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?
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