What do you believe?

 I thought about this as a reflection on being Head of Department, but I'm sure it doesn't just apply to that. Please note, this is a low-stakes quiz. Not a test.  And whether there are "right" and "wrong" answers is up to you (see the final question).

Maybe we could set it out as a flow chart, or as one of those quizzes that tells you what sort of Head of Department you are. But for now, it's just a bunch of questions. And of course, other options are possible, other combinations are possible. It just makes it harder for the flow chart to pin a label on you...

What do you believe about Grammar?

a. It is best taught in a logical set order, starting from simplest, but teaching full paradigms, fitting topics to the grammar, with a focus on accuracy.

b. It is important but it's not what your course is ordered around from the pupils' point of view. Topics require certain grammar points, although they can often be learned at first as fixed expressions. The complexity is gradually increased, but full paradigms aren't always needed. Grammatical accuracy is part of general accuracy of spelling and recall of structures.

c. Your course has a grammatical core, but it's based on what structures are most powerful in terms of what pupils can do with them. They are structures which can be re-combined to create the pupils' own sentences and they can transfer across topics. Some of the first ones you introduce might be "complex". You won't introduce full paradigms if they aren't necessary for what you want pupils to do.

d. You have a very clear grammatical progression, which is introduced through and integrated into real classroom communication.

e. Your course is built around stories, interesting input, interaction and natural acquisition. Grammatical understanding comes much later and emerges naturally.

What do you believe about Topics?

a. Pupils learn to talk about themselves and their world.

b. Pupils learn about the target language world, culture and Culture.

c. Pupils learn to communicate in practical situations.

d. Stories, clil, projects, real communication with schools abroad.

e. The course isn't organised around topics. Because that's not what they are learning.

What do you believe about Reading and Listening?

a. It is mainly to rehearse and practise the structures that you want pupils to be able to say and write. It is integrated into the lesson developing key structures.

b. Lots of comprehension practice and exam technique, linked to vocabulary, grammar and reading/listening skills. You try to do a little each lesson.

c. Lots of working on strategies to develop pupils' processing skills. Holding language in their head, parsing sentences, accurate phonics, making sense. You might do whole lessons on developing it.

d. Authentic materials, for enjoyment, information and culture.

What do you believe about Communication?

a. Pupils' work is made up of expressions they can recall in order to express themselves. They have set expressions they can use in the classroom. Expressing themselves more freely would produce errors.

b. Pupils' work is to show they can use the grammar and vocabulary they have been learning. They will be able to express themselves once they have learned enough grammar and vocabulary.

c. Pupils can communicate right from the start, including short responses, partial and non verbal responses. It doesn't have to be accurate - they are finding ways to express themselves.

d. Pupils spend a lot of time using the language they are learning, exploring what they can do with it with more and more freedom.

What do you believe about Testing and Assessment?

a. Self testing, low stakes testing and recall activities are key in getting pupils to memorise new language and retain language they already know. If you give pupils a list of 15 words to learn, then the minimum acceptable result is 15/15. With accurate spelling and pronunciation. Tests should test what pupils have been taught.

b. The tasks pupils do should not test specific language points. It's important that they are tasks that require pupils to draw on the entirety of the language they have learned up to this point. This is what makes their evolving language gel and systematise. It lets them work out how it all fits together. Exploring the limits of what they can do is a powerful driver to learn more.

c. Assessments should test what pupils can do with the language they have been learning. Their ability to use it to communicate and develop answers.

d. Assessments are for the teacher and learner to understand how the learning process is progressing.

e. In an assessment, you expect the same standard of work from all pupils. What varies is the level of support individual pupils need in order to achieve that standard.

What do you believe about your Beliefs?

a. You are the Head of Department and it's your job to set a strong vision. Your beliefs are not beliefs, they are evidence-based.

b. Once teachers are in their own classroom, they do their own thing well (or your thing badly). As a department you will determine your team vision. And diversity is a strength not a weakness.

c. It's when you try things you don't "believe in" that you really learn something new.

d. These things aren't important. We just get on with teaching.

So! This is where I ought to be supplying the "key". Can you pin a label on yourself? Can you pin a label on me? Are you clear on what you believe, or are you only too aware of the competing pressures? Let me know in the comments or in a tweet.

A Very Cheeky Activity

 This activity can be sold to pupils as "What to do if you don't know what the key word in the question is." I wouldn't encourage pupils to pick a 90 word or 150 word writing task if they don't know what one of the bullet points is, but it's reassuring (at the early stages) to think that you are equipped to deal with even that situation.

We imagine a question with a made up word in. And then we create our best answer. Here it is the verb "siblear". A made up word, based on the name of one of the pupils in the class. For the purposes of this post, we could call him or her "Sibbles".

Cuando vas a la playa, ¿te gusta siblear?  - When you go to the beach, do you like to sibble?

Of course, we are not going to say we like to "siblear" because we don't know what it means. And that could be embarrassing. So we say we don't like it much. And if we don't like it much, then we can say what we prefer to do. Then we can say under what circumstances we might have to do it. Then we say what we were doing, what someone suggested, what we preferred, what we ended up doing and what we would have preferred to do.

And we have a lovely answer, with great Spanish, convincing personal detail, humour, confilict and resolution.

Of course, I have had pupils in the speaking exam who needed the confidence to give an answer to a question they didn't quite understand. Like the candidate who was asked their opinion of la corrida de toros and who probably wouldn't have said, "It's fun for all the family" if they had known it was bullfighting. But this isn't really about that. It is really about creating a model answer.

Writing the paragraph summarising it above, I couldn't help thinking about the story, "If you give a mouse a cookie..." (If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. If you give a mouse a glass of milk, he's going to...) Because once you've said what you don't like, you ARE going to say what you prefer. And once you've said what you prefer, you ARE going to use an if sentence to explore under what circumstances you can/can't do it. And once you've used one if sentence, you ARE going to use another one to explore the opposite alternative. And (going back to the start) once you've given your opinion, you ARE going to give someone else's opinion. And once you've established a conflict of opinions, you ARE going to give a specific example, saying what you wanted to do. And if you use direct speech to say what someone else says they want to do, you ARE going to say what you said in reply. And you will say what happened as an upshot. And if this is mildly disappointing, you will say what you would have preferred to have done.

And then your answer has written itself. Almost as soon as you have finished saying that you don't like something, the rest of the answer just unwinds in front of you. Like the elephant in the block of marble waiting for the sculptor to reveal it, your answer was there all along waiting for you to say it.

That's the power of this activity. It's not really about a nonsense answer in an emergency. It's about having an eye to create something logical, coherent, a work of beauty from the materials at your disposal.

Writing in Colours

 If you can afford coloured pens (and stop the rest of the department using them for colouring in), then writing in colours can be a great way to get pupils to develop their writing.

Writing in colours, writing big, or writing on unfamiliar surfaces, seems to change their approach to writing. In an exercise book, a blank page can stay blank. "I didn't know what to put." Or "I wanted to say X, but I didn't know it in French." Using coloured pens can get over the issue of the blank page, or of writing being intimidating, or writing being just for the teacher to assess.

Love the Colour Coded Key!

Here pupils are using different colours for different chunks that make up a sentence. Changing pens helps slow writing down, make It more of an enjoyable attractive experience, drawing attention to the product not just "getting it done." It also draws attention to the process. Building paragraphs from opinions, verbs that take the infinitive, infinitives, connectives. It draws attention to the building blocks and the process of assembling them. It makes writing in French more of a hands on, nuts and bolts activity. For this to work, you need to have the writing scaffold printed in colour. Or consistently use the same colours for the same components as pupils learn them.

Also for a similar stage of pupils' writing, is Ski Slope writing. Pupils draw a diagonal ski slope line from the top left to the bottom right of a double page. They write a sentence from the margin to the slope. When they have done a sentence, either they, or a very speedy teacher, can draw a skiing penguin or a ski jump, or a polar bear, or an eskimo on the slope at the end of their sentence. If that makes no sense, then have a look at the picture.

The pupil's next sentence will have to be slightly longer to reach the ski slope. And so on... And by the end of the activity, they have to have a sentence that is going to go right across the double page.

Once pupils are good at writing longer sentences, linking their ideas with and, but, so, because, especially if, for example... you can try branching tree writing. This gets them exploring different directions they can take an idea. You can do this in their books or on A3.  I like to do it on cheap rolls of backing wallpaper. The picture shows how they make sentences which extend and branch off at different points. These make for great temporary displays. Especially if your Year 11s come in and say, "We did that when we were in Year 8!" It's one of those lessons they remember, and they remember how it opened up possibilities for how you can develop an idea using the language you know.

These activities work around the boundary between randomly assembling language, curating the coherence of the language, exploring what you can do with your language, and starting to express yourself with the language. I have mentioned this in several posts, for example here in a Year 8 lesson.

This mechanical versus ephemeral boundary can still come in even at A Level. For essay planning,
where pupils need to get their ideas into shape, we use Writing on the Tables. Just doing the outline or the plan or the draft on the table changes the dynamic. It makes it freer, more experimental. It can just be at the planning stage, sketching out the shape of an essay in boxes, or starting to write it. Sometimes I operate a production line, writing the first and last line of every paragraph. And then with students moving round from one table to another, to write the next part of someone else's essay, filling in examples and arguments to fit.

Tips: Black and purple don't always wash off tables and can get on people's clothes. If you throw away a dead pen, always keep the lid - you will need it. And don't let the rest of the department use the pens for colouring in. They are much too valuable for doing writing with!

A Lesson from 2002

 Ever wondered what teaching languages was like 20 years ago?

Every so often, like the sword of Gryffindor, or a slightly unpredictable Halley's comet, an old CD Rom appears in our house. Often disappearing again ("I remember I put it in a safe place") before a computer capable of playing it can be found. It is the old Open University MFL PGCE materials. On it is video of me teaching in 2002.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Ann Swarbrick brought an OU/BBC film crew for a "model lesson". It was with a Year 8 class, in their second year of Spanish.

OU resource showing a mock-up of what ended up on the board

The first thing on the video, is me constructing a complicated branching out tree on the board. Pupils tell me a sentence in Spanish, starting from I like holidays... They can start their own new branch, or can use an existing branch and take it off in a different direction. I still do something similar to this as a writing activity, with pupils writing in coloured pens on rolls of cheap backing wallpaper.

Adding pupils' contributions
to the sentence tree

The photo is a still from the video, and the picture above is the OU's mock-up of what ended up on the board. You can see the OU have kept the "dance totally naked" that one pupil came up with. In fact what he said was, "Me gustan las vacaciones con amigos porque puedo hacer algo, por ejemplo puedo bailar completamente desnudo alrededor de una fogata con una cabra." Which brought the activity to an early end. It was cut from the video on the CD Rom, but I know that Ann Swarbrick enjoyed showing it at conferences. (No google translate in 2002. This was chunks that he knew or had asked for in previous lessons.) 

Anyway, that brought this stage of the lesson to a hasty close. 

Then we went on to the connectives dice activity described in the second half of this post. We worked on developing an answer, using dice to force us to extend using and, but, so, because, especially, for example according to the throw of the dice. This was modelled by one pupil for the class, and then they worked in pairs to practise. I was struck, watching this again, by the way I insisted they bring in some coherence (despite the random element) by picking just 3 or 4 infinitives to use. I thought I had only started to do this recently, as a tactic to make answers focus on developing specific ideas.

OHP Acetate

Then we moved on to another dice game, again very similar to one described in this recent post. It's written on an acetate and projected on the OverHeadProjector. Pupils worked in pairs, rolling the dice to create sentences, evaluating if what they were saying was logical and coherent, or not. It uses can / have to + infinitive in the same way I do now. It's interesting to see this early example. And to see my Spanish was still quite Mexican with things like quedar/quedarse. (You can hear this in the accent on the video too.)

We then played a football game on the board. The class were in two teams, alternating to extend an answer by following on from the previous pupil, using connectives to take the ball off the other team. Impossible to explain, but I remember I used to do it a lot.

The medium-term planned outcome was a piece of writing, but most of the lesson was about speaking and extending answers orally. It had the same balance between random and coherent that I use with my current Year 8 classes. The random element means that thinking about what to say doesn't stand in the way of producing lots of fluent language. The coherence and organisation comes next.

The pupils had a high level of using their Spanish in the activities, using the resources to give extended answers about Holidays. But they also interacted in Spanish with me throughout, even when we got on to discussing the success criteria for the piece of writing they were going to do. I had forgotten how good they were at communicating.

This was in the days of the written Coursework GCSE. This meant extending answers and developing ideas was a new priority. These pupils went on to get caught up in the uncertainty of whether they had to take a language for GCSE or not. And also got mixed up in a grading fiasco associated with the changing nature of the cohort being entered. I might tell that story in another post one day...

Nice Practical Ideas

 If you are just here for nice practical ideas, and don't want to read thoughts on the curriculum (fascinating I'm sure but for another time maybe), then here are links to the posts with lesson ideas.
Reading newspaper articles at KS4: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/reading-authentic-texts.html…
Dice activities for extending speaking and writing: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/nice-with-dice.html…
Structured low prep activities for A Level speaking: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/a-level-speaking-ideas.html…
Drag and drop tasks in Word:
https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/creating-foolproof-tasks-for-computer.html…
Feedback: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/thoughts-on-assessment-and-feedback.html…
Vocabulary teaching strategy: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-great-way-to-learn-vocabulary.html…
A low prep listening idea:
https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-nice-idea-for-listening-skills.html

Reading Authentic Texts

 Last year I started regularly using newspaper articles with Year 11. Many of them the more bizarre sort of story that AQA like to use. Here's an example of a nice story that fits with the GCSE topic of social conscience. It's from La Voz de Michoacan, which was my local paper when I lived in Mexico. It tells the story of a young boy who won some money playing bingo at his gran's. Then on the way home he gave it to a man who was trying to sell lollipops to customers in a taco place.

Link to story here. This is how I taught it:

The main thing I did was to spread it out over several lessons. Lessons in which I did other things for most of the lesson.

In the first lesson, pupils just listened to me read through the text. They had the text in front of them. And then I asked them for what they understood. Some picked out single words, others had some short ideas, others thought they knew what was going on. Then we left it and got on with something else.

Next time, I gave them questions in English which fed them much of the answer.

Article from La Voz de Michoacán

What is the name of the mother who has posted this on Facebook?

How old is her son?

How long did it take to go viral?

Whose house had they come from?

These questions guide them through the text and make it accessible. It also brought up some cultural references - place names, foods, media outlets - which we examined. And then we left it and got on with the rest of the lesson.

The next time they had the same text. And I am sure they remembered some details and had forgotten others. I gave them a list of words in English to find in the text: sweet seller, had won, they were having dinner... The words are in order, which helps locate them. They are words that they can identify from the rest of the sentence or from knowledge of Spanish word forms. And they will typically be words that were "given" by the questions in the previous lesson.

Each lesson they are more confident with the text, matching what they remember to a closer reading of the text. What I did next was test them on some vocabulary (including the words in the list from last lesson) and then as a class we rewrote the story in our own words in Spanish on the board. This made us work on tenses - what had happened, what was happening, what happened.

And then I continued to come back to the text in future lessons. Listening to me read it aloud with the text in front of them. Listening to me read it, without them following the written text.

I would say that coming back repeatedly to a text is even more important with Listening. If you want pupils to get better at processing what they hear, why would you use new material each time and not go back over listenings you have worked on?

I know AQA pick these off-beat stories so that pupils can't use their reading skills of prediction or working out new words from context. But reading isn't just a test of vocabulary and grammar. Reading is about meaning and understanding.

Nice with Dice

 This week, I realised I have enough dice for pupils in some groups to have one each. So as long as they don't touch them all as they choose their favourite one from the tub, we can do dice speaking activities without worrying about sharing dice.

With Year 8, we did a scaffolded speaking and writing activity. Pupils roll the dice (never say die) which gives them the words for each section. For example throwing a 1 would give them j'aime and then throwing a 4 would follow that with voir mes amis and so on. Until you have a long random sentence made up of all 9 chunks.

J'aime voir mes amis mais je dois faire des achats dans le parc parce que je n'aime pas visiter des musées.

They do this with a partner, saying the sentence they are making in French and in English. They have to decide if their sentence makes sense or not, and put their hand up to tell me if they get one that they claim works.

I wrote in a previous post about how we use this phase of just producing French, before turning our attention to curating meaning and coherence more carefully.

After the speaking activity, I take in the dice, and ask the pupils to use the sheet to write sentences in their books. They have to write a mixture of ones that make sense and ones that are "correct" but random. It is then their partner's job (or the teacher's job, when they mark the books) to spot the sensible ones. You can see me setting up this activity in this lockdown teaching video.

Asking pupils to write grammatically correct but nonsensical sentences is interesting. We do it just to practice processing a high volume of French and producing longer sentences. We all know what happens when pupils focus on wanting to say something specific and end up not practising saying anything at all. But actually, two things tend to happen. Either pupils really love the creativity of making nonsense sentences. Or they have a strong desire to make it make sense. Both of these are great, and lead us on to the next step of self expression and creating meaning.

There are examples of these dice activities on the ALL London Branch talks archive page in French, Spanish and German, which you can adapt. The sheet is also useful for the "Consequences" activity where pupils write one of the choices from the first set of 6, fold it over, and pass the paper to the next pupil... who writes one from the next set of 6 choices, folds it over, and passes it on. Then at the end they unfold and read what they have written. This guest post on the OUP blog has one for writing a letter to Father Christmas. You can also use the sheet for a speaking activity where a pupil selects a long sentence using one from each set of choices, then their partner has to guess their sentence a chunk at a time.

The next step up using dice, is to use them for conjunctions. The pupil starts talking (using the Keep Talking sheet). J'aime le sport. At the end of each chunk, they roll the dice for a conjunction. So if they rolled a 2 they would use "because" and carry on: J'aime le sport parce que je peux jouer au rugby avec mes amis. Then again, and again, and again. J'aime le sport parce que je peux jouer au rugby avec mes amis mais je n'aime pas nager surtout si je dois nager avec ma famille alors je voudrais jouer au rugby par exemple le week-end si je peux...

Again, there is an element of incoherence thanks to the random element of the dice. The focus is on keeping talking, extending, practising, processing. Pupils DO pay attention to whether it makes sense and whether the sentence becomes incoherent. But meanwhile they are practising talking and talking spontaneously.

I have had pupils ask me if they can take the dice into their Speaking exam, because they understand that it helps them extend and develop spontaneously. It also makes them think about what order they would logically like to have the conjunctions if they could choose. The 1 - 6 order in the picture above is actually a useful order for constructing an answer. Et just gives more information. Parce que and  surtout si explore reasons. I use par exemple  tactically as a trigger for examples in the past. And alors to trigger examples in the future. And you should keep mais until last, to change the subject once you have said everything you can.

So we do this dice activity at GCSE as well as at KS3. And in the GCSE Speaking Exam, many of my "Questions" are not questions at all, but single word prompts. I will say, "Et?" or "Pour quoi?" or "Alors...?" or "Par exemple..." and the pupils will extend their idea on the spot just as they are used to doing in class. And without the need for me to say, "Now please can you narrate something relevant to this in the past tense." All I have to say is, "Par exemple...?" and the pupils automatically give me an example in the past.

Using dice really seems to get over the problem of pupils not knowing what to say, or wanting to say something that they can't. It gets them producing language in speaking or writing, and actively starts them thinking about meaning and coherence. Then it is the key to interaction with a partner, teacher or examiner in using short prompts to probe for more information and to push them to extend their answers spontaneously.

The French Street View Mysteries

 In the Google street view mysteries, pupils explore a French town. When they meet people, they have a scripted conversation from which they can extract information and clues. The first two worked so that they could meet the people in any order as they explore, and at the end they had to make a decision to try to save the day.

One took place in a town called Blaru, where at the end they would come across a boy hiding behind some bins, and be able to understand how he had got there and what needed to be done.

The other was set in Chateauneuf du Faou, and at the end they had to race to the bridge to stop an accident. This was the suspect's car that they had previously investigated in the town centre, heading for the river! There was also a white van that had been following them around everywhere they went. I remember when they moved to the bridge, turned round and saw the van again, one pupil screamed out loud! Very similar in that respect to when the pupils eventually tracked down the villain in the Workhouse. (Scary life size mannequin mystery.)

And of course, one day, Google sent the car to take new photos, and the mysteries were over. (Although you can use the go back in time feature, so I could re-create them.)

During lockdown I had time to do another. This time set in Vesoul. A town apparently under attack from plants! Too much time! It's a monster. The video has a tutorial on how to use it. And the mystery is available to download here.

In lockdown a few keen Year 10s completed it (and one dedicated Year 7 pupil). I am now trying it with my Year 8. It has taken us two lessons in the computer room so far, and we are about half way. We didn't spend the whole lesson on it - I didn't want them to get fed up of it, and so I started and ended the lesson with other activities. I was wondering whether to continue in the normal classroom and do it on the whiteboard. That way we could encounter a couple of characters at the start or end of a lesson, and make the mystery last half a term. Given they way they worked today, though, I think I will be booking the computer room again, and I think it is important for them to have those "scream out loud" moments for themselves.

Advice for teachers wanting to try it: It has definitely emerged that the teacher has to be very familiar with the route. In the Vesoul one, there are clear instructions given in English (in the booklet) and in French (by the characters) as to where to go next. But a wrong turn takes you off on a wild goose chase. I have inserted "checkpoints" (links to the correct street in google street view) for any pupils who do get lost. And check in the comments below for another solution to this.

It's also good to be able to keep their interest by building up some of the characters and places,
"L'homme nu," "The talking cat," "the homeless dog," "the houses destroyed by plants." It is also good to let them find some things for themselves -  the street of umbrellas, the balcony of disappearing plants, the microwave thrown out of the window, the cat food... No-one has screamed yet with this one, but they will!

The conversations are all in French, but with questions in English. The questions "feed" pupils the words they are not likely to know, so by reading the questions, they can understand what they are being told. Certainly my Year 8s were so bound up in the story, that they didn't comment at all about the fact that it was all in French. They just got on with answering the
questions and finding out more clues.

There is also sound for each conversation, recorded specially by volunteers from the #mfltwitterati. I got their recordings using Qwiqr conversations, as suggested by @ivana_stanley on twitter. Some of my Year 8s are listening to them, others are concentrating on navegating and reading. If I do some on the board in the normal classroom, I think I will make use of the sound then.

Please do have a good look at it and think about using it with your classes - in the computer room, as a homework project, or in lessons in installments. The old original ones were very popular and very well-used. We need to get as much use out of it as possible before Google get round to re-doing the photos!

As predicted, part of the route has been re-photographed by Google. Look in the comments below for links to screenshot videos of the correct route if you want to keep using the Mystery!

Virtual Exchanges

 One thing to come out of lockdown was our determination not to let our links with schools abroad slip away. We have an exchange with a school in Spain which has been going since 1995. And we have schools in France with whom we exchange letters.

Having a good relationship with a partner school is vital. We have tried exchanging letters with several schools in France, and it is important to manage expectations. Are classes set or mixed ability? Is the partner school committed to all pupils being able to take part, whatever the level of their language, cultural knowledge, literacy or handwriting? Can deadlines shift without causing a furore? Do the schools share similar ideas about how pupils should be paired up (or should they work in groups?), and how pupils can (or shouldn't) contact each other? What language are they expecting the letters in, and to what extent do these need to be corrected by the teacher? Is the language the most important element, or the cultural contact?

One way we got round some of the issues to do with language, ability and literacy, was to send Flat Stanleys to France. Our pupils created a Flat Stanley from a template to be their avatar. They took pictures of the Stanley in our school and in the community. Then they sent the photos and the Stanley with a letter to France.

The French pupils then took pictures of the Flat Stanleys enjoying their stay in France, before sending the photos and the Flat Stanley back to England with a letter.

The letter became the least important item, and pupils enjoyed this way of an avatar doing a visit to France for them. One year when the French Stanleys were here in the winter, our pupils made them all cut out Christmas jumpers to return home in!

(Unfortunately last year our Stanleys spent rather longer than they were supposed to, locked down in France!)

Our Year 8 curriculum is based around describing Town, School, Free Time. Writing to introduce yourself to a real French person brings the pupils and the teachers up against the question, "What can you actually say in French." I have written in a previous post about how we use authentic tasks as a driver for the curriculum and to make sure we equip pupils with the French they need in order to express themselves. A mixture of pictures, a paragraph in English, and a paragraph in French seems to be the best option. Although some pupils like to send sweets, football stickers, fishing hooks (?!) etc...

For our Year 10 pupils who would have been hoping to go to Spain on the exchange this year, we have tried to make a virtual exchange experience. This video shows how I asked them to create a virtual tour of the school with a voice over. It would be just as easy to make one to show the town that pupils live in using images from google street view.

The Spanish have now done something similar using pictures and voice over to show us round their
city. They have really gone to town, with music, voice-over and humour.

The pupils have a shared folder on google drive where they can write to each other. At the moment the exchanges are directed by the teachers - all the pupils produce something on the same topic - but they are asking if they can just be in touch on social media.

Meanwhile, with the Year 9 Spanish beginners, we have had a similar letter exchange via shared google documents, hoping it might inspire them to sign up for the real exchange next year!

A Level Speaking Ideas

 Speaking at A Level can vary so much from perhaps a fluent discussion amongst native speakers, to maybe a student who did GCSE by learning answers by rote and struggles with spontaneity. So approaches differ and classes can be very different, but in all cases, we have to develop students' ability to speak with increasing fluency and sophistication in terms of argument and language.

One idea that I find works well is to have a speaking routine. This coincidentally works well for students
who are struggling with spontaneity, but also with native speakers who tend to give a straight-up answer to the question and leave it at that!

Students are banned from starting with their own opinion. First, they have to get used to examining other people's opinions or stereotypes. Even saying what they don't think, which introduces the subjunctive and helps consider different sides of an argument. Perhaps the debate lends itself to discussing how things used to be. Or giving a personal evaluation or reaction to the current situation. Then, and only then, once they have considered these other perspectives, can they give their own opinion.

This to some extent dictates what grammar I cover early in the course. We have to look at the subjunctive for doubt and for value judgements. We have to use the imperfect for talking about how things used to be. We have to learn to compare. And then re-use this routine regularly in lessons and across topics until it stops being a routine and becomes a natural way to consider and debate ideas.

I also use a lot of activities based around the idea of echoing back. The simplest version is pairwork, where one student has a copy of a text. They read it aloud in Spanish to their partner in short chunks. Their partner simply echos it back. Trying to process, memorise and repeat longer, more coherent sections of the sentences.

Then we move on to other variations of the same task: 

Echoing back but changing the tense. This works well with a text that was written about something that no longer exists. For example a description of the old Spanish social media site Tuenti.

Echoing back but changing the person. This works well with a first person account that students will need to use in the 3rd person. This is also important for the Summary task in the Listening and Reading paper.

Echoing back but simplifying, paraphrasing, embellishing, casting doubt...

Another favourite is Simultaneous Translation. One student is responsible for thinking up what to say. They feed this to a partner in English. The partner has to say it in Spanish. This is to overcome the situation of students having nothing or very little to say. The cognitive load of dealing with the A Level topics, thinking of something to say, AND saying it in Spanish, can be too much. The skill of thinking up what to say, making it coherent and pitching at the right level of language is a skill that needs practising. So one partner takes on this job. And the other just has to put it into Spanish. It's spontaneous extended speaking but with the workload shared. And it turns out that doing the Spanish is the easy part!

These structured activities need to be interspersed with more open activities. Such as describing a scene, answering a collection of bizarre personal questions ("¿Cuándo fue la última vez que viste un animal vivo?"), Would I Lie to You (I no longer play this after a series of revelations from one group) or just chatting.

Bizarre questions (Why is the sky blue?) are great for practising the skill of talking around something you don't really have an answer for. You can show off great language by saying that you are not sure about something, suggesting different possibilities, rejecting ideas, and re-framing the question. It's another powerful routine to be worked on until it comes naturally.

Using the Speaking Exam Stimulus Card is also important, but students sometimes automatically view these as threatening, or think there is a "right" answer. The routine outlined at the start of this post, does fit well with the demands of the Card, and it is important for students to be able to quickly spot that the questions are not asking for a straight-up answer, but in fact are an invitation for you to show off your knowledge and your Spanish.

Creating Foolproof Tasks for the Computer Room

 We have built up a folder of activities in Word documents for pupils to do on each topic in the computer room. They are designed so that pupils are working with the language, in a way that gives them all the words they need. They can successfully complete the tasks, with support built in to the task. I have used printed off versions of some of these for cover lessons, although on paper they don't have the same drag and drop functionality.

1. Tangled paragraphs. This isn't a tangled translation. It is literally dragging the Spanish into a separate paragraph, creating a Spanish paragraph and an English paragraph of the same text. This can then be used to ask the pupils to create a glossary of words and structures which can be used in later exercises such as translation. The virtue of this task is that all the words are there. It works on paper too for cover lessons so the pupils are doing a task that cannot go wrong. And then the next task can re-use the words they have picked up by doing the untangling.

2. Replace the spaces. To make these, type your sentence, then use Replace All for the highlighted text
and remove all the spaces. Or remove/replace certain letters. Pupils then have to rehydrate the text. You can give an English translation to help. 

A word of warning. Pupils can copy and paste the English version into Google Translate to avoid having to work out where to put spaces in the Spanish words. I either use snipping tool or Windows key + shift + s to snip the English text and put it into the document as an image rather than as text. Or I include a secret DO NOT CHEAT message in very small white font hidden in the English sentence. So if pupils copy and paste it into Google, it gets translated into Spanish and shows up when they copy it back into the document.

3. Self Marking Smiley Faces. I use this for drag and drop categorising activities. A hidden white font smiley face is revealed when the right answer is dragged onto a coloured square. In the example on the left, the blue boxes are for categorising the sentences as Sensible or Random.

On the right, you can see what happens when the sentences are dragged onto the boxes. A hidden white font smiley face for Sensible becomes visible. Or a not smiley face for Random. So pupils know they have the right answers. They enjoy the magic of this activity. I imagine it could be achieved in Google Docs as well. Although unfortunately, just converting the Word doc into a Google Doc doesn't keep the right formatting.

4. Appear/Disappear. One more example is using bring to front / send to back to set up whether a box appears or disappears when dragged onto another. Here pupils are asked to drag all the Opinion words onto the blue square. Any correctly selected words will appear on the blue square. Any that are incorrectly selected disappear behind the box.

All of these activities are low stakes, and impossible to get wrong. The trick is then to recycle the same language in later tasks such as translation. (Remember the 2 tricks above to stop the use of Google Translate.) The pupils remember the words from the easy drag and drop tasks, or can look back to them to find the words they need.

These are Word documents, but if I were to do them again, I think I would work out how to do them in Google Docs instead. That way they can be set as homework - remember, not all pupils have Word at home. They are fairly quick to set up, and mean pupils can successfully engage with texts and paragraphs in a structured way. There are a couple of examples you can try out and adapt here.

Teaching Verbs

 I read in the 2016 Review that they recommend pupils study entire verb systems for one tense or more by the end of "the first year". This has prompted me to think about how we teach verbs, and what has been most successful with our learners.

I think there are several principles involved:

1. Things are not "learned" in one go, done and dusted, covered, secure and systematised.

2. Pupils learn best when new language fits with the core of language they already have and extends what they can do.

3. New grammar works best when it equips you to say something interesting and useful. If not, it is easily discarded.

4. Pupils haven't learned a language before, so they are also learning to think about language in a certain way - persons of the verb, tenses, combining tenses, differences between languages...

5. The nature of French means that the spoken and the written forms need separate attention, and it may be an occasion to talk to pupils about how languages evolve.

6. A pupil's step by step systematisation of the language may not follow the same paradigm that someone with possession of the entire system would see.

Click or Zoom in

In Year 7, early on we introduce subject pronouns and have a focus on the irregular verbs to have and to be. These are used for describing people and family members, and then reused in the Art Exhibition unit. It does seem that at this stage, pupils are far more likely to learn these as lexical items. We can ask them to look for the right form of the verb in a table, or encourage them to chant the verbs (link to verb skipping video). But at this stage, their conception of a language is still that it is English sentence structure with French words swapped in. They are starting out with a focus on vocabulary and how to directly swap basic things they can say into French. Things like word order, and gender loom large as they move away from this simplistic conceptualisation. When it comes to verbs, they seem happy to remember that "est" means "is" and "j'ai" means "I have" etc. For someone with the whole system of the language under their belt, knowing the difference between appelle and appelles is easy, because the system tells you what to do with the ending. At this stage, for Year 7, it seems that learning appelle/appelles as a one off (or not really worrying about it) is a more realistic option than mastering a whole system. Later on in Year 7, we pick up on verbs again, with the present tense of manger, and then verbs for daily routine. Again, we are hovering between fluent lexical learning of first person use, with intellectual awareness of the forms for other persons. 

In Year 8, we develop a strong core of opinions and reasons (because I can..., if I want to..., I don't have to...) that pupils can transfer across topics. Again, this starts with a 1st person focus, on the topics of My Town and My School. The idea is that this core is used across topics, with a focus on pupils being good at using it. With increasing spontaneity, fluency, independence. Then we can add other language to that core. So in January of Year 8, we teach the paradigm of --er verbs. 

This lockdown teaching video shows you the kind of verbs we work on. It's a list of things like jump in puddles, eat snot, look for money under the sofa, that pupils can enjoy using for a purpose. We practise the 3rd person by writing the school report for a celebrity (or a teacher). And the tu form by writing slightly insulting letters to older pupils (or a teacher).

This is a very mechanical process, writing down the verb, removing the --er and adding the correct ending. And focusing on one person of the verb at a time is a natural thing to do at first. But in fact, language doesn't work in isolation, and it's selecting the correct form and integrating it with your existing repertoire that really matters. So we take the sort of paragraph that pupils were already creating, and set triggers for using other persons of the verb. So in a paragraph where it mentions another person, for example "avec mes amis", we would then make it a rule that you would add in a nous form of the verb or an ils/elles form of the verb. So we take a paragraph with a sentence such as J'aime aller au parc parce que je peux voir mes amis. We would then add a detail such as nous jouons au tennis. 

The new language fits into the repertoire we are already developing, as shown in the Year 8 exemplars poster above. You can also see that we start to introduce the perfect tense in the first person, in readiness for the full paradigm later on.

In Year 9, we introduce verb tables. You can see some of our resources on the ALL Grammar Wiki. There are verb table resources here for jobs, crime, and the environment. On the Year 9 exemplar poster, you can see that these are topics where we still start from the core of 1st person opinions and reasons, and add different persons of the verb and different tenses as appropriate to the topic.

By using verb tables, we work on the principle that pupils can use the support until they can manage without. It's also a valuable skill as a linguist. It helps them see how language works as a system. It means they can work at a level of sophistication more appropriate to their age and the topics. It gives them a glimpse into what they are going to study in KS4. And it works on the principle that you end up knowing the language as a result of using it with support. Rather than having to learn it first before you are allowed to use it.

The resources you can see on the ALL wiki (link above) start off by asking pupils to find verb forms directly available in the verb table. Then they introduce the idea that you can use these endings for other verbs, not just the model given. Then they ask pupils to combine them to translate paragraphs combining the different tenses.

You will see that one of the units has bizarre sentences about a clown and a nurse and an accident. This is where we work on chains of what was happening and what happened. It is part of a unit on Clothes, Make up and Advertising. And links into work we do on telling stories and creating a child's book. This example was sent to me recently by a Year 11 who I don't teach any more, but who wanted to tell me that this was the lesson where tenses suddenly made sense.

Our pupils who start Spanish in Year 9, follow an accelerated version of the progression I have sketched out here for French. You can see here how their use of tenses and different persons comes once they have a strong 1st person repertoire based on opinions and reasons. They use their knowledge of verb endings to add anecdotes to illustrate the opinions they are giving.

The question at the moment with the proposed new GCSE seems to be about the hierarchy of knowledge and use. Whether systems should be learned first with use following, or whether you develop pupils' use of language and continually add language to that. I would say my experience shows that for our learners, there is a very strong advantage for the latter idea. I am aware perhaps that our choice of topics is interlinked with strong 1st person use. Perhaps because the goalposts have been to do with giving and justifying opinions, with examples in past and future. Or because the topics are often My town, My free time, My house... A different choice of topic, perhaps with greater cultural emphasis would require a different core, with more emphasis on 3rd person (In France, people...) or 1st person plural (In England, we...). But the principle would still apply that the pupils are learning what they need, and need what they are learning. And this seems to matter not just for motivation, but also for the reality of learning.

Coming back to this the day after I wrote it...

So is my conclusion that I will not be teaching full verb paradigms ahead of pupils' need to use them? Partly because I build the curriculum around developing what pupils can say and do with their language. But even if you were to believe that what they "know" is more important than what they can do, isn't it the case that learning happens when new language fits with what is already known? And that what isn't used or doesn't fit, is quickly forgotten?

This is my experience of teaching different groups different things at different stages. And it would seem to fit both with the underlying ideas of Task Based language learning and with the currently fashionable ideas around cognition. Can people point me in the direction of specific research, up to date and relevant to the English beginner level classroom?

Story Books in French

 People are asking on Twitter for ideas for the final term of Year 9 when some pupils are and some pupils are not continuing with languages. I am not against the idea of just continuing to teach them as normal right until the end! But here is one project we have done with them with great results.

We get them to work on producing story books in French for local Primary Schools. This works best when they send a form to the Primary class, asking what sort of book they would like, and to specify characters, style of drawing or a theme. In this way, when the completed forms come back, the Primary pupils are commissioning our Year 9s to produce something, and they feel the value of the project.

Before we start, we look at a selection of children's books in French. We look for language we can understand, consider the relationship between text and pictures, and we look for books that use repetition from page to page. Some of these are books they are familiar with translated in to French. Others are original French books. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a great example of a book built around repetition, using the days of the week and different foods.

Here is an example of a Year 9's book, which uses repetition over several pages, with a surprise at the end. This format makes for a very effective story technique; it works well for the Primary pupils being able to read it; and it works well for our pupils being able to write it in the first place.

You can see this example uses language that our pupils will have at their disposal, and they are quite able to write this story for themselves.

The value of the project is that they are realising what French they have learned and that they can use it creatively.

Another pupil's book uses the Four Friends story. It uses the "inviting people out" language that pupils will have studied. Florian suggests going somewhere. Josef and Claude agree it sounds great (Chouette!). Jean-Luc makes an excuse or disagrees. Then Josef and Claude in turn suggest somewhere to go. Each time it is Jean-Luc who says it's "boring". Finally, Jean-Luc says he is going home. The others say, "Chouette" (etc) and go off and have a lovely time without him.

In this post, I wrote about a story on the topic of likes and dislikes in food, with a girl and a hungry monster.

It is possible to take any idea that a pupil comes up with, repeat it through different encounters with different characters, and then put a surprise or a twist at the end.

You can see that we move from working on the French, to spending time creating beautiful books. More recently we have worked on computers to also produce powerpoint stories, including with sound.

We do also use the unit to look at literature, for example exerpts from Le Petit Prince and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (links to resource on ALL Connect Literature wiki). And also some stories we have created ourselves. It also fits in well with our work on tenses for narration. This one on the right is an example of making a crazy chain of what was happening and what happened next. It was sent to me by a pupil in Year 11 who said it was the exact lesson in Year 9 when the different tenses made sense.

I do have another project in the pipeline. We have ordered a class set of "La rivière à l'envers" by Jean-Claude Mourlevat. It is a novel often set for pupils in France to read over the summer before starting secondary school. In fact, it is two novels, Tomek and Hannah, which both tell the same story but from the point of view of the two characters. Tomek is in 3rd person and in the past historic. Hannah is in the first person and in the perfect. There is also a version in BD. It is set in an imaginary world, but it's a French imaginary world, with references to areas of France and Francophone countries.

My idea is to record myself talking through a passage (example here from a different book). Then I can ask the pupils to to read silently all the pages we've looked at, or read while listening to the audio book, or try to read ahead. There is also the possibility of once we have read an episode from Tomek, asking them to read the same events from Hannah's point of view. I have tried out a couple of pages already with a Year 8 class, and it's a lovely story, written with humour and warmth.

I am glad I've got this post to sit next to the one from yesterday, wondering if our KS3 curriculum has to change. A much better start to the weekend. Hope it's made you feel the same!