Keep your eyes on the road, not on the satnav.

 Keep your eyes on the road, not on the satnav. Especially if it's a bit foggy. Slow down and watch the road. You  can't drive safely by following the little bendy arrow on your screen. And the same with teaching. Teach the pupils in the class. Not the scheme of work. 

Firstly just in practical terms: what is it about whoever sat down and planned that scheme that means they knew what your Year 8 would need in late April? And secondly in philosophical terms. A scheme of work that takes the language as the linguist sees it and chops it up, and delivers it in bitesize chunks, is thinking linguistically but not pedagogically. As Scott Thornbury put it, "You don't make an omelet by taking apart an omelet and trying to put it back together to make a new omelet." It's much messier, starts with whole raw ingredients. Involves things getting broken and thrown away. And needs to be cooked. The language that forms in the pupil's brain isn't a chopped up omelet stuck back together. It's an organic creation that spreads and solidifies.

Or for another metaphor I've used when talking about this: When thickening a roux, don't keep looking at the recipe and the quantities or even at how much milk is left in the jug. Your full attention is on what is happening in the pan.

That's not to say I am not very clear about the ingredients. Or what I am trying to make. But it does mean that I adapt the temperature, quantities, time, and do a lot of monitoring and stirring.

My Year 8 group at the start of the year took weeks to get to grips with places in town, il y a, gender, pronunciation and starting to use j'aime, j'adore, je peux, je dois... But then in the next unit, when we started talking about School, they quickly picked up where they had left off, talking about what they liked and why (parce que je peux... parce que je dois...). They went straight to paragraphs and longer spontaneous answers, picking up from where they left off at the end of the previous unit. That's how it's supposed to work. But how well and how quickly, the scheme of work just can't tell. And it's not about "coverage". It's about how well they can do it.

Are their sentences turning into paragraphs? Are their paragraphs linking sentences or are they starting to take one idea and develop it? Is their work scaffolded or independent? Do they understand the pay-off between taking risks (and making mistakes) by expressing themselves, versus playing safe and being accurate (and derivative)? Can they improvise spoken answers? At length? Are they repetitive and incoherent, or do they develop an idea consistently and logically? Do they need more language, or do they need more practice getting good at using it?

When we moved on to Free Time, they had the core of opinions and reasons secure. We were ready to move on from j'aime  to Harry aime... / Debbie aime... And not just because they were asking how to say it and experimenting with changing j'aime into Harry j'aime, Harry aime, Harry aimes... But because it dovetailed with what they could do with their language. We made it a rule that whenever you mentioned someone else, you used one of your new verb endings. So if they were saying J'aime aller au parc avec mes amis, that would trigger, et nous jouons au tennis. Or if you said, Je peux regarder la télé avec ma soeur, that would trigger Elle regarde des films d'action. 

Conceptually and practically what we are adding into the mixture binds to the language they already have and makes something tasty in French.

Last week we were doing Pimp My French, talking about how we could improve a passage mainly made up of repetitive sentences with j'aime. One pupil said "We can get rid of j'aime and change it to j'ai." This worried me. Because thinking that je n'ai pas and je n'aime pas are interchangeable has been an issue! But then he said, "Then you can use j'ai to say I have done something."

The perfect tense is on the scheme of work. But not just yet. But if the pupils are asking for it and coming up with half of the language already by themselves, then it's time to go for it. So it's time for the perfect tense. With the j'ai that they already knew. And the fact that ---ed = ---é (because engaged = fiancé) we have the perfect tense.

All that remains is to combine it with their existing omelet as it cooks. And that's easy. They are familiar with the Conjunctions Dice Game. We just need to adjust it so that par exemple becomes a trigger for the past tense. So that whenever they say (or a partner prompts) par exemple, it is always followed by reference to the past.

Eventually this will develop into what was happening, what someone said, what decision was taken, what you would have preferred to do. But for now, it's J'aime aller au parc parce que je peux voir mes amis. [Which triggers...] Nous jouons au foot.  Par exemple le week-end j'ai joué au foot au parc.

To sum up, I am going to quote from a previous post, again with food based metaphors:

Pupils have an evolving conceptualisation of the language. Which is messy, partial, incomplete. Which evolves as they learn more and which can be called upon to express themselves. The alternative seems to be a collection of remembered structures and rules which if it isn't rolled up into a functioning proto-system, and remains as a set of discrete facts, isn't any sort of language at all.

There seems to me to be an argument which has gone too far. That language-learning consists of learning patterns and rules to be understood, memorised and recalled. And that the step-by-step syllabus is transposed into the learner's brain as a set of structured concepts.

If this then neglects meaning, communication and self-expression, I think this has gone too far. It is an argument seeing language-learning from the point of view of someone who has a vision of the whole grammatical system. And who wants to break that down and feed it to pupils in bite-size pieces. 

To pursue the metaphor, I am sure it's a diet that would contain the correct amount of each micro-nutrient, carefully weighed out and administered at the correct time. But not necessarily with any regard to the taste or appetising nature of the meal, individual preferences, social conventions, enjoyment, participation...