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.