The Swing of the Ideological Pendulum

 In Teaching Modern Languages (ed Swarbrick 1994), William Rowlinson looks at how the swings of the "educational" philosophy pendulum depend on the dominant political views of the time, more than depending on any educational advances.

He contrasts the study of languages as an intellectual pursuit, with the study of languages for communication. This is not just about the objectives, but also the methodology.

The first of these contrasting approaches is about grammar, structures, learning and applying rules, moving from regular to irregular. It links to the study of ancient languages (in their official standardised forms) and also to the study of Great Literature. For modern languages, the language taught can be artificial, acting as a pretext to practise the grammar being studied. It is part of being a cultivated English person of a certain class. It is not particularly interested in actual "foreigners" to communicate with.

The second is about learning language by hearing and practising, expressing yourself and communicating with speakers of the language. There may be more exposure to authentic language and interest in the target culture and speakers of the language.

Currently in England, the dominant political philosophy is the "Knowledge Curriculum." This is not what you might expect from the title and its declared aims of sharing the knowledge of the privileged elite with previously disadvantaged pupils. It's not (in practice) primarily about higher level thinking, concepts, taxonomies, terminology. It's about recall and rote-learning. For example in English teaching, it has led to pupils learning "important facts" and quotes from a Knowledge Organiser. Instead of reading the actual book. And the books which are chosen are "the best". A report this week from the Runnymede Trust laments the lack of diversity in the books that pupils read in English Literature. This is no accident. Pupils are supposed to be reading the books (and speaking the standard English) that give them access to the Knowledge of the Elite.

This view of education is not educational. It is political. It is done in the name of social mobility, but it is very much in order to preserve the status quo. It promotes conformity and demotes criticism. It promotes "elite" voices and demotes diversity of voices. It demotes creativity. It promotes the role of knowledge over the role of thinking.

It is in this context that we can understand the top-down trends in Languages teaching.

All the elements on Rowlinson's tick list are coming together:

The reinstatement of dead languages alongside modern languages.

The recent ALCAB proposals for A Level languages to have essays on literature written in English to ensure the correct intellectual level.

The GCSE proposals and Ofsted Research Review putting grammar before communication.

NCELP's idea of creating language (word sets and texts) to exemplify grammatical concepts, rather than to serve what pupils might want to say.

Ofsted Research Review defining the skills of reading and listening as word-by-word parsing of sentences containing known words and structures.

A KS3 National Curriculum with the words, "Great Literature" on the front page.

Another clear indicator that these are temporary and local preoccupations is the fact that this only refers to England - in the USA, the political pendulum is currently at stories, authentic voices and materials, the brain's ability to systematise comprehensible input, diversity, and inter-cultural competence.

We can debate the different ideas and approaches to language teaching, but the participants in the debate must be honest, with us and with themselves, about the fact that these positions are primarily political.

More on The Real Problem with GCSE Listening

 In a previous post, I wrote about how the GCSE Listening exam is not a Listening exam at all. If you haven't read it, you might like to follow this link and start there. It has examples from an Edexcel paper that show exactly what is really going on.

In this post, I am going to show more examples from AQA which confirm that it is not a Listening Comprehension test at all.

Here is the Question:

Here is the Transcript:

And here is the Mark Scheme:

You can see that the Question asked "What did one school do that she really approved of?" And from the transcript you can see that this school grew its own fruit and vegetables on the sports field. But look at the mark scheme. The fact that the school grew its own fruit and vegetables is NOT what she approved of. The fact that the school grew its own fruit and vegetables on the sports field is NOT what she approved of. What she approved of was much more precise. She approved of the fact that "the school grew fruit and vegetables on PART OF the sports field." I imagine because as well as fruit and vegetables she was also keen on exercise. Although, that is an inference I am drawing.

We could tut at the ridicuous mark scheme and expectations, as if the examiner had momentarily taken leave of their senses. But we shouldn't. And they haven't. What they have taken leave of is the comprehension question. Clearly the answer to the question is not that she is impressed that they only grew fruit and veg on PART OF the field. The actual question is irrelevant to the examiners, because this is not a comprehension test.

The examiner would refer you not to the question, but to the transcript. Which clearly says half the sports field had been turned over to fruit and veg. The examiner doesn't want you to do a comprehension question showing you understand the passage. The examiner wants you to transcribe and translate the passage word-by-word.

For one mark you have to have the 3 key ideas in the box. Or be able to transcribe (in your head) every word and translate it into English.

It is not a comprehension question. And it's not really a Listening question. All Listening cues are removed. Tone of voice, natural speed, intonation are all deliberately neutral to avoid pupils deploying any Listening strategies.

For anyone at a level below fluent speaker, Listening is NOT about understanding every word. Listening is about learning to use all the cues - including context, intonation, known words, deduced words, sentence structure - to work together to extract information. And simultaneously evaluating that whole process to judge whether it seems reasonable or whether you need to think again.

AQA do not agree. They think that Listening is to test word-by-word processing. Basically a reading that you do in your head. This is a very unusual definition of Listening. In the rest of the world, using Listening cues and strategies is about using intonation, context and other cues to work out what is being said. Even when you don't know what every word means. Although you can work out new words in the process.

It's an affliction that comes from a view of language-learning too based on the idea that it is learning a set of structures and words to be plugged in to those structures.

The recent Ofsted Research Review is quite clear that it thinks that reading and listening are done by word-by-word parsing of sentences. And the proposals for a new GCSE also promised unnaturally slow speech and seem to come from the same narrow point of view.

Now we understand it's not just badly set questions, but their actual understanding of what a Listening is, you can spot it everywhere:

What she does is NOT visit schools and give talks on the environment. (Spoiler: Well, it is.) Because the question isn't really, "What does she do for the environmental group?" The question is, "Can you transcribe and translate word-by-word." And the answer to, "Why is she impressed by young people?" is NOT because they have clear ideas about saving energy. You have to transcribe word by word, "Because they have clear ideas about HOW TO save energy." It's not a comprehension question.

The Great Pet Debate

 Absolutely stunned this afternoon catching up with the LanguageNut Question Time panel debate on YouTube. It was a wonderful event, with excellent panelists engaged in a fascinating discussion. It was very welcome to see ideas being exchanged with a love of exploring the intellectual and practical aspects of Language Teaching. In an atmosphere of complete respect and professional friendship. Something I said I hoped to aspire to in the blurb of this blog, knowing that actually it was just going to be me telling it how I see it and trying not to rant.

At one point Helen Myers and Dr. Rachel Hawkes had a most interesting discussion on what themes and what vocabulary should be taught, which crystalised around the example of teaching the words for pets.

The two points of view exemplified a staggering gap in how we conceptualise language-learning.

I will spell out what I think were the points each were making. And then follow up with what I think are the implications of each. Of course my exegesis may go beyond Rachel and Helen's arguments and these are entirely my own musings. I should also say that I have known and worked with Rachel and Helen over many years and have nothing but total admiration for both of them professionally, and that both of them have shown me considerable personal kindness. Beyond the initial sketching out of their arguments which set me thinking, I want to be clear these are my own reflections triggered by what they said.

Rachel was using the example of teaching pets in Year 7 to show how we might need to shift topics away from what we've done in the past. She argued that at this stage we want to teach nouns that have a regular pattern of masculine words ending in o, and feminine words ending in a. So pets like pez, ratón, serpiente wouldn't be appropriate. She suggested widening the topic beyond pets to other things that pupils have, for example "libro" or "bolsa" so they exemplify the pattern you want pupils to spot, learn and apply.

Helen argued that pupils want to tell you about their pets. And if they have a snake, then they will want to learn the word for snake, whether or not it exemplifies a pattern. Telling you about their snake is important to them and the focus of their language learning is to communicate. This doesn't prevent teachers from working on spotting patterns or learning concepts.

The reason for writing this post, is that these seem to portray an enormous gulf in thinking about language-learning. One view is that we are teaching the pupils a set of rules and we carefully select and restrict the language they learn in order to help them spot, learn and apply those rules. Language is an intellectual system. And the things pupils learn to say are in the service of learning that system.

The other is that we are teaching the language so that they can communicate. We equip them to say things in an ever-expanding repertoire. They can still spot patterns and apply patterns, but not everything conforms to these patterns. And many of the most useful language features that they want to say, and much of the most powerful language, is irregular.

I do agree with Rachel that when we teach a topic, we need to be aware of what we are really teaching. So in Year 7 French, when I teach pets, I do it happily knowing that oiseau, chat, chien, tortue, poisson, serpent and their friends are doing an excellent job of reinforcing the phonics we have been working on. But I don't select the pets to fit the phonics. I teach the animals my pupils have. 

To pick up Rachel's argument and take it on further, I also agree that we have to keep in sight that this topic is really about pupils learning to talk about what they have. When we do pets, we bring in "I used to have" and "I would like to have" as well as "I have".  And I also teach, je n'ai pas d'animal. I wouldn't think of insisting they invent an animal to talk about on the grounds that we aren't doing the pattern for negation yet.

I don't think Rachel said it in the context of this debate, but I would also add that lists of nouns are perhaps not always the best way to learn a language. In fact at my school, we don't have a lot of topics based around nouns and adjectives. Which means the verbs "to have" and "to be" are not given the prominence that NCELP and the Ofsted Research Review think they should have. I am personally having to struggle with whether to bring in more nouns and adjectives!

So I have a lot in common with Rachel's arguments as good tactics for setting up a lesson - the real objectives for the teacher and the underlying language. But I can't go as far as to accept it as an end in itself. Helen talks about pupils wanting to say things. In the classroom, wanting to tell the teacher about their pets. On an exchange, wanting to talk to their partners about what sports they play. Pupils learn words and structures because they want to, because it equips them to say something.

I am going to end with what I think. I am going to quote from a guest blog I wrote for the MEITS project.  

Spontaneous communication is not just a valuable objective, and self-expression is not just what pupils want to learn to do. They are vital in the language-learning process. Learning to use the language cannot be postponed until all the grammar and all the vocabulary have been learned. It is by using the language from the start that the pupil develops the conscious and unconscious schemata that make learning happen. Being allowed to communicate requires the pupil to draw on their entire developing repertoire. Making the links, seeing how it works, and exploring its limits. It gathers their knowledge into a snowball, stopping their language from melting away, and means more and more language will stick to the snowball they already have. Learning to use the language has to keep pace with learning more language. In fact, I would reverse that and say that learning more language has to keep pace with the pupil’s ability to use what they are learning. Without the aim of self-expression, creativity, and increasing spontaneity, there is no language-learning.

A huge thank you to LanguageNut and all the panelists, especially Helen and Rachel for this particular debate. This simple example you stumbled into gets to the heart of what we spend our days thinking about and working at, and I love that.

Target Language Teaching

 One of the things we are reviewing in the light of the Ofsted Research Review is the use of the Target Language for classroom communication.

Of course, the words The Target Language just mean "French" or "Spanish" or whatever language you are studying. And most of the development of pupils speaking "The Target Langauge" happens in the activities of the lessons. For example in pairwork or Speed Spanish activities to build fluency and spontaneity.

But the words "Target Language" have been distorted in the English context. I remember people asking on forums "Can you give me a list of Target Language," meaning set expressions used by the teacher or pupils for routines.

At one point it was the orthodoxy that a "good" lesson had to be conducted by the teacher in the Target Language. Pictures, mime and other physical cues, routines, tone of voice and cognates were all used to make it comprehensible. There were firm believers and quiet heretics. Of course, a lesson in the Target Language wasn't automatically good. And a lesson delivered in English wasn't automatically not good.

But it was axiomatic that exposure to the target language was a good thing. Maybe because of a belief that this led to language acquisition through immersion. The teaching in the mid-1990s had a very strong oral/aural approach, with high energy physical and spoken interactions.

Or maybe it was in order for pupils to make the philosophical conceptual step that this is a real language, used for real communication. A pupil once said to me, "Sir. French people are so clever but so stupid. So clever because they can say everything in French. But so stupid. Why don't they just say it in English." So it is a chance for pupils to understand that their teachers are fluent speakers. We are role models for our language and how to use it. A bit like those amazing clarinet lessons where your teacher spent the first five minutes warming up with some dazzling virtuosic scales. 

I remember being told that it was good practice for teachers to use their French to talk to each other in front of pupils. In my experience this leads to very strong antipathy from the pupils who think it is suspicious or rude. Perhaps this is something that we need to make more normal. Or perhaps it is suspicious and rude. Certainly we need to be aware of how it comes across. 

In fact, I think this was the major flaw of the whole Target Language approach. It was never explained to pupils, and often it was imposed. I know one of my own children hated French lessons because she was always too hot. To take your blazer off, you had to draw attention to yourself and ask in French. Her teachers would be mortified to know this. But perhaps they should.

If this is starting so sound a little bit as if I was one of the quiet heretics, I should interject here that James Stubbs is one of my heroes. I mentioned here how he programmes his and his pupils' use of the Target Language for classroom communication, not only to keep pace with their progress in the language, but as a driver of progress. He introduces new language, for example tenses, in pupil speak associated with games and activities. James' blog will give you some idea. But if you can get to see him talk, then even better.

I once did an experiment with a class who really enjoyed Spanish. It's the class who were videoed for the OU CDROM lesson. I put a picture on the board as they came in. Several of them commented on it in English. When they sat down, we looked at how many of those things they could actually have said in Spanish. And thought about all the other things they could have said and knew how to say. Then I made them all line up outside and come in again, and each in turn had to say something about the picture. Before the end of the lesson I sent them out again. And changed the picture to a different (but similar) one. This threw most of them because now they wanted to talk about the differences and they wanted to do it in English. But lots of them could say something. At the start of the next lesson I had a picture on the board. They all walked in shielding their eyes, avoiding looking at it and sat down in stony silence.

I would also like to tell you about two students in another class who each had very different approaches. Both went on to study a language at A Level. One is now a doctor and the other trained as a Primary Teacher. In Year 7 I was their form tutor but I didn't teach them Spanish. 

One of them would regularly come up to me and talk to me in Spanish. Sometimes spending the whole of break chatting to me. They didn't think of things to say and then try to say them in Spanish. They looked around for things they could say in Spanish and used it as a stream of consciousness we could share in. "Six pupils. Football. Friday today. It's sunny. I like it when it is sunny." Talking for the sake of saying things you can say. A desire to communicate that saw them all the way through to A Level and beyond. Oh. And they also played Resident Evil on their games console swapped to Spanish. Which famously meant they knew the word for "hive" when eventually it came up in an A Level lesson.

The other pupil in the same class would come and ask me for help with verb forms. Or ask me to check the accuracy of some work he was going to hand in. Never spoke a word of Spanish to me. But always asking me questions. Also went on to a top grade at A Level.

So I'm not a hardline believer either way. There's always a way to get the best of both worlds. And the pupils' commitment to it in both cases was key.

So. Some questions to work through with the department:

Do we believe using the Target language for classroom communication is... vital? ... a good thing? ... alienating?

How do we move from fixed routines to more flexible use? Does it keep pace with pupils' progress in the language?

Is it obligatory? Is it so full of fun and joy and purpose that everyone will want to join in? Is it something we can incentivise?

The Ofsted Research Review is concerned with pupils' attitudes to language-learning. So anything which is an alienating obstacle should be removed. They also think that language-learning is about words and grammar and that communication comes later. Personally I am much more an advocate for communication than they seem to be. But I am normally talking about learning to communicate by extending and developing speaking and writing with increasing spontaneity in the lesson activities rather than for classroom communication.

But in their report, Ofsted do still hang on to the idea that there should be use of the Target Language for classroom communication when appropriate. And they want to see this planned so that it keeps pace with progression.

I am not in favour of doing things just because of Ofsted or because we are somehow supposed to. I will continue to advocate for developing pupils' communication as a major part of the lesson activities. I am not sure forced formulaic routine requests are real communication, and if it's alienating or anxiety-inducing then I am not a fan.

I think we will start with routines for teachers and for pupils. And we can work on how the language in the topics of the curriclum je peux voir mes amis, je dois faire mes devoirs can be translated into the language used in the classroom: Est-ce que je peux vous montrer une photo de mon chien... Est-ce que je dois écrire la date...

And we can bring back the Target Language Connect 4. It's available here on the Association for Language Learning Speaking Wiki. It is a laminated sheet of coloured circles. When the teacher hears a pupil using the Target Language, they put their name on a circle. (Different coloured circles can be for using the language for different purposes.) When a line is completed, all the pupils on that line get a merit. I last used it when the pupils currently in Year 10 were in Year 7. They used to run to lessons to be the first ones to ask me something in French.

So... We will think about: Continue to develop speaking in the lesson activities and topics. Target language for routines in lessons. Look for ways to integrate the language we learn into more flexible use for classroom communication. Expect and incentivise its use as something rewarding and rewarded.

Being Ben - A Keep Talking Activity

 I have mentioned in other posts (Assessing Speaking) the activity called, "Being Ben". I squeezed in a quick explanation, but I think its importance in how I develop spontaneous speaking means it deserves a post of its own.

Ben was in Year 8 or Year 9 when he invented it. Going by his LinkedIn profile (he is now a business analyst and cricketer) this must have been in about 2002. He said to me, "Sir, I can't think up what to say and say it in Spanish. If you tell me what to say, I can say it."

So that's what we did. We worked in pairs. One partner said short chunks in English. The other had to say it in Spanish. It had to be an answer that extended and developed, not separate isolated sentences. The rule was that if the pupil "Being Ben" couldn't say it, it wasn't their fault, it was their partner's fault for trying to make them say something they couldn't.

I mean answers that happen in short chunks but which take the idea on:

Me gusta el deporte... sobre todo si puedo jugar en un equipo... por ejemplo juego al criquet para Fakenham... pero no me gusta la educación física en el instituto... porque tengo que jugar al rugby... y odio el rugby... Prefiero el criquet. Jugaba al criquet el fin de semana pasado. No ganamos pero me encanta jugar.

You will notice that each chunk tends to start with a conjunction - pupils get very good at this from the conjunctions dice game.

So firstly, it was useful for getting pupils to successfully practise saying lots of Spanish. Ben was right. If you remove the cognitive load of having to think up what to say, then you can be much more successful in speaking Spanish. In fact it turned out that doing the Spanish was the easy part of the equation.

So secondly, it turned out to be a way of practising much harder skills of pitching the content. Thinking up what to say, and then what to say next. Making it coherent and convincing. Pitching it so that you are using Spanish you do know. Pitching it so that you hit the required level of sophistication.

The activity works well at all stages of learning. You can do it with a Keep Talking sheet in front of you. If you do the activity with a series of different partners, then it works very well. Because each partner will be challenging you to say something different. And you get to hone your version of what you ask your partners to say. As you work with more partners, you can be less and less dependent on the sheet. The early 2000s was just when Speed Dating was hitting the UK, so we called this Speed Spanish.

As learners make progress, it is also important to use the activity without the sheet. This is where the job of pitching the answer really comes in. And it has an important role in pupils' awareness of their own repertoire - how all their language fits together and how the language works.

I also use it at A Level, rebranded as Simultaneous Translation. When your sixth formers seem unable to speak Spanish or start making basic errors, it may be that the cognitive load of thinking what to say as well as how to say it, is too much at this point. And both sides of the equation need practising separately. And in fact it turns out that thinking up what to say is the difficult part. So thanks, Ben, for making this clear all those years ago. Your invention has helped me and many pupils. You should add it to your CV!

Having a Game Plan for GCSE Speaking

 This might be a good time for this, or actually we might all have just realised how boring football is. Anyway, here is what started as a simple metaphor with one Year 11 group - the idea of going  into the exam with a game plan - and turned into a complex strategic masterplan!

Languages Today Magazine

Full details are in this article I wrote for the Association for Language Learning's Languages Today Magazine. Or in this webinar for Linguascope.

Before we start, some basics on the modern game! You will have seen teams "playing out from the back". Instead of kicking the ball up the pitch, the goalkeeper passes the ball to one of the defenders. The defenders are confident on the ball. They protect the ball, often standing facing away from the goal they are attacking, to shield the ball from any attackers. They pass it around with no urgency, and could keep the ball all day.

In GCSE languages, this phase is the opinions and reasons phase. Pupils have to be able to confidently keep talking, accurately and quickly. They use verb + infinitive and conjunctions to keep moving the ball along with no pressure. Things like:

J'aime aller en ville parce que je peux aller au cinéma avec mes amis parce que j'adore voir un film, mais je n'aime pas faire les magasins surtout si  je dois y aller avec mes parents parce que je préfère aller avec mes amis...

We can incorporate the "one-two" with if sentences - always in pairs: si je vais avec mes parents... mais si je vais avec mes amis... or s'il pleut... s'il fait beau... If you don't know what a one-two is, we're in trouble because the offside rule is coming next.

We could use opinions and verbs + opinions all day long. But at some point we have to move into attack. This is going to be where we show off some of our fancy language, take some risks, and string together a narration in the past.

First we have to be "onside" as we move into the attacking half. And we need to change our body position to receive the ball. Instead of facing back towards our own goal to protect the ball with our body, we should stand sideways on, ready to turn and run forward.

For us, "being onside" means before we launch into I went or I played, we have to specify a time frame. So Le week-end dernier or pendant les vacances, for example. And changing our body position means shifting tense. We start with the imperfect to set the scene: j'allais aller en ville or je jouais au foot or j'étais dans ma chambre...

Then we use the rest of our repertoire. We can do an attacking version of the one-two using direct speech: mon ami a dit... j'ai dit... This sets up a clash of wills, with different people wanting to do different things. You then say what you decided to do: j'ai décidé d'aller nager avec mon ami. And if you set it up well, you can finish with what you would have preferred to have done: j'aurais préféré...

Here's a couple of examples:

As well as being a strategy for developing an answer in speaking or in writing, it also helps with attitudes to learning. Pupils understand the idea of training, practising something over and over until you can do it fluently. It's also interesting for them to think about their attitude to difficulty. At football training, they don't want to spend ages on the all-important basics of passing and receiving the ball. They want to practise Maradona turns and Rabonas. So in languages, when things are difficult, they are the things to work on until you are good at them and people are impressed!

Of course, not everyone is interested in football. So you'll have to develop your own extended metaphors!

Teaching Reading for Pleasure in the 1990s

 Today I was looking for my old OHP transparencies in a box of teaching resources from the 1990s at the back of a cupboard. I didn't find them. But I did find Ann Swarbrick's 1998 CILT Pathfinder on More Reading for Pleasure in a Foreign Language. In it, Ann mentions some resources I made for reading sets of cards that came with French magazines. And in same box, as well as the book, I found the cards, the resources, and some examples of pupils' work. The pupils now will be in their late 30s.

We need to think back to the 1990s. For resources we were still dependent on textbooks, sets of graded readers, or resources brought back from holidays in France. We didn't have the internet as a resource, and photocopying was black and white only and limited.

Reading for Pleasure or Reading for Information was encouraged. With schools investing in things like Bibliobus for pupils to work their way through graded readers. I was not sure that the time was always well spent, beyond the value of an encounter with a book in a foreign language as an interesting artefact. I think that many of the pupils were not reading at all.

With one authentic text, it is possible to create a resource that guides pupils through, helping them read and extract information and then starting to unlock sentence structure and learn new words. I've written here about how I still do this today with online newspaper articles. With a set of reading books, all different, there were no resources to guide the pupils through.

What I wanted to do was to take a set of cards that came with a magazine, and make a resource that was specific to that set of cards, but generic in that the resource helped you read any of the cards in the set. A step away from dependence on specific guidance for the text you were reading, towards strategies that could be deployed for any of the cards in the set. Trying to develop reading strategies that pupils could use more and more independently.

Here is the generic reading guide to go with a set of football cards from a French sports magazine. It gave pupils a series of tasks to go through with whichever card they picked. And which they could then use to work through a series of cards on different players. The more cards they tackled, the more independent they could be of the resource, and the more confident that they could pick up a card and find information for themselves. And along the way meet and deal with unknown language.

One of the ideas was that existing cultural knowledge was important for being able to engage with the text. So as well as football, I had cards on cooking, music, engineering projects and a guide to attractions in the East of England.

You can click on the resource to see it properly or zoom in if you are on a phone or tablet.

Here are some of the others, with examples of the notes pupils took as they read some of the cards.

The fashion at the moment is not to believe in Reading Skills. Ofsted have said in their recent research review on languages that reading is done by decoding word by word based on known words and grammar.

I am certainly not in favour of pupils pretending to read, or not being able to access what something means. But it is possible to teach and practise the skills of reading where the interplay between understanding meaning and understanding the words is a more complex process of positive feedback between the two. In the work I am now doing with a class novel in French for Year 8, we are trying to operate in that zone where we return to a passage we have worked on previously, so pupils remember enough to make it comprehensible, but still have to process the reading to access the meaning. The unconscious processes of language acquisition come from interaction with language and with meaning as well as through deliberate memorisation of words and concepts. 

Talking about Table Manners in France

 Looking forward to teaching my Year 7 some table manners this week. We are going to watch this video by Geraldine from Comme une Française about what you can and can't do at the table, especially concerning bread. Her videos are usually in English and teach words and cultural concepts. You do have to check before showing them as she sometimes uses naughty words. Not in anger, just to explain. For example if you want to explain la bise then she has a video, but she starts by explaining the difference between un baiser and the verb baiser. So maybe not.

To go with the very interesting video about whether bread can be put down upside down, whether to tear or cut, or wipe your plate or nibble the end... (I know, all those things we had to work out for ourselves because there was no YouTube)... I have made a speaking activity.

It's in the format of one of my Keep Talking sheets, with more freedom to make your own sentences than a "sentence builder". And designed so you can go round and round to make more of a paragraph.

So you can ask pupils to come up with things like:

In France you can use your bread to wipe up the sauce on your plate but you shouldn’t put the bread on the table upside down. In England it is not polite to wipe your plate but you can dunk a biscuit in your tea.

I will start by making up my own paragraph in French and underlining it on the sheet projected on the board as I say it. Pupils will listen and follow and underline too as they hear me say it. It will quite possibly be exactly the model paragraph I gave above. Then I will put the English version of what I said on the board. And the pupils will put it back into French speaking in pairs and then in writing in their books. They will easily be able to pick out what they need because we've underlined it. This way I can help them find the meaning of the few items on the sheet they are going to need help with - tremper, poser, nappe, doigts for example. If you use it, you could always put the English on the sheet for them in a different colour.

Then pupils can write their own short pieces about etiquette in England and France. Then we can do delayed reading. Pupils work in pairs. The one doing the reading is allowed to look at what they have written. But they must look up and make eye contact with their partner when they speak. They can read, remember and say short chunks, or challenge themselves to say longer chunks. But if they look at the page while they are speaking, they have to go back to the beginning.

Then we will work on the Being Ben activity, which I have written about before in a post about A Level Speaking. (In this post I called it Simultaneous Translation to assuage fears of anyone scared of use of English in an A Level lesson.) Pupils work with a partner using the sheet. One is responsible for thinking up what to say. And making it sensible, coherent and developed. They feed the ideas to their partner in English, and the partner has to say it in French. It turns out doing the French is the easy part. Thinking up sensible things to say is the thing you need to work on. And as they take turns at this, they can start using the sheet less and less.

Gosh. This post has turned out to be more about sharing speaking activities than the actual Keep Talking sheet! Anyway, it's available here. Enjoy! (Or bon appétit!)

Reading a class novel in Year 8 French

 I have mentioned in previous posts (here and here) that I was going to start reading La Rivière à l'Envers as a class novel with my Year 8 class. The books arrived last week, and we've done three lessons on it now, so time to tell you how it's going so far.

First, some notes on why I chose the book. It's often read in the first year of secondary school in France. It's a typical adventure of setting out on a quest, a series of encounters, and a return home. It is imaginative, funny, gentle. It takes place in an imaginary world, but it is a French imaginary world. There are cold old busy market towns, small villages, abandoned towns on the edge of a desert, a coastal region of crepe eaters, a tropical island, and a far off country across the sea.

But beyond this, there are some specific features I want to make use of. There are in fact four books! In novel form there is Tome 1: Tomek and Tome 2: Hannah. Book 2 is not a sequel. Both books tell the same story, one from Tomek's point of view, one from Hannah's perspective. As well as providing strong male and female protagonists, this means I could read an episode from Tomek with the class, and then use the same part of the story from Hannah's perspective for the pupils to work on more independently. 

The third book is the audio book, read by the author Jean-Claude Mourlevat.

And the fourth book? The fourth book is my secret weapon. It is a B.D. (comic book) version of the story. This means I can use the pictures to give pupils an idea of what they are about to read. And I can also use it as an abridged version if I want to move more quickly through the story.

Why am I doing it? For a start, it seems like a great thing to do. I know when I was learning, I was probably the only person in my class who had French books at home. And my own children have also had that opportunity. Then there's the class I am starting with. They have worked before on translating poems and a bizarre mystery quest. They enjoy a challenge and they like to be creative. Working on poems showed a side of them that we don't always see in French lessons - including a love of language and self-expression. This included pupils who I know are reluctant readers.

But as well as instinctively knowing it's an exciting thing to do, I suppose I should evaluate it in terms of language learning. Vocabulary: exciting words to learn, which pupils don't have to learn but will stick in their heads because they love the word. High frequency vocabulary: exposure to texts that aren't made up of topic words, but contain the language that makes language work. Phonics: listening to me or the author reading the book while they follow the text. Confidence in reading: talking them through from what they expect it to say... to words they recognise... to understanding whole sentences. Comprehensible input: processing large amounts of French that we have worked on previously, which they can read and re-read, letting their brain's innate ability to deal with language take over.

I am filming my input for each lesson on a visualiser. This way other teachers in the department can use my lessons with their classes too. I am not going to be making these public because of copyright reasons, but here is one example of what I am doing. Click here if the embedded video doesn't load.

It's the second lesson, so we start by reading through what we worked on last time. In this case, the blurb on the back of the book. Then we look at the prologue, which is a beautiful invitation to the novel. You can see, I read it through. Then ask the class to talk about what they understood. I then show them how it's structured: Things that weren't invented yet, good things they did have, bad things they did have. We read it again and find which things go in which category. Then we read it and enjoy following and understanding the French.

I will use the video at the start of the lesson before getting on with something else. Then I come back to it at the end and re-read the same passage. And re-read it (as shown in the video with the blurb) at the start of the next lesson. I am trying to operate in the zone where there is a fine balance between pupils remembering what the passage says, so they can process the language. And being able to process the language, in order to read what the passage says.

I am deliberately avoiding making lots of comprehension based resources or vocabulary resources. We are concentrating on reading it as a story.

After the video, teachers can choose to get pupils to write down words, or translate sections, or read aloud. And at the start of the next lesson, we will read through the same section again, so pupils can enjoy reading and understanding without worrying about knowing every single word. And the lesson after that, we can listen to the author reading it rather than me, using the audiobook.

I am not going to be able to tackle the whole book in the last few weeks of term, so I am going to use the B.D. picture version of the book to skip some sections. But I will continue next year so whoever teaches the class will be able to use the videos to carry on reading the story. I'm also getting copies of all three books for the school library because there are some pupils who will take them out and enjoy trying to read them independently.

So far it's going well. I am keeping an eye on how much pupils retain from lesson to lesson. I don't mean being able to remember the meaning of every word. I mean remembering what the meaning of the sentence or passage was, enough to be able to process the text when we read it again. It's a fine balance between remembering and processing which is going to be varyingly successful depending on circumstances! I will keep you posted - update here.

Footnote with reference to the title of this Blog The Nice Man Who Teaches Languages. Yesterday when I was talking to the class about what The Nice Man in the Video had said, one of them asked, "Sir, is it you or not?" After a year of teaching them and all those lockdown videos! And another one replied, "Obviously not. Imagine calling yourself The Nice Man" and tutted loudly.

Further and rather mind-blowing footnote: I have just found out that I met the author 30 years ago. I am going to go and lie down in a dark room for a while. 

Assessing Speaking at KS3

 Without having one-to-one speaking tests, how can we assess pupils' speaking at KS3, either for a grade or for formative marking? Here is what I do and how it works.

On The ALL London Branch webpage, you can find this Speaking Self Assessment sheet. This one is for Year 7 Spanish talking about the weather and opinions/plans for activities that depend on the weather.

So things like:

Me gusta jugar al tenis con mis amigos en el parque, sobre todo si hace sol. Pero no me gusta si llueve. Si llueve tengo que hacer los deberes. Entonces el fin de semana quiero ir al parque a jugar al tenis si hace sol.

Before we get onto assessment, you have to get the pupils talking in the first place. I've written about this in other posts for example here and here. And now here on the Being Ben activity. You will see ideas such as practising keeping talking using dice for conjunctions. Or one partner feeding ideas of what to say to the other partner, for them to say in Spanish. You can practise this with a series of partners in a speed Spanish activity. And encourage the pupils to use their support materials less and less as they move on from one partner to another.

This is from the early 2000s. I was using what are now called Sentence Builders - on the same ALL London Branch site you can see examples, here called "Talk Challenge" sheets. But actually, this sheet makes reference to pupils' "Emergency Sheet" or in this picture, a "Starter Kit". This was a sheet we used that was independent of topics. It had key transferable language for giving opinions, reasons, and examples in past and future. It was a step away from sentence builders, requiring pupils to build their own sentences. Pupils could use it for the assessment, but if they do refer to it, they have to declare it on the sheet.

So throughout the lesson, the teacher is there watching as pupils work with different partners, aware of anyone not participating or struggling. And aware of those who challenge themselves to speak spontaneously and without support. At the end, the pupils return to their original partner, ready to do the assessment. Now they can choose if they just want to speak spontaneously, or if they want to have the sheet for support, or if they want a partner to tell them what to say. All this information will be declared on the Self Assessment sheet.

The first half of the Self Assessment sheet is a ticklist of the sort of Spanish expected. This isn't the most important in terms of the information needed for giving a grade. It is there for the pupil to make sure they are using all the "ingredients" at their disposal. 

The most important part of the sheet is the second half, "Using Spanish", where the pupil declares how much they needed to use the support, how fluently they could think up what to say, and how much they interacted with their partner's follow up questions.

So all pairs of pupils are speaking at the same time. You don't do individual speaking exams. You are there listening and watching throughout the lesson. All pupils are using very similar Spanish, but what you are assessing is how fluently and independently they do it. This information is given by the pupils on the Self Assessment Sheet. They don't just tick, they annotate and comment. So it is excellent formative assessment too. And the information you get is very detailed. When we used to have to give National Curriculum Levels, it was very useful for being able to justify a level, with pupils often being more self-critical than you might think.

I've been doing it for 20 years now, and it works well and would work well with the current fashions for Sentence Builders and spontaneous speaking.

Conundrum: Reading and Listening Assessments

 I need to think through our KS3 Reading and Listening assessments in the light of the Ofsted Research Review.

At the moment we have regular vocabulary tests, assessed written work and speaking. And Listening and Reading tests. We use tests based on past papers from the FCSE. Many years ago we used to enter pupils for the FCSE, and when National Curriculum Levels disappeared, we carried on using some of the tests to ensure continuity and comparability.

The things from the Ofsted Review that I am thinking about are: 

Pupils should be tested on what they have learned and how well they know it.

Tests are an important part of showing pupils their progress and making them feel successful.

Our KS3 tests "content" and "skills" separately. The language they know, and what they can do with it. We have vocabulary tests that test how well pupils are learning their words and structures. And these also model how testing is an important part of the process of learning. Then we have end of unit Reading and Listening tests. These have the language pupils have been learning in context. They also have some unknown words and structures. We encourage pupils to use Reading strategies, Listening strategies and Exam strategies to deal with this.

This is the first decision we are going to have to make. Is it worthwhile and reasonable to have this type of test? An immediate answer would be that pupils do cope, pupils find the right answer, pupils use skills and strategies. So it seems right to expect them to do it.

This throws up a series of further questions. We have to examine whether these are the things we want to be testing. Are we simply separating out the pupils with strong underlying literacy skills and labelling them as "doing well in languages"? And vice versa. Not doing well.

Or are these literacy skills at the heart of what it means to make progress in a language? Next question: are we developing literacy by having this sort of test? Do our lessons show that we know how to teach pupils how to read texts with unfamiliar words? Do we do this through explicit strategies, or through lots of practice? If we were to stop doing this kind of testing, would we be stepping away from supporting pupils' literacy?

Some of the skills may be exam skills rather than literacy skills. Using the question to lead you to the answer. Eliminating the wrong answers to arrive at the correct option even though you didn't "know" it. The Ofsted Review specifically rejects the validity of this. I am not so sure.

Then the question of "what pupils have been taught." Is this so clearly defined? Do we want to martial our content so that all pupils are expected to know the same words thoroughly? But nothing outside the defined list? Or is learning a language part of something much bigger? All the words you have ever met including in songs or stories or articles, or because you looked it up in a dictionary or because you play video games in French...

Does that same argument apply to the "skills"? The willingness to take risks and speculate on meaning; the confidence to build a hypothesis on what you think something says; the clarity of vision to be able to change your hypothesis when it is not confirmed by the rest of the context? Are these things that can be developed by lots of exposure to texts? 

From a social justice point of view, is it fairer to make sure everyone achieves the same, even if that means restricting others? Or not?

This leads on to the second element I picked up from the Ofsted Review. Tests should be part of what makes pupils feel successful and confident in their progress. Our current tests do discriminate between pupils who can cope with longer texts, unfamiliar language, new content, and those who can't. Is the whole idea of testing in this way inappropriate? Should we simply be using tests to make sure pupils have learned what we taught them. And if they haven't learned it, working harder on making sure they do. Should we design tests where all pupils achieve full marks, by simply testing them on things we know they have learned?

By this stage of writing a post, I would expect to be coming to some answers. It's not happening yet. What would you advise?

Ok. So a day later and I've had time to think about it and some useful conversations on twitter:

I am not going to resolve the principles, but I am going to be more aware of them. So I can review our assessments on a case by case pragmatic basis and address the balance.

I think it has become clearer in my mind where the balance has to be struck:

tests need to discriminate between pupils to give us a range of marks

versus

tests need to help teachers and pupils have a feeling of success and progress

tests should test what we have been learning and not primarily be a test of literacy skills

versus

literacy is central to learning a language and should be developed and assessed 

what pupils see in Reading and Listening rehearses the structures we use in Speaking and Writing

versus

pupils also see texts and learn to recognise high frequency words that may not yet be part of their core repertoire for Speaking and Writing

These questions won't go away and don't need to be resolved. They need pragmatic and careful balancing. That's our job.

The Human Side of Severe Grading

 I promised in the post on a Lesson from 2002, to tell you about what happened when those pupils got to GCSE in 2005. They got tangled up in a grading anomaly which still affects us today.

Watching the video, I still remember the names of many of the pupils. Lots of them were in my form, and some of them really loved Spanish. One used to spend his summers at his dad's in Spain. Another took her Spanish exercise book on holiday so she could speak Spanish, but it got stolen in a distraction robbery in an airport carpark. 

Their GCSE group was what we used to call mixed "ability". At the time, the number of Spanish entries was much lower and it tended to be a slightly more "elite" national cohort of pupils who had done well in French and chosen to take Spanish as a second foreign language. 

It may have been as a result of the profile of the cohort, or it may have been because there was no attempt to ensure equality of standards across subjects, but standards were higher for Spanish.

The year this class took GCSE, it happened that the Head of Department was teaching French instead of Spanish. And the Head of French had a Spanish class. They both were surprised at the mis-match. The Head of Spanish found that she could enter for Higher Tier many more pupils for French than she was used to in Spanish. And the Head of French was similarly surprised that in Spanish pupils couldn't hit the thresholds for Higher Tier in Listening and Reading.

As they were discussing this, it turned out that you needed 22 for a grade C in French. And 39 for a grade C in Spanish. Of course, this could be to do with the difficulty of the paper. So I tried an experiment. I got my Spanish group to sit the French past paper (OCR Reading 2004). Of the pupils who had got a D on the Spanish mock, 50% managed to get a C in the French paper. And the others were much closer to a C than they were in Spanish. None of these pupils were doing GCSE French, and some had never done French at all.

As you can imagine I wrote to the board. Repeatedly. They eventually replied. Their letter said that the difference in grade boundaries was to "rectify poor performance of parts of the exam." This made no sense to me. It was distorting the results, not rectifying them. And since the discrepancy between the languages was a regular feature, it suggests the exams were regularly performing poorly.

The date is important. The years 2004-2005 were when GCSE in a language stopped being compulsory. And the exam boards did different things to decide how many of each grade should be given, as the profile of the cohort changed. This included distortions such as different grade boundaries for the Coursework in different languages, even though the marking criteria were identical. The same mark on a piece of writing got a different grade in different languages.

Some exam boards looked at the percentage of pupils at each grade. Some looked at overall numbers of grades. And at some point this became set in stone as the "correct" number of pupils getting each grade. With comparable outcomes, the number of pupils getting each grade is now set in advance. There are tweaks each year based on how the cohort did in maths and English in Year 6. But basically, the grades awarded hark back to the chaos that my pupils were mixed up in. The anomaly has become perpetuated, fossilised, set in stone.

To the extent that when we got the new GCSE a couple of years ago, the number of pupils getting each grade was transferred over from the old GCSE. So even before any teaching, before any exams, the numbers of pupils getting each grade was already set at a lower number than other subjects.

My anecdotes and experience match what FFT explain here about the historical situation. And here about the new GCSE. But when you see the video of their shiny little faces enjoying their Spanish in Year 8, unaware of what was to come...

If we get a new GCSE, whether it's an oddball phonicsvocabularygrammar one, or a cultureandcommunication one, whoever puts their heart and soul into it, is going to be pretty annoyed if before it's even been taught, it is set in stone that pupils will do worse than in other subjects.

Year 9's Favourite Spanish Song for Phonics

 This song is the third lesson I do with Year 9 Spanish beginners. It's the lesson where they realise they can pronounce Spanish correctly and fluently, with rhythm, style and flair. So much so that even without knowing the words, they can recognise the song through the flow and rhythm of how they read it aloud.

I've written here about how in the first couple of lessons we use greetings and a random character called Ángela (or José) to cover all the main features of the sound-spelling link. With numbers we look at what happens when we have 2 vowels together (ua, ie, ei, ue). Then we are ready to tackle the song...

In the whole lesson, I cannot read any of the song. If I did, I would be unable to avoid saying it in rhythm or even singing, and giving away the song. Pupils work on reading it aloud. After a while, they start to get that annoying tingling feeling that they know what it is. Then eventually someone always gets it.

Here is the start. First we highlight the key sounds - ch, qu and j. And in the next chunk, I think there is a ll and a ci.

No sé qué está pasando
Que todo está al revés
Que tú ya no me besas
Como ayer
Que anoche en la playa
No me dejaste amarte

Algo entre nosotros no va bien

A pupil reads it aloud to the class, and we check vowels are correct and the ay and ar sounds. And we introduce the idea of sinalefa - there is only one vowel sound where qué meets está: questá. And the same in the next line for está al. This is a key feature of fluent Spanish and in this lesson it is the key to getting the rhythm of the song. Then they practise with a partner reading aloud with flair. And they all make random guesses. Mostly, "Is it despacito?" I tell them that when they do get it, they will KNOW. And they should get my attention but not shout it out.

Here is the next section:

No busques más disculpas
No siento tus caricias
Ya no eres la misma
Que yo amé
Te veo tan distante
Te siento tan distinta
Pues hay dentro de ti otra mujer

And now they are getting very good, and the dangerous recognisable section is coming. It's important I don't read any of this, as I am incapable of doing it without tapping my foot and singing. Read it aloud in your best Spanish, otherwise it doesn't work!

No culpes a la noche
No culpes a la playa
No culpes a la lluvia
Será que no me amas

And if they still don't get it, then there's this bit:

Ya no sé, ya no sé, ya no sé qué va a pasar

Ya no sé, ya no sé, ya no sé qué voy a hacer

Got it yet? You have to read it aloud with rhythm, style and flair.

At this stage someone always gets it. And NOW I can read it aloud for them. And play the song. It is, of course, Será que no me amas by Luís Miguel. Which they all know.

Now the problem is to stop them singing in English! Do the normal play the song, turn the volume down so they can keep singing thing. And see if they know what any of the words mean. Then come back to the song again after a couple of months to reinforce the pronunciation and so they can see how much more they understand of the words.

Did you get the song? Just by reading it aloud?

The Sheer Joy of Translation

 This year we have been adding more Culture into our scheme of work, matching songs and poems to some of the units we do. This a poem we do in Year 8 for the topic of School. It is Prevert's well-known poem "Le Cancre."

We work on it over a series of lessons, ending up with them working on their own translation of the poem into English. The resources are available free on my TES "shop". Just check all the YouTube video links are up to date before you use it.

First we watch all the different YouTube videos of this popular poem. I do this over several lessons, in between other activities. I don't do the "rate the video" activity on the worksheet. We just talk about any words they heard, and any clues in the video. By watching several videos, we start to get an idea of what is actually in the poem, rather than the specific interpretation of any one video.

So when we eventually see the text of the poem, the pupils have an idea of all the things it probably says, and they can say what they think each line is about. We do a little bit of work on hunting for words I ask them to find. And then I give them a very literal translation of the poem, so they can find the meaning of any words that are still frustrating them.

Then the real work starts.

We look at the poem for structure, contrasts, rhythm, figurative language, rhyme. And then they write their own versions in English. My Year 8 class really enjoyed this approach and I saw a side of them (and some individuals in particular) that I hadn't seen before in French lessons.

Here are just two translations. But reading them both and seeing the different creative decisions, gives you a sense of the passion and excitement and sheer joy they put into this task:

Pimp My French and Ready Steady French

 Two great activities named after TV shows. And both possibly in search of new names. Pimp my French because Pimp My Ride isn't well known anymore. And is Ready Steady Cook still around? I heard it was making a comeback but news of it hasn't reached this part of the country yet...

Pimp my French did get a mention in an earlier post about changing (a small group of) boys' attitudes to French. In lockdown, it was also an excellent activity for side-stepping Google Translate, because it requires pupils to take a part a text and re-build it using their tool kit of French.

Here you can see an example. The text at the top is repetitive. The sentences are short. It is disorganised. It lacks cultural detail. The customer has brought it in for you to overhaul. Just as in the TV show doing up cars, they do want their original piece of French back. But with a serious upgrade.

Underneath you can see the tool kit of French I want pupils to use. This is not just a good activity to help pupils work on what makes a good piece of French. It is also a powerful metaphor about how to think about your approach to French. Click here for a previous post on metaphors and metacognition.

I give the pupils a "budget" of a certain number of words. I tell them they mustn't go over budget, but the customer will feel short-changed if they are under. Unfortunately in the example below, I think I set the budget too high. They started with 40 words and had to produce 96. So instead of just swapping some parts (j'adore, je peux, to replace the over-use of j'aime), they had to contribute more of their own ideas.

And this is the sort of thing my Year 8 produced:

I like the way they brought in "regarder la lune" - lune is one of our phonics keywords back in Year 7.

Bringing in your own words (as you will have guessed if you know the show) is a key part of Ready Steady French. Pupils have all the normal store cupboard words (very similar to the toolkit above for Pimp My French). And then they have 5 minutes with a dictionary to choose 6 random extra words. I will specify how many verbs, nouns there need to be. Sometimes I get them to then "cook" using their own words. Or sometimes they give the bag of French ingredients to another pupil to use. And they have to make some tasty French out of what they have been given.

I haven't done it since the days of Ainsley Harriott, so I don't know if pupils are familiar with the format. I will give it a try and let you know!

Speaking, Reading, Culture - Ordering Real Spanish Food

 This is the situation I always find myself in when I go to a restaurant in Spain. People say, "You speak Spanish, tell us what's on the menu." And I haven't a clue. Firstly, I learned Spanish in Mexico. And things just don't have the same names. And then there's Spanish regional dishes. And just the fact that dishes have fancy names. That don't always give clues to what's in them. But, secret weapon, I do have the ability to ask what is in dishes and what sort of dish it is. To take an interest and start a conversation about the food.

And that's where I start when we do food with my Year 9 Spanish beginners. In Amigos 2, there is a
page with descriptions of dishes for pupils to read and work out what dish is being described. For example:

Es una especialidad del Japón. Se hace con pescado crudo, arroz y algas. Se sirve frío.

Of course, once they guess it is sushi, then they expect to find the words "raw" and "seaweed" in there, and quickly learn some new words.

Then imagine we are working in an English restaurant and a Spanish family come in. They are confused by Toad in the Hole, Ploughman's Lunch, Spotted Dick and Shepherd's Pie. But we save the day, sell loads of Toads in the Holes and earn a huge tip, by explaining:

Es una especialidad de Inglaterra. Se hace con harina, huevo y leche. Y una salchicha. Se sirve caliente y con gravy. Gravy es...

Next we work on Spanish dishes. Sites like this one have descriptions of the most famous Spanish
dishes. Here's the teaser for Cocido Madrileño. A great example of something on the menu I wouldn't be able to describe. Pupils need to be able to read it and pick out the answers to these questions:

¿Es una especialidad de la región? Is it a regional speciality?

¿Qué tipo de plato es? What sort of dish is it? (Starter, soup, fish, rice, meat, pudding etc.)

¿Cuáles son los ingredientes principales? What are the main ingredients?

¿Cómo se sirve? How is it served?

The answers to the first three questions can often be found in the teaser on the main page. In this case it is from Madrid, it is a soup, it has beans, chickpeas and meat. Then clicking on the dish takes you to a page with more details, including a Presentación section which answers the question about how it is served.

I have done this by printing off the pages for each of the dishes. The pupils fill in a grid with the information on one dish then swap pages with another table until they have done them all. Or I have done it on the projector. I would like to do it as live research on computers, but the website is too easily set to English. At the end, the pupils have read and found the information on a range of dishes, answering the key questions.

The final stage is to integrate this with a restaurant role play. So we take the usual, "Table for two what would you like have you got the menu here you go can I have the bill please" conversation. And we insert questions like, ¿Qué tipo de plato es cocido madrileño? Es una sopa. And all the other questions form part of the conversation... What's in it? It's made with beans, chickpeas and meat. Oh I like that...

So we have learned to describe dishes to a visiting Spanish family. And learned to enquire about Spanish dishes when we go to Spain. So my pupils won't have the normal two options open to Brits on holiday: Eat familiar things they recognise all week. Or try random things off the menu without really knowing what to expect! And if they start this kind of conversation, perhaps they will bring the chef out to meet the English people who speak Spanish and want to know more about Spanish food, and give them free samples and let them try everything. It's part of what makes the experience of going to Spain different if you can speak the language!

Enjoying Reading Fiction in French

 I have written several posts on Listening, including listening for entertainment, but relatively few posts on Reading. I have written here about non fiction authentic texts, but today's post is going to be about reading fiction. For me, learning French in the olden days, reading was the key to having access to the language. My exposure to French was through taking Dumas novels out of the school library and reading them for pleasure.

In this post, I am going to focus on Reading in the KS3 classroom, but I want to make one point about my reading when I was a pupil, so indulge me for a minute. Apart from the novels in the school library, I went on to buy many books in French second hand. All of them would have penciled in translations of words the owner had looked up in the dictionary. This never went beyond the first two pages. After that, I don't think they had read any further. Sometimes these were books with uncut pages, and they remained uncut until I had to cut them. I always tell my students not to look up every word on the first page. When I read Le Comte de Monte Cristo, it took me 20 or 30 pages to work out what was going on. And when I did work it out, I didn't have to go back to page 1 and re-read. It all just fell into place. I recently doubted how much I understood when I was reading in French aged 16, so I re-read Les Trois Mousquetaires and reading it again, I had exactly the same pictures in my head as I remember from the first time.

I am not going to be writing about sending your pupils home with classic novels to struggle throught without a dictionary. But I am going to talk about not getting bogged down translating every word.

Neither do I want to befuddle pupils with incomprehensible texts or pretend they are reading when they are not. One way to do this is to give them a translation of the text and work with parallel texts. I have hinted at this before in ideas for cover lessons. We seem to be hard-wired to want to use texts to test pupils' comprehension. Using parallel texts takes this out of the equation. They have access to what it means. Now we can get on with enjoying reading it in French. 

Perhaps as a model, we need to think more of how we would approach working with a song. When we use songs in lessons, we put enjoyment of the music, the rhythm, the video, the physical quality of the sound of the words before testing meaning. We will look for words that pupils understand. We will look for repeated structures that unlock the meaning. We will use it as an opportunity for pupils to learn beautiful phrases that will stay with them for a lifetime. We hope they will make an emotional connection with the song, the singer, the French-speaking world. It can be the same for reading fiction.

By now you are impatient for an example. My biggest example today is a book translated from English into French. Sorry if that loses some cultural dimensions. But it's such a good example and it works so  well. It is the Tom Gates books by Liz Pichon. It does count as an authentic text. It's sold for French teenagers to read. And reading books in translation is part of the culture of the non English-speaking world. Liz Pichon also gets involved in the translation of her books, for example in translating the names of people and places, so if she does an author visit to your school, you can ask her about languages and French in particular.

But the reason I use this, is the way Liz Pichon sets out the books. She intersperses text and image. This helps with reading in the French, but even more importantly, it means the texts in French and English are exactly parallel. The layout on the page is identical and the pictures give immediate landmarks to help navigate the page.

So what do we do with the texts? I don't have class sets. If I was spending that amount of money, I would want something that was an originally French-speaking book, not a translation. I use it early on in Year 7. With photocopies of the limited number of pages we are allowed to make. On A3 with a double page of French and a double page of English, so the English half can be folded away if we just want to look at the French.

Here are some suggested activities that are ways of enjoying reading the text without being tested or getting bogged down:

Read the French while listening to your teacher reading it aloud. Enjoy the sound of the French and being able to pick out some words. Talk to your teacher about what words you recognised and what you think it is about.

Read the English and enjoy realising what some of the French was about. Now read the French again and see if it makes any more sense. Practise reading the French aloud to practise your phonics.

Read the French and hunt for some words your teacher asks you to find. These will be well-chosen to be new words but ones that are deducible from what you remember from the English translation and other words in the sentence.

Pick out words in the English that you wonder what the French would be (caramel wafer?). And find them in the French text. Enjoy learning interesting words. Pick out interesting looking words in the French, (roulez-boulez?!) and find what they mean in English. Enjoy saying them. Keep a list of great words.

Find the words in English that go with the pictures. Find the same words in the French. Work with a partner. One of you looks at the English, one looks at the French. One reads aloud in one language. The other follows the text in the other language. When you think they are about to get to a picture, shout, "Snap."

Work with a partner. You start reading the text in French, stopping in random places. Your partner is looking at the English and listening to you reading in French. When you stop they have to say what the last thing you said was in English. Or your partner reads aloud in English while you follow the French. When they stop you have to say what comes next in French. This will involve some amount of dealing with different ways of saying things in the two languages, including word order!

Use the parallel texts to focus on high frequency "little" words that can get ignored. Or even verb endings. Ask your teacher questions about differences between the French and the English.

Use the text as a model to write about you and your school, including Liz Pichon style pictures integrated into the text. Or re-write some of your normal classroom writing in this style with pictures and some words you have picked up.

And Always Always: Go back and read the text through, normal speed in French. While listening to your teacher read it aloud. Again and again.

This doesn't have to be done in one lesson! In fact it is best done over a longer period of time. And over that period of time, keep going back to pupils reading the page at normal speed. What they understand because they remember what it says and what they understand because they are reading the French will slowly merge.

I mentioned in this post on Story Books, that I am buying a class set of Tomek by Jean-Claude Mourlevat to use with Year 8. I will be using similar approaches. Most importantly alternating reading the book together and pupils re-reading it for themselves. Without ever getting stuck on translating every word.

I will keep you posted!

In fact, you can now click here to find out more about how Tomek is working out as a class novel.