Why Randomise your French?

 Joe Dale has contacted me to let me know he's made a Spinner Wheel out of one of my Keep Talking Sheets. 

In the picture you can only see two of the four wheels. You can click to spin each wheel individually or spin all wheels at once. They are designed so that they produce grammatically correct French. Whether or not the sentence makes sense, is a different question. When you have spun the wheels, it will pop up the result in a text box for you to read.

Joe actually referred to it as a Sentence Builder but if you look at it, you will see it's not about building a sentence. When you have spun all 4 wheels, it doesn't come to a full stop. "I can sing in the garden, but if it is cold..." is the random sentence I got by spinning Joe's wheels. So now I need to spin again to carry on.

So I now have, "I can sing in the garden, but if it is cold I like to play the trumpet at the youth club, but if it rains..." and round again we go.

So the French is grammatically correct, the meaning is random, and the lack of full stops makes it ultimately incoherent. So what is the point?

There are 3 points.

1. Showing pupils that writing and speaking French doesn't happen by magic. It is built out of recombinable chunks.

2. You don't start with a blank piece of paper or a blank mind and wonder what to say and come up with nothing or come up with something you can't say. You start with the chunks, and make something out of them.

3. The French is actually easy. You just use the chunks you have been learning. You practise using them over and over. But the real job is, once the French is flowing, to make sure it makes sense, to make it coherent, to make it something you do want to say.

Joe was really pleased to send me this, because he knows it's something I have been looking for for a very long time. In 2006 the tech department made me one out of wood, with spinning cardboard tube barrels. And in 2011 I made this machine for writing French:

Instead of spinning barrels or wheels, this one works with a shape sorter. But it works on the same principle of producing a long sentence in French through mechanical non magical means. It was part of a series of sessions for a group of disaffected boys, to change their attitude to French by showing them the step by step processes.

So it might seem odd to produce random sentences, but it is the physical, mechanical nature of the process that we are trying to emphasise.

We do the same thing in speaking activities in class. We use dice for conjunctions so that where a sentence would end, the pupils always have and, but, so, for example, especially if, because... and carry on.

We tell pupils we want them to beat the world record for the longest French sentence:

This often brings two different reactions from pupils. One is that pupils love to make silly sentences, enjoying the creativity and fun. The other is that they desperately want to take control and make it make sense. Both of these reactions are good.

And the next step is to work on the coherence, taking one idea at a time and developing it. But the ability to talk and talk spontaneously, giving opinions and justifying them, always reaching for a conjunction to carry on, is the core of their repertoire across all topics. In the GCSE Game Plan, it is playing the ball out from the back, keeping possession without taking risks, moving the ball confidently and moving into space to get the ball back. (Before moving into the opposition half to try something fancy or score a goal.) In the food tech metaphor, it is the cake you can always make out of store-cupboard ingredients. (Before putting on the icing and smarties.)

So Spinner Wheel and Flippity are both fantastic for showing pupils how you start with the ingredients and combine them to create French. How do I use them in class?

I actually use them very rarely in class. In the early but important stages of moving pupils to thinking about how to use the French they have learned. It's as an initial demonstration rather than as an activity. Firstly for the mechanical process of putting chunks together. And secondly for evaluating meaning and coherence. Is our sentence a good one or does it need tweaking? Flippity has the ability to re-spin or even nudge the barrel, which is fantastic for sorting out sentences that are grammatically correct but not logical.

 I do like to use them for homework. Asking pupils to spin and write down the sentence in French and English. Because it's an activity they have to do, without being able to just use google translate.

I know other people use them differently. For example with the barrels/wheels in English for pupils to translate. Or with infinitives that the pupils have to conjugate depending on the person. Esmeralda Salgado's amazing blog has great examples.

We have come a long way since spinning toilet rolls on bits of wood!