, a return to spontaneous speaking and the widespread use of chunking. Although, having said that, I suspect that ofsted are also looking through the lens of "phonics, high frequency vocabulary and grammar". Of course language-learning involves phonics, vocabulary and grammar. That doesn't mean that they should be separated out and tested separately. Taking things apart is easy. It's putting them together that matters. And in language-learning, it is how to put the process together that is being fine-tuned and tweaked. Throwing out the babies and the bathwater is never a good idea.

Please do read the previous more positive posts on Curriculum Change and watch the video on developing spontaneous speaking under the post on the One Nice Thing about the New (current) GCSE. And the Nice Man will get back to posting nice thoughts as soon as he can!

Nice Things to Have Been Involved with: Gressenhall Museum - Farm and Workhouse

I mentioned in an earlier post how Terry Lamb's pupil voice research inspired me to create a curriculum which responded to pupils' desire to be able to use their French creatively and for real purposes. One of the most exciting things to come out of this was a long-running collaboration with Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse and the Norfolk Museums Education department. In particular Collie Mudie and then the incredible team of Jan Pitman and Mike Crisp.

At the Farm, there is a Stamper Trail, where parents are dragged round by excited youngsters, keen to get the stamps of the different animals on their sheet. What we did was get our Year 7 to create a French version of this trail, which is then made available to visitors to use.

 Everyone in Year 7 makes their own version. These are then judged and a committee of pupils are invited, under the supervision of the Year 9 International Leaders, to create the definitive version to be printed for the Museum.

As part of this, Jan and Mike have come into school to launch the project in assembly, commissioning the pupils to produce quality work for a real purpose. Also we have taken groups of pupils to the Museum to do their finished trail, including not just our own pupils but Primary feeder schools and our Spanish exchange visitors.

This was the original idea: to create projects where our pupils could use their French for real purposes and real audiences. But other important aspects came out of it. If you look at the example pictured, you can see that it has another purpose in developing pupil creativity. It provides a new context for all the language previously learned in Year 7. Pupils will have learned, for example, to describe people, order food in a restaurant or talk about their house. For the Stamper Trail project, it is up to them to draw on all this knowledge, applying it to the new context of animals around the farm.

But that's not all! We then turned our attention to the Workhouse part of the museum. It was peopled by strange lifesize figures: A girl looking down from on top of a cabinet, a man caught in a bear-trap, a motorcyclist with a hearse for a sidecar. Round these, we built a story so that the pupils could explore the museum, meeting the characters in any order, and build up a picture of what had happened. For each character there was a conversation sheet in French and English. 

The pupils had to use these to collect important information and key words for their glossary. When they had all the clues, they could find a letter, written in French, and interpret it using the key words they had acquired. It led them to the hiding place of the culprit. The drama over a whole afternoon was intense, and many pupils screamed when they opened the door and found him there.

We took groups of pupils to the Museum to complete the Mystery. Including Spanish exchange visitors one year when we had to find an extra day's activities because of a French air traffic control strike.

It was also the start of the idea that was going to turn into the later Street View Mysteries. And other projects at Norwich Castle Museum where pupils created stories and trails around artefacts that caught their attention.

Many many memories of sunny days on the farm (and the time we got cut off from returning to school by a flood), pupils who first came to do the trail in Year 6, then made their own in Year 7, did the mystery in Year 9, did the Spanish exchange in Year 10 and Year 12... Languages and doing things in languages part of their lives and their growing up. A lovely, lovely project to have been part of and which we will do again soon!