Muddled thinking - Magical thinking

 Really enjoyed talking to teachers from the Inspiration Trust yesterday about how to get pupils developing spoken answers spontaneously. Ideas like Being Ben and building a story round the class and what I don't call "sentence builders". But I wanted to write a post on the couple of slides that I cut out, on getting pupils to speak in the target language for classroom communication.

I have written here and here about ideas for encouraging and enabling pupils to use the target language to communicate in the classroom - so please do follow the links for some positive ideas of things you can do. I am going to be looking in this post at the rationale, because I think that teachers being clear about what they want to achieve is key to success.

What do we want to achieve when we say we want pupils to use the target language to communicate? Do we want them to have a few set phrases they can use for classroom routines such as greetings and requests to remove their blazer? Do we want pupils to interact in the target language when conducting activities with expressions for turn-taking or commenting on each other's work? Do we want pupils to be able to express themselves and talk to us fluently and interact with us naturally?

Routines, interaction and fluent self expression. Are they very separate ambitions or are they on a continuum? Does asking to take off your blazer lead on to being able to have a conversation about whether the film Titanic is based on a true story or not? (See comments below.) Or is that a vain hope, an act of self-deception, an illusion?

To try to get some clarity on exactly that point, I have some more questions.

Do we want pupils to use the target language for classroom communication because:

... because there is an expectation that we attempt this? It's for show really. Because it's expected. And people judge us on it.

... because it's a nice thing? It may or not be important, but it's fun. And pupils like to try out their language and love to challenge themselves to use as much French as possible.

... because it might be a small start but it's an important one. If we don't start using the target language for little routines now, pupils will never switch over to using it, even when they know lots of language.

... because we believe that communication plays a role in acquiring a language. Real communication. That it's only when you use language to say something you mean, that the brain's language learning mechanisms are set in motion.

And separately from these four possible reasons, are we aware of any of these possible negative sides:

It can get in the way of clear explanation. It's not really where learning happens in the classroom.

It can alienate pupils. Including pupils who just want to get on with learning a language without all the pantomime.

Because routine expressions are not real communication. Especially when you have to say it.

My biggest worry is this: Insisting on pupils using the target language isn't enabling them to communicate at all. It's silencing them. Or limiting them to a few transactional parrot utterances. Dr Florencia Henshaw tweeted yesterday, "We want students to be multilingual, so why are we imposing monolingualism in the classroom?" Florencia can always cut through the debate, the side-taking, the orthodoxy and the heresy, and focus clearly on what she wants to achieve.

Here's some heresy. Is it OK to allow pupils to mix French and English when they want to say something? Many pupils can trot out, "Est-ce que je peux enlever ma veste?" How many of them ever ask "Est-ce que je peux..." something else that they want? Or when we work on verb + infinitive, how many of them ever recognise "je peux" as something they've known for years?

The pupil who says, "Can I take off ma veste" may in fact be engaging more with the words than someone who knows the whole sentence like an incantation. Or a pupil who says, "Est-ce que je peux help give the books out?" Or "Est-ce que je peux put ma veste on the radiator?" Is this an abomination, or is this a pupil engaging with the language to express something they want to say?

Some of the answer will depend on our answers to the sets of questions earlier in the post around the purpose of using the target language in the classroom and how we hope that routine expressions can morph into self expression. Perhaps these examples are showing the pupils' communication in the process of transmutation, and we should celebrate it.

And more of the answer is in the slides that I did deliver in my talk yesterday - it is in the classroom activities that we scaffold, model, develop, and practise pupils' ability to communicate. So what happens in the lesson activity and what constitutes real communication can converge. So when Year 7 watch a video about French table manners and have a keep talking sheet to discuss it, the language-learning activity merges into an ability to communicate about the video they have watched. Or if they learn to listen to a song in French and give their opinion on it. Or describe an artwork and say how it makes them feel.

I think I could have done more to turn this post into one with a lovely extended metaphor around magical thinking: 

Expressions as an incantation pupils use when they want to take off their jacket. 

Target language use as an orthodoxy to pay lip service to, if you don't want to be burned at the stake.

Thinking that because you want something to turn into something else, it will happen through the power of belief.

We need to follow Florencia's example and cut through to what really matters. The lesson can't be separated into a false dichotomy of routines that pretend to be communicative because they are incidental versus activities which because they are planned are deemed to be not part of using the target language for communication. I'll leave you with Florencia's final tweet on the matter: "Let's focus on increasing students' communicative engagement with the language."