One Year of the Nice Man Who Teaches Languages

 So a year ago I started this blog with these certainties:

I thought that whatever the change to topics, or assessment or focus, I was confident that I could navigate them, tweak my teaching, engage with new ideas, but that the ultimate aim would be the same. For pupils to build a repertoire of language they can use. And that the tests would want to assess how well they could perform in deploying their repertoire to express themselves.

And then post after post through the year showed how I could engage with many of the ideas. On sequencing, on the balance between forms and meaning, on testing defined content, on topic vocabulary and universal vocabulary, on top down and bottom up approaches to texts.  But again and again, coming up against my incomprehension of the down-grading of communication. And in particular, the removal of rewarding pupils' ability to develop answers spontaneously in the GCSE speaking exam.

I am sure the One Year mark won't see an end to the evolution of my thinking. But I do feel as if it's time to come to some conclusions and make some decisions for planning the way forward.

In Year 7, I think I will keep our current "topics". I will sharpen the teachers' focus on certain forms, and make sure we are all aware that while we may think we are teaching the verb to have or think we are teaching adjectival agreement, there are people who would say that the pupils only notice the colours, the shapes, the foods, the animals. Not the grammar. And I think we need to realise that this is entirely natural when you start learning a language. The learners' focus is on meaning and being able to say things. We do not want to squish their impulse to communicate, to express themselves, to relate the language to their lives, to have fun saying things. 

So some tweaks for the teachers to concentrate on the verb to have in Unit 1 which is on describing families, teachers, criminals, celebrities. With un/une. With to be and adjectival agreement starting to be introduced with regular adjectives. And phonics. Lots of phonics with the all the sound-spelling patterns with pictures, key words and actions.

Then in Unit 2, keep the Art Exhibition. With the teachers aware that colours include some irregular agreement rules. And that size adjectives can come before the noun. With the verb to be, realising that we need to work on changing the indefinite article into the definite: Il y a un bateau rouge et bleu. Le bateau est dans un cercle jaune. Using the things we want pupils to do (describe a picture) in order to introduce important transferable grammar step by step.

And to give an example from Unit 3, while pupils think they are learning to say what foods they like and don't like and why, the teacher is carefully sequencing work around words for the and some.

Without detailing all of our units, I think you can see I am trying to take on board the ideas of one-thing-at-a-time at first, then contrasted and used in conjunction with other structures, everything is added on and not abandoned, BUT I think we can do it with a focus on pupils learning to say and do things with their language.

In Year 8, I want to keep the focus on being able to extend spontaneous answers and paragraphs that develop an idea. Because I think there is a strong literacy/oracy obligation for us to work on how well pupils can deploy their language. Not just test if they know it. The idea that thinking up what to say and how to say something coherent needs developing just as much as your "knowledge" of the language, is central. It has a clear progression that pupils can appreciate. From sentences to paragraphs. From incoherent to structured. From repetitive to personal. And while you work on that development, that is where you have the opportunity for language to be practised over and over until it is more fluent. And it is what pulls the pupils' language into a conscious repertoire they can use and curate. It's the famous snowball of language that can start to get bigger and bigger. It may be that at GCSE they will no longer be rewarded for being able to extend answers spontaneously. But we shouldn't let GCSE ruin KS3. And if we can genuinely see that having a snowball of language is what stops all their language from melting away, then it's not a waste of time and effort even if it's not rewarded at GCSE.

It will give us the opportunity to re-think the Year 9 curriculum. Currently we take the Year 8 repertoire and transfer it to topics that are less directly linked to their everyday experience. Jobs, Environment, Fashion... With a focus on continuing to move away from 1st person. And with lots of work on tenses for narrating: what was happening, what happened... This could all change.

There is an element of wait and see with Year 9 and definitely with KS4. 

And whether we can continue to offer Spanish, starting in Year 9, is in serious doubt. As our current approach to GCSE with pupils starting in Year 9 with one lesson a week, depends heavily on developing what they can DO with a core of language. Rather than the thoroughness of their knowledge of recondite areas of the specified vocabulary and structures. I don't apologise for this. The fact that proportionally more pupils carry on to A Level Spanish is another example of how having a strong usable core of language means pupils are aware of how their language fits together and how more and more language will stick to it.

So to sum up the changes. Be aware of the balance of focus between attention to meaning and attention to the forms of the language. That's it really! Understand that while for the learner, the attention may be on meaning and expression, it is our job as teachers to structure the curriculum and slowly shift the pupils' focus so that there is an underlying strengthening of understanding and use of the language across topics. Our starters, resources, sequencing, explanations, demands, testing, should all be built around our understanding of how pupils are learning not how to say one off things, but how those things contribute to being able to say new things, more complex things, more creative things. And I think that's what our curriculum based around creative outcomes was always designed to push us to do.

I am more and more perplexed that I was ever made to doubt our approach.

And where I think I completely differ from what is being proposed, is in the idea of developing the learner's evolving interlanguage.

I don't plan learning by breaking down my knowledge of French and trying to rebuild it in a plan that looks great on paper. I am in the business of working with my pupils, practising using what they know, adding to it, making sure what's new is integrated with what they already have, recycling what they already know, and developing how well they can use it to express themselves coherently.

And I am not just making this up. Dr Gianfranco Conti tweeted this excerpt from Robert DeKeyser (2017) this morning.

Modestly headed "Teaching Tips", it is a brilliantly concise summary of the fundamental principles which underlie the complexity of the flow, evolution, development, monitoring, balance, give and take that make up language learning. It makes me very happy to read it, the same way that doing it in the classroom makes me happy and thinking and writing about it in this blog makes me happy.

A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Developing Answers for the Speaking Exam

 As we prepare for the GCSE Speaking Exam with my Spanish class and my French Intervention group, here's a counter-intuitive activity I'm using: Giving the shortest answer possible.

I can ask short questions or long ones. I can repeat a question, grunt or raise an eyebrow. The pupils have to speak. They cannot just repeat. But they have to keep their answers short. Why would we do this? Let's see the sort of thing that you get when you do it:

Tu aimes aller à la plage?

Oui.

Ah, oui?

J'aime aller à la plage.

Où est-ce que tu aimes aller?

À Cromer.

À Cromer?

Oui, j'aime y aller.

Avec?

Avec ma famille.

Pourquoi?

Parce que je peux me promener.

Pourquoi?

Parce que j'adore chercher des coquillages.

Tu aimes nager dans la mer?

Non.

Non?

Je n'aime pas nager dans la mer.

Pourquoi?

Parce qu'il fait trop froid.

Alors?

Alors je préfère jouer sur la plage.

Par exemple?

Par exemple le week-end dernier je suis allée à la plage et j'ai joué au volley-ball.

Et après?

Je suis allée boire quelque chose dans un café.

Mais s'il pleut?

This could be a pupil who's been working like this since Year 8. Or this could be a pupil who has learned answers off by heart. It could be a pupil who has prepared ideas of what they want to say. Or a pupil who has a clear idea of what structures the examiner wants to hear. It could be a native speaker who simply answers questions and needs further prompting. In this activity, all of these pupils are forced to interact. They end up developing an answer. But if this were the exam, it would be clear to the examiner that they are not delivering a memorised script.

Pupils enjoy it as a fun game. Where it almost feels as if they are being bloody-minded and frustrating, and making me do all the work. In the exam itself they don't take it to extremes, but the expectation is there that they will not deliver a long spiel, but that we will explore an answer together.

It means in the exam, most of my questions are very short. Pushing pupils in a new direction, inviting them to give reasons or explain in detail or give examples in past or future. My questions are not "testing" them. I don't ask them to describe their room or list their routine. There are no marks on the markscheme for describing or listing. The marks are for giving and justifying opinions, using tenses and narrating, extending answers and interacting. So all my questions are an invitation to do these things.

Of course, in the exam, pupils aren't deliberately giving me short answers. But they know I will prompt them to come up with more detail and bounce my questions off what they have been saying.

I know the old Controlled Assessment GCSE (that meant even my pupils had to rote-learn long fancy answers) still affects how some people approach the exam. And when my pupils go home and thoroughly learn possible answers to possible questions, that's a good thing and part of their exam preparation. But the current GCSE doesn't condemn us to teaching or testing that way. It's heart-breaking that we've only actually done this new Speaking Exam twice, and now it's going to be snatched away by people who want short undeveloped answers that test pupils' recall of structures.

Reading through this post ... Isn't this just what teaching a language is? How did we ever get a GCSE which stamped it out? How can we be getting another one which will snatch it away? What is language teaching if it isn't this?

Language World

 I have really enjoyed following the Association for Language Learning Language World Conference on twitter this weekend. It sounds as if it has been a kind of MFL twitter school trip, all meeting up joyously after 2 years of only seeing each other virtually. In fact, that's always been my experience of Language World from the days when there was no social media and there were no webinars. It was the time that you did get to meet and share ideas and recharge your batteries.

I haven't been to Language World all that "often" as it usually clashed with the Spanish Exchange. But because I've been around for a while now, I have squeezed in quite a few. In geographical rather than chronological order: Canterbury where I did my first talk, up in an attic, and it clashed with major sporting and pop concert events. London, where dinner was accompanied by Cossack dancing. Brighton, where I got a haircut and showed Ann Swarbrick the work I'd been doing on reading for pleasure, which led to her immediately introducing me to the editor at OUP. Exeter where even before I arrived, Bill Musk was on the train with me. Bath, where they had lots of signs. Oxford, where an erstwhile ALL President was seen attempting to stuff his trousers through the letter box of a charity shop. And Oxford again where people were crying in my talk because the last time they'd been in that room it was for their finals exams and I gave Bill Musk a lift home. Rugby with gardens and lake and Lisa Stevens' sketch noting. The one that wasn't in Leicester. The one that was in Leicester where I upset OCR because after presenting the OUP textbook for their spec, I said I wouldn't be doing OCR because their Spanish exam thresholds meant pupils could do better on the French paper even though they'd never done French. A conversation which continued in the lift where I was backed up by Anne Prentis who said exactly the same thing I'd said. The one in Nottingham in the snow where I saw the amazing James Stubbs talk about planned progression through classroom use of the target language. The one in Manchester where on the Thursday night I didn't meet anyone so I had a large tuna sandwich... just before meeting everyone and going to the Great Wall for a huge Chinese banquet I couldn't really eat. And walking back with the lovely Kathy Wicksteed, coming across a queue to a nightclub taking up the whole pavement and having to use my teacher look on the (very apologetic) bouncer. And at least two more in Manchester (including one where I was a hybrid). Plus last year's virtual one. Not finished yet, hang on. Keele, where I think I saw James Burch doing "Wie issssssssssst Bletchley?" and I danced with a nice lady called Shirley. And York (twice?) where Steven Fawkes got us repeating some French which then turned out to go with a song by the Spice Girls that everyone knew except me. And possibly more which are all a blur.

This year, the talk I would really have loved to go to was Professor Emma Marsden talking about the new GCSE proposals. I have heard that she was very good and her arguments were quite persuasive. And I am open to persuasion. Or rather, I am open to trying out ideas. Both intellectually and in the classroom. I've always said that it's only when you try something that doesn't fit with what you "believe", that you actually learn anything new.

Without having been in the talk, it's hard to judge. But from the summaries I've picked up on, I'm still not convinced. For a start, I think the topic of changes to the exam is a red herring. This isn't about changing the exam. It's about changing our teaching. The offer of changes to the exam is something of a tempting sweetener for teachers who are generally frustrated with the GCSE.

In her talk, Professor Marsden pointed out that the exam boards don't generally make use of the majority of the great long lists of vocabulary in the specification. And that it's just a small number of words which always come up. This fits exactly with my own analysis of the vocabulary in the Listening and Reading exams. There is a complete mis-match between the topic vocabulary we teach for the Speaking and Writing, compared to the high frequency language tested in the Listening and Reading. Where the answers depend on words like started to..., too..., half of..., used to...

So we share a diagnosis of the situation. But I don't understand the argument. If this is already the problem with the Listening and Reading exams, how is the new high frequency based GCSE the solution? If there's a problem with the mis-match between what we teach for Speaking and Writing, and what gets the marks in Listening and Reading, leading to a perception that the Listening and Reading are tricky and tricksy... then why on earth would the solution be not only to make the Listening and Reading more so, but to also take the Speaking and Writing down the same path?! We share the same analysis of the issues. But from my point of view in the classroom, the solution would be to make sure the Listening and Reading were better aligned with what we teach pupils to say and write. Not the other way round!

Which leads me on to Speaking (and Writing). In her talk, Professor Marsden spoke of the Speaking exam as being made up of long rote-learned answers. And that in language-learning terms, this is a nonsense. Again, I could not agree more that an exam which rewards regurgitated scripted fancy monologues is destructive of language learning. And that is exactly what happened with the previous Controlled Assessment GCSE. Which is now 5 years out of date. The current GCSE has seen a return to rewarding pupils who can extend answers spontaneously from a core repertoire. Thank goodness.

The AQA examiner's report on the new (current) exam comments on the strength of pupils' ability to respond in Speaking and Writing to un-prepared questions. And how centres which began the new GCSE by still relying on rote-learning did not do their candidates any favours. I am able to use all the techniques I was using in the early 2000s for developing spontaneous answers again. And teachers who weren't teaching back then have discovered the use of what I didn't use to call Sentence Builders, coinciding with the introduction of the current GCSE, to return to teaching pupils powerful recombinable language so they can express themselves with growing fluency.

Professor Marsden's analysis of the problem with GCSE Speaking, as with Listening and Reading, aligns with mine. But it would seem to be an analysis of the wrong (previous) GCSE exam. The proposals are explicitly based on the 2016 Teaching Schools Council Research Review. Looking at the landscape of the old GCSE. Do they have research looking at what has started to happen under the current GCSE? Or is it based on personal experience of working with the current Edexcel GCSE, which is slightly more prone to the learning of fancy rote expressions than the AQA version?

So in terms of identifying the issues around the GCSE as it was back in 2016, I think I would have been nodding along to much of what Professor Marsden was saying. And beyond the GCSE proposals, I am very interested in the ideas around sequencing of learning, the balance between form and meaning, between topic vocabulary and universally useful vocabulary. But when it comes to the new GCSE proposals, the thing I can't get past, is the stripping out of teaching pupils to develop spontaneous answers from a core repertoire of language. A new GCSE that explicitly wants to keep pupils' answers short, is an out of date over-reaction to a previous GCSE which is long gone.

I am willing to accept that all those talks at all those past Language World conferences about authentic language, real content, communication, creativity, were not exactly "wrong", but certainly that things move on. And I would be proud to think that I've played my own small part in how our teaching of languages has evolved. And things have continued to evolve and even transform. And one of the biggest transformations has been happening in the classroom since the review in 2016. 

Mr Apostrophe

 A lovely thing happened with Year 7 this week. We are working on talking about food we like and don't like. In interesting combinations: j'aime la glace avec des cornichons. Previously we had learned some foods using the dual coding keyword technique. So when they hear confiture, pupils have a mental image of a comfy chair covered in... jam. We know this works, because one of the class had done that lesson on a Primary taster day and still remembered the words 6 months later, from a single hour's lesson.

Anyway, this week, I started by going round the class asking Tu aimes le pain avec de la confiture? Tu aimes les hamburgers avec des cornichons? Tu aimes les pâtes avec du fromage? Tu aimes la glace avec des cornichons? And the pupils giving the answer Oui, j'aime... or Non, je n'aime pas... And then me occasionally recapping, Theresa aime... Derek n'aime pas...

Now. One of the lessons of the Ofsted Research Review is that we need to shift the focus away from the fromage, cornichons, moutarde, guimauves and onto the structure of the language and the important words that are recycled across topics. We like to think that our curriculum is already built around this recycling of a repertoire of powerful structures. But the Ofsted Review has sharpened our awareness of how pupils' focus doesn't always lie in the same place as the teacher's. So we might think we are working on j'aime, j'adore, je n'aime pas, je préfère... but the pupils are entirely focused on the idea of eating marshmallows with gherkins.

And that is entirely natural. We don't want to raise awareness of the forms of the language by squishing pupils' enthusiasm to communicate and create meaning. So we are looking for ways to keep tweaking the balance. Our Fluent in 5 lesson starters started out as a way of recycling language from previous topics. They have quickly turned into a way to focus on the patterns and detail of language. 

And we are examining our own attitudes to how pupils consume grammar. Did we use to think that "weaker" pupils were happy to learn to say things? And "stronger" pupils appreciated the insights into grammar, or would spot the patterns for themselves? If so, do we need to turn this thinking on its head? Does a careful and deliberate focus on the forms of the language help those pupils who otherwise have been lost in a swamp of incoherent and unexplained language? It's worth asking ourselves that question.

I don't know if you've forgotten about the Nice Thing I promised you at the start. I haven't forgotten it. We will get there.

So after going round the class and talking in French about their likes and dislikes, I put the word aime on the board four times.

aime

aime

aime

aime

And I told them it was four different words. And that they had heard or used all four of them already in the lesson. And that I had spelled one of them wrong!

Because if we focus on the foods and not on the recyclable powerful words, you end up in Year 8 with pupils who know j'aime as a unit. And say things like Ethan j'aime jouer au foot when they want to use the 3rd person. Or pupils who cannot distinguish je n'ai pas and je n'aime pas because they inexplicably haven't spotted the word aime as central to je n'aime pas. Not because they aren't capable of spotting it. But because they aren't that fussed about that word. They are focused on the marshmallow-gherkin combination. I am not saying we should remove the marshmallow-gherkin feast. (Although I think that the proponents of a curriculum based on meticulous sequencing of high frequency language and structures might.) But we need to keep an eye on the balance. The more interesting we make the content, the less interested pupils are in the language. Could this be true?

My Year 7s correctly identified the 4 aime words. (Are they different words?) I recapped the dialogue a little bit to keep it in context and show them how we had already seen the words. And they spotted all four. All of them with aime hiding in the middle.

J'aime, je n'aime pas, tu aimes, Theresa aime... And I told them about the secret silent s on tu aimes. I also deliberately misspelled j'aime as je aime to emphasise the separate meaning of I. And I left it like that on the board and pretended to carry on. At which point a pupil appeared to shout out, "Mister Apostrophe". Which was the best thing that could have happened. (I told you I would get to it.) It was one of those moments you just cannot plan for, but which are going to stay in your teaching for ever. "Mister Apostrophe!"

Of course, I think they must have said, "You missed your apostrophe". But too late. Mr Apostrophe was born. He is called Mr Apostrophe. And he eats letters!

So je aime was turned into j'aime by Mr Apostrophe. And he reappeared to hungrily change je ne aime pas into je n'aime pas. And he will be back regularly. Every time I use j'aime in fact from now on. With all my classes. And actually it's not to remind pupils to include the apostrophe. It's to make sure they know that it is in fact je aime and that a letter has been eaten.

Funny things happen when you do phonics testing.

 Last week I wrote about how testing phonics through dictation gets very complicated very quickly. Processing sound, identifying the word, and understanding meaning is not a one way linear process. You can't decide if someone is saying porc or port until you have understood the whole sentence. So a dictation is much more than a test of knowledge of phonics.

I had a similar experience this week with reading aloud. Reading aloud is the other proposed way of testing phonics knowledge in the proposed new GCSE.

I am a big fan of reading aloud. I have always believed that if something is tricky, that means you work on it more, not avoid it. I teach phonics (the sound-spelling link) at the very start of Year 7, and then constantly reinforce it. Even when pupils are reading silently in their heads, it is important that they are sounding the words correctly. In a sense, all their reading is "reading aloud". But I am not sure about reading aloud as a test of phonics. As with dictation, the interplay between phonics and meaning is too complex.

I was doing the Debbie and Harry lessons.

It's the first lesson on Free Time with Year 8. It gives them sentences with new topic vocabulary. In sentences which are too repetitive, all with j'aime. So straight away the pupils will want to be improving this in speaking and writing, by using their conjunctions and a variety of opinions and other structures like je peux...

We did some work on phonics on some of the words. The hidden gorille in maquillage and the bébé in télé. Then the pupils had to make sense of the new vocabulary (darts, going out). Which was writing, not speaking at this stage.

The second half of the sheet is fun. Based on what they know about Debbie and Harry (names, gender, photos, a liking for darts...) they have to predict who they think likes each of these new activities:

They write them out. Then they have the opportunity to tell me in French who they think likes which activity. Which is a chance to go over manipulating j'aime into Harry aime / Debbie aime... 

The next lesson, more activities follow, including a Listening where I tell them in French what activities Debbie and Harry actually like and don't like. The pupils make notes on the page as I tell them, reading a model text in the first person for Debbie and for Harry.

We then co-constructed the text on the board. With pupils telling me in French their suggestions for what to write. Changing the je to il/elle, adding conjunctions, and giving better alternatives to the repetition of aime... All of this without me having to correct pronunciation. Either of known words (adore, mais, peut) or the new words (conduire, fléchettes).

The main part of the third lesson is to ask the pupils to write their own paragraph for a 3rd person whose photo I show on the board, writing their own version of what they think they like/don't like. But first, I did some work on reading aloud the paragraph we had co-constructed in the previous lesson. It didn't go well.

In the previous lesson, giving me their guesses as to who liked what, the pupils were working from text to speech, but mainly concentrating on telling me something. As we constructed the paragraph, they were working from some known language and some new language presented in text. Mainly concentrating on the coherence and variety of the paragraph we were creating. Without pronunciation being a big issue.

Not so when it came to reading aloud. There was something about the focus on a body of text and the explicit focus on sound that kept making it go wrong. Silent letters pronounced. Cognates pronounced as if they were English words. Worse than when we weren't focusing on pronunciation.

And the solution was to ask the pupil to read ahead in their head. And then look up from the text and tell me what it said in French. Reading aloud, focusing on a word at a time or a syllable at a time, was having a strange effect. Instead of making their reading more correct, it was spoiling it. Reading a whole sentence silently, understanding it, and saying it, with support from the text when needed, was much more successful.

I have never agreed with the 1990s approach of not allowing reading aloud because it would corrupt the pupils' pronunciation. But those teachers weren't being willfully stupid. It's not easy and it's not straight forward. And as with dictation, the link between sounding out and the brain's need to find meaning was getting muddled. Reading aloud wasn't testing phonics. 

What is a reading aloud phonics test going to look like? How prepared are we to teach pupils how to tackle this? Will we advise them to read it for meaning first? Do we understand how meaning and pronunciation interact? And whether reading syllable by syllable is good for careful accuracy or actually distorts? Is this the same for different languages? (I know in Spanish I tell pupils the important thing is NOT to look up from the word.)

If this is how our pupils are to be tested at GCSE we need to gear up massively to have effective teaching in place. It is more complex than you think. And the exam boards have a lot of work to do to work out what sort of tests and texts will actually test the phonics.

What is a word?

 I did some crowd-sourced research on twitter. To try to find out what "a word" is. Some people gave me dictionary definitions. But that's a bit like trying to find the meaning of life by looking it up in a dictionary. You are going to be disappointed. 

The dictionary definition  A single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed, tells me that "play" and "plays" are words. But are they the same word? Or different words?

So I asked a series of questions to see what we conceptualise as "a word". Of course by "we", I mean people on twitter at around 7.00 in the morning, predominantly teachers of and speakers of other languages. So that for example, a third of people think that played (simple past) and played (past participle) are different words. As the spelling, pronunciation and core meaning of the word are identical, this means our survey is going out to people who are making fine distinctions based in part on grammatical distinctions. So given a different pool of respondents, I think we would have got very different answers. But on the other hand, if I am asking "What is a word" then having a pool of people equipped with linguistic knowledge is possibly an advantage, as long as we are aware that this is baked in to the results.

And the results are: We don't know what a word is.

The biggest area of agreement was around core meaning. Where 2 words were spelled and pronounced the same, but had substantially different meanings (even if ultimately from the same root), then a large majority agreed that they were different words.

This example also has plays as different parts of speech. I have just belatedly posted a question to try to get at this. Using words with the same core meaning but one a verb one a noun. So far it is coming out strongly in favour of being different words.

It does seem that perceived meaning (rather than literal core meaning) is important. For example running water was seen as different to I went running. I know they are different parts of speech. But it came out particularly strongly as different words, compared to two different grammatical uses of the word playing.

Again we have almost a third of people who consider "I was playing" to be a different word to "I like playing". Based presumably on its different grammatical role in the sentence. But the 90% who consider "running water" to be a different word to "I went running"  shows the role of perceived meaning.

So I came up with other questions to get at the idea of whether words with the same core meaning but different forms counted as the same word. It turns out that again, we don't agree. But "regular" plurals with an s are seen largely as variations on the same word. Whereas proper good old English plurals such as children are seen by many as a different word. Children, bretheren, oxen, abominable snowmen. Good job I didn't include mouse/mice, cow/kine.

And then there are sheep.

Most people think sheep and sheep are the same word. But more people think that sheep and sheep are different words than think play and plays are different words. This may be a result of the fact that thinking about one question affects your thinking as you answer the next.

With verb forms, there were again three elements. Meaning, sound, spelling. Predictably, the more of these that were different, the more people considered it to be a different word. But the concept of "same word but with a different ending" was strongly detectable.

We were fairly evenly split on play / plays as a third person ending. And of course the nature of the survey doesn't tell us how arbitrary the choice was, with many people probably umming and ahing (how do you spell that?) about what to put. Most people think that "I fly" and "we fly" are the same word.

With changes of tense, the argument of "same word, different ending" was weaker. And not just with forms like fly/flew or for with changes in pronunciation read/read, but also for regular simple past tense ending in --ed. These were generally considered to be a different word.

You can see the whole thread here. I think broad conclusions are:

1. There is not clear agreement on what a word is.

2. Perceived meaning (even if literal root is the same) counts for a lot.

3. Regular plurals may be seen as the same word but with a different ending.

4. Changes of person in a verb are seen as the same word, but when there is a 3rd person s added, this is seen by some as making a new word. Generally where there is no change to form, a change of person of the pronoun is not seen as implying the verb is a different word.

5. Change of tense is often seen as being a different word. More so with different pronunciation or an "irregular" change. But also with regular --ed endings.

6. It turns out that actual linguistics linguists don't use the word "word". It's too vague! They (like mathematicians!) use the word lemma for a base concept that can be inflected or extrapolated upon.

Does this have any impact on how we teach languages?

Every so often our school has a round of cross-subject initiatives to try to metacognitisify the learning process for pupils. One variation of this did have every subject writing their generalised conceptualisation of the stages learning onto a laminated brain. For languages we had the stages of:

strategies for learning vocabulary

learning how to put words together to make a sentence

learning to change the endings of words

expressing yourself using the knowledge you have

Or something like that but better expressed. The idea of inflection of words and the way in which other languages may do this to a greater degree than English, is an important concept for our pupils. We come up against this when pupils use traditional dictionaries. Wrong word for saw. Can't find the word is. As always, important not to bypass these issues, but to tackle them head on.

Thank you to everyone who joined in and answered the questions! Hope you enjoyed it. Certainly made me think.