What to do on Open Evening?

 Every so often on Twitter someone puts out a cry for help, "What ideas do you have for languages on Open Evening?" And fortunately there are many kind and generous teachers who are glad to share their ideas. But I think basically it comes down to this: Showcase what you do in your school.

That's not really a helpful answer, but it is the start of a discussion and bouncing ideas around. Which is the situation I am in now. Bouncing back from two disrupted years, and still with wise restrictions on hands-on activities, what does, "Showcase what you do in your school" mean?

In previous years, we have based our room around the creative outcomes our pupils produce in their language lessons. So we could show the pupils the Stamper Trails our pupils had made in French for Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse museum, and explain to parents how this pulled together all the work in Year 7 into a creative project with a tangible outcome. And we could display the artwork from the French Art Exhibition held at Dereham Windmill, with the descriptions of the pictures and artist biography written in French. And we could show the trophies for the Are You Smarter Than vocabulary competition and the Francovision Song Contest. And it made a great showcase. But this year, our pupils haven't had all those opportunities.

The Year 7 French Café from 2007

For the last two years we did run a French café where the Year 9 International Leaders showed off their French as waiters, helping the visitors order from a menu and a script. We justified this because a French café with Year 7s as waiters was on of the projects we used to run.

This year it was suggested that we continue to do something similar with pre-wrapped food items. But I think this is missing the point. We don't want to be "that school where they gave you free food." We want to be showcasing what French is like here and what the school is like. The French café, interacting with the Year 9 waiters did just that. It allowed visitors to engage with our pupils, who are by far our greatest strength. But this year it seems unwise.

So I think I am going to go with "Français: ma leçon préférée". Which is nice and ambiguous. Does it mean French is my favourite lesson? Or that this is my favourite French lesson? Because it will feature our Year 9 International Leaders talking through some of their favourite lessons with the Year 6 pupils.

I have a week to put this to the International Leaders and see what their favourite lessons really are. But I am thinking of having this top 4 on show:

Francophoniques: The key words that exemplify the French sound-spelling link. With pictures and actions. Ciseaux, Poisson, Sorcière are genuine favourites. And then maybe demonstrating how this enables them to have a go at saying various words like oiseaux. (Click here for more on how we borrowed this phonics idea from Dr Rachel Hawkes.)

Confiture: Memorising food vocabulary using dual coding and the keyword technique. Confiture/Comfy Chair, Guimauve/Game Over, Fromage/From Mars. (Click here to see how this evolves into story telling and makes the words unforgettable.)

The Art Exhibition: I know it's more than one lesson, but this is one project the International Leaders did get the chance to do before lockdown, so they will be able to talk about their own work.

And then on the whiteboard screen, some activities from Gimkit or Blooket because we can't ignore the fact that this is the year group who have taken to learning French online and there are pupils whose excitement will be contagious.

So that's the plan. Real lessons, pupils' actual work, interaction with our pupils and a love of French. Wish me luck!

"There's no time for acquisition."

 In language teaching, there is always a debate between, on the one hand, the way a language is acquired through exposure to the language, engagement with meaning and communication, and on the other hand, through explicit teaching, explanation and memorisation.

I think most of us are happy to make sure we maintain a balance of the two. Exposure to language, communication through language, spotting patterns in language, using patterns to generate new language to express ourselves, with the teacher providing input, explanation and structured practice.

There are current proposals from Ofsted, NCELP and the new GCSE panel that would seem to want to push the balance away from meaning and towards forms. With a carefully controlled syllabus where what pupils learn to say is not primarily based on what they want to be able to communicate, but instead as a medium for encountering and rehearsing specific grammatical features.

This is accompanied by an explanation that there is no time in our classroom situation for enough exposure to the language for acquisition to happen.

The reason this rings alarm bells for me is not because I am opposed to this idea. It describes very accurately many features of my approach.

We start Spanish in Year 9. And to get to GCSE by Year 11, we are short of time and I do have a very sharp focus on how explicit grammatical knowledge can accelerate the process of learning a language.

Dr Rachel Hawkes and HMI Michael Wardle have both used the example of Pets to ask what are we really teaching. In Spanish we might really be teaching the patterns of gender. In French we might be teaching the phonics of chien, cheval, chat, or oiseau, poisson and oie. Or word order. Or adjectival agreement. Or the verb to have.

I do exactly the same. When we start Spanish, we have a series of lessons which are not really about the "topic." We start with a conversation of basic greetings. This is carefully constructed, right down to the names (Ángela) of the characters in the book (OUP Amigos 2) , in order to tackle the sound-spelling link and have all the phonics of Spanish sorted. As well as upside down question marks and exclamation marks.

Then we do some work on numbers, but really we are focusing on the vowel combinations in seis, siete, nueve, diez. The point being that greetings are useful, but not as useful as being able to read any word in Spanish accurately and confidently.

Then we do a lesson ostensibly on Family. Which is really about the pattern of masculine and feminine endings. And lessons on My Town and My House to look at plurals, negatives, high frequency words and endings other than o/a.

And so on, with the next lesson on My School to look at the definite article and adjectival agreement.

And a lesson on Free Time to look at verb + infinitive and conjunctions.

Of course, we can adapt the pace and we go back and reinforce to make sure pupils are accumulating learning not discarding it. And pupils are building on years of work on these features in French. So very quickly pupils get the basic concepts and are ready to start learning Spanish in units where they will develop their ability to extend answers spontaneously. They learn to give and justify opinions, and narrate events in detail. I am extremely pleased with their progress.

But they often are not.

Because for learners, forms are not of primary importance. I might be happy that they have a grasp of concepts and can apply them in the range of language I have given them. But the focus on building up a working kit of recombinable language suits some learners more than others. Others feel that what they are learning doesn't sufficiently match what they personally want to be able to say. That our attempts, which we think give them a picture of the language and how it works, ignore the specific individual things that they would like to learn to say. They are less concerned with mastering what to them seems abstract, and more concerned with feeling secure in saying specific things which are important and personal to them.

The Pets example given above would seem to be the very worst example they could have picked. To teach cat and dog because they exemplify a grammatical pattern but refuse to include snake and mouse, is not going to have the desired effect of removing obstacles to pupils' learning. For a pupil who has a snake or a mouse, it will seriously impact their ability to learn in that lesson and their attitude to languages going forward. Pupils' primary concern is meaning. And focus on form is secondary. Would we really have it any other way? 

In my teaching, I have to keep this in constant tension. Pushing forward the things that I think will build up their repertoire, develop their understanding of how language works. And also delivering on their desire to feel that they can say the things that matter to them.

We can try to shift the focus. But by highlighting forms. Not by removing meaning.

As well as the rationale that "there is no time for acquisition", the other claim is that this approach is more equitable.

A colleague, Kate Shepheard-Walwyn, analysed our curriculum and learners' response to it as part of her MA. She looked at the idea of accelerating learning in a time constrained situation through a focus on understanding forms designed to equip pupils with the knowledge they needed to meet exam criteria. She found that the learners who responded best to this were pupils of higher prior attainment, in particular boys. This doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is an assertion that such an approach would be more equitable for pupils of lower prior attainment or who have previously not engaged with language-learning.

Hopefully you can see why I am extremely wary of any attempt to push our teaching any further in this direction. It is not because I am ideologically opposed to it. Or can't see the point of it. I have already gone far enough down this road and I am trying to claw my way back.

To come back to acquisition and explicit learning, to meaning and to forms. I think that we have to keep them in balance. Researchers trying to decide between the two ways of learning have not resolved the debate. But we don't have to chose between the two. It is a balance we constantly address.

Finally a Place for Starters!

 For once, I think I am late to the party! When did Starters and Plenaries come in? Early 2000s? (Here's what I was teaching in the early 2000s.) Well I think I have finally found a place for Starters in my teaching.

Plenaries I could sort of see the point of. An opportunity for pupils to reflect, for the teacher to assess, for progress to be considered. That made sense. (Although not the idea of making it into a performative stationery-heavy part of every lesson. Or misusing the word Plenary.)

But what were starters for? To engage pupils' brains? To get them ready to learn? To have part of the lesson where there was problem solving or bringing in elements from wider learning? It didn't make much sense to have this as a separate part of the lesson rather than getting stuck in. The problem with Starters seemed that they were more Start-Stop. And the few times I did try them, they took over the whole lesson.

But now, I am actively looking for ways to make sure I and all the other teachers in the department have clearly defined and programmed moments where we go back over content and concepts that mustn't be let go of. Because of our rolling Snowball curriculum model, we try to have this built in to the Scheme of Work already, but if our mantra is "Everything is joined up, nothing is left behind" then extra opportunities to make this explicit are always welcome. We are already using our low stakes drag and drop computer room tasks to do this.

So we are trialling what we are calling, "Fluent in Five Minutes." Our maths department have this, and I think there is a similarly named Primary maths initiative. They've stolen the word fluency from languages, so I am stealing it back. In maths the fluency means fluency of recall and then fluency of application. So their starters are a mix of tasks to prompt recall of meanings and definitions, processes and equations, arithmetical dexterity, and some problem solving. The Starter may or may not be used to link previous knowledge to today's lesson.

Another benefit is Routines, and starting every lesson in a predictable way. A downside is that someone has to prepare them, and that that someone has to learn to use Powerpoint. Or Powerdisappoint as I call it after a morning spent working out how to stop it resizing text and refusing to do accents. Fortunately, as the tasks are meant to be low on extraneous cognitive demand, they can be very similar so that pupils immediately know what to do and can focus on the language. They are designed to be do-able, rather than to catch pupils out. They are low stakes and pupils know that they won't be marked. But that the teachers will be alert to how they work and what is going on, so that they can take it into account in their planning. The idea, though, is that the tasks are an exercise in refamiliarisation with content, strongly scaffolded, and then the answers are given, with an opportunity for a quick focus on important concepts. All before the lesson proper begins.

And that doing all that will have a positive impact on the lesson, by giving pupils confidence and helping them have their French ready at their fingertips.

Here are some examples. They are then followed by an answer slide, sometimes with notes.

This one is a mechanical exercise in writing out the sentences in order. And then translating them into English. It is refamiliarisation with words from Year 7.

The bar at the bottom is a timer. It's a rectangle with a colour gradient, so green at one end fading to red at the other. And when the teacher clicks, it is set to "fly out" to the left. But slowly. In fact it slides out in exactly a minute. You can't set it for the full five minutes. And anyway, I have pupils who will spend five minutes happily watching the timer. So it may well be the first thing to be cut.

This one is a translation of 5 roughly similar sentences to draw attention to the words like is, has, to have... It is shifting attention from the broad meaning to the precise forms, focusing on high frequency words that are taught grammatically and lexically in a pincer movement.

You will see that as a school we are using beige or pastel coloured backgrounds to avoid visual stress from whiteboards and we are avoiding clutter on slides. I don't know if this will have the side effect of making everything too samey to be memorable. I notice Seneca Learning do use decorative images that could distract but which are designed to make the exercise look and feel different from the last one.

Translating "in" into French can be tricky, and this exercise exposes pupils to that, but in a do-able way because they are translating into English. The answers slide also prompts discussion around "at the weekend" and "on Monday". For Year 8, this is moving into new content. For Year 9 it is revisiting vocabulary and grammar in a low-stakes way.

Similarly, this one revisits content from Year 7 and the concept of word order. Again, it exposes pupils to the difference in word order but with them working into English. This is partly for recall and partly looking to build on internalised models that can be used by analogy for new contexts.

I will let you know how it goes. The department are under strict instructions that if they already begin lessons with this kind of thing but with expert quick-fire questioning, then they are totally at liberty to continue to do that instead. If this revolutionises my lessons with pupils who are at once calm, focused and ready to push on, then I will claim it as a triumph. (If it leads to a deadening, a dragging and pain, then I shall say I was right all along for the last 20 years.) We shall see!