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.