Are we allowed to talk about the Speaking Exam yet?

 Are we allowed to talk about the Speaking Exam yet? Even though the speaking window is closed, I think we should be careful about discussing specifics of cards because these will be next year's mocks and also our pupils don't need us dragging this up as they focus on keeping going through their weeks and weeks of exams.

But after 2 years of not doing the Speaking Exam, it would be nice to discuss some general experiences.

I was frightened that in the interim, AQA could have found a new paper-setter with a slightly different style. Specifically, I was worried that the Role Play could have shifted to being more transactional style situations. What I mean is rather than requiring the pupils to say something built out of the Spanish they know, it would be wholesale phrases learned by rote. Edexcel are more prone to this. With things like "My wallet has been stolen" which is grammatically beyond GCSE which but has come up as a phrase pupils are supposed to have learned along with a collection of situational phrases. The AQA exam has a mix of situations and contexts, but I think generally they could still be done by pupils making their own sentences out of their repertoire of Spanish.

I did actually sit in on one Edexcel Speaking Exam for a pupil taking an exam in their own parents' language. For the purposes of anonymity and exam security in this post, let's say it was Italian. (It wasn't.) But what happened in the role play was the prompts were that they were talking to an "Italian" teacher. It wasn't at all clear if this meant a teacher who was English but a teacher of Italian. Or an Italian teacher visiting a school in England. Or if the pupil was visiting a school in Italy. And because the pupil themself was "Italian", were they pretending to be English? And the teacher conducting the exam was an Italian pretending to be Italian. This was OK until the unexpected question, which was about the pupil's experiences so far in "this school". They had no idea which school, and neither did I or the teacher conducting the exam.

The AQA cards, of course, are not immune to this kind of confusion. Having the prompts in the target language was imposed on the exam boards. They are the experts in exams, and they knew it wouldn't work. The prompts couldn't gift the pupils the words they needed. But without using those words, it's impossible to convey what you are asking them to say. It is one of the paradigms of a good exam, that you don't have to take time out of teaching the subject, in order to teach the exam technique. This would be easy to fix if they just did what everyone wanted and put the prompts in English. 

One thing I have to work on: Pupils asking questions. Not because they couldn't ask questions. But because they couldn't ask the question prompted by the card. There's a question mark and a single word. And they have to ask a question about that. They didn't. They asked questions of their own invention. They just couldn't read the examiner's mind and guess what question they were supposed to be asking.

This is why I tell the pupils the Speaking Exam is like a football match. After the Role Play you will probably be 3 - 1 down. Your job is to come out in the second half and score 10 goals in the Conversation so you win 11 - 3.

The Photocard. There was one card that stood out as a bizarre image. On a topic that is in the specification. But which was just mind boggling. I'm not going to give any more away, but if you did the AQA Spanish exam you will know which one I meant. It fell to a near native speaker. Who just shook their head and we moved on to the other questions on the card. I don't actually remember much about the photocard part of the exam. I just read my script and did the timing. And worked out what Conversation topics were coming next. It's all a bit of a blur, to be honest.

The Conversation. Pupils answered the questions. Giving opinions, reasons and examples in past and future. I asked obvious questions to get started. And followed up with and... so... Why..? for example..? And asked questions that flowed logically from the answers they were giving. Some were better than others. None were as good as the very best I've seen when it's not an assessment. They responded well to the interaction. But could maybe have done better at dropping in some set piece language for things like what was happening or what could have happened. That's fine. They can save that for the Writing exam. Maybe they were confident in their ability to develop answers on the spot. But I wish they had maybe done a little more preparation to have a balance of spontaneous answers alongside something up their sleeve to show off if the opportunity arose.

There was one pupil who had diligently done preparation, memorising possible answers. Delivering these word by word, they were nervous and making mistakes. As soon as I interjected and moved them away, they were much more comfortable making up answers from their repertoire of Spanish.

One big thing. And I remember it from previous years too. The Speaking Exam highlights neurodiversity. In particular allowing pupils to choose the first Theme of the Conversation. Specific pupils then have this very much in the forefront of their mind. To the exclusion of everything else. They are focused on this one Theme, the possible questions they might expect, and also a question they might ask the examiner. Coming in to the exam with this in mind, makes the Role Play (already cryptic and confusing), a huge stumbling block. Often they blurt out things they are expecting for the Conversation as their answer to the Role Play. And then having said them in the Role Play, when they realise they should be saying them again when it comes to the Conversation, it all confuses them further.

The exam, with its separate parts, confusing stimuli and different success criteria, is a marathon through a mine field. Pupils have to be agile, quick and clear thinking, resilient and responsive. Pupils who focus best on one thing find it incredibly confusing.

In terms of conducting the exam, it's worth remembering that after 2018, AQA made it clear that it is malpractice to tell the pupils that the Themes will be cut down to certain topics. So my pupils all knew that they had to be able to answer on the full breadth of the Theme. And anyway, the photocard can include any of the topics. In conducting the exam, my priorities were to give pupils the opportunity to demonstrate they could give opinions and justify them, talk about past and future, narrate events, and respond to further prompting. Some topics are better suited to this, so I started with topics like House, Region Family, Free Time, Travel, School, Careers (as dictated by the Theme). And I found that by the time pupils had developed their answers, and I had followed up with questions that logically picked up on their answers, the time went very quickly and I didn't ask a lot of questions on Social Issues and the Environment or Festivals in Spain. I hope it's clear to the examiner that precisely what I was doing was not allowing pupils to give rote-learned answers to a pre-agreed list of questions!

The Conversation, as in 2018 and 2019, continues to be the best part of the whole GCSE. Where pupils can show off what they can DO with their language. Speaking spontaneously, developing answers, interacting with the examiner. And it's central to their language-learning. It's when that core repertoire starts to gel, that other structures start to stick. It is heartbreaking that the new GCSE (in the name of ending the rote learning that was happening back in 2016) is going to stamp out this part of the exam and this aspect of learning.

What will the new GCSE change?

 We are starting to think about what we will need to change with the introduction of the new GCSE. The pupils starting Year 8 in September 2022 will be the first to take the new exam. So we should be starting to think about what they are learning and how we are teaching.

The new GCSE is part of a drive to make us change the way we teach. Together with Ofsted's "Research Review" and with the support of NCELP, we are supposed to be focusing on phonics, high frequency vocabulary, and grammatical knowledge. The hardline view of this set out in the Ofsted webinars on curriculum design, is that we should concentrate on boiling down our teaching to the essentials of language knowledge, avoiding complex or rich contexts.

But if we look just at the implications of the GCSE, perhaps we can minimise the changes needed.

I am sure the exam boards will want to keep as much continuity as possible. For them, the exam isn't about setting the curriculum. It's about creating an instrument which consistently, year on year, discriminates between pupils of different grades. I think that the look and the feel of many of the questions on the Listening and Reading paper will be very similar to what we are used to.

This is reassuring on the one hand. But not great on the other. Because the Listening and Reading papers are widely criticised. And while the new GCSE proposals seemed to be promising to offer an improvement, I think that actually, what they are offering is more of the same.

Their big offer was a restricted vocabulary list, based on the most high frequency words. In fact, looking at the current exams, this does not represent a big change. The texts are largely constructed out of non topic words. As I showed in this earlier post, there is a preponderance of non topic words. And the scattering of topic words are familiar ones or cognates. Also the words which unlock the correct answers are the non topic words. As I discussed in this post, it's words like, too, started to, was going to, never, so much... which make the difference between what AQA accept and reject.

The issue with the current Reading and Listening is that this focus on directly translating all the little words means that what masquerades as a comprehension question, is anything but. In this earlier post, we saw that a correct answer to the question, "What impressed her about the school?" (They grew fruit and veg on the school field), is not accepted. Pupils had to write "They grew fruit and veg on PART of the school field." This is clearly not a comprehension question. What impressed her was indeed the fact that they grew fruit and veg on the field. What AQA want is an answer, not that answers a question with comprehension of the text, but an answer that shows knowledge of the non topic words. 

Also, it requires an answer based on parsing the whole sentence word-by-word. Of course, when listening to a foreign language, we don't understand by a one way street of understanding every word to arrive at meaning. We keep in constant review what we think the word is and what the overall sense is. Especially in French, where you can't even decide if the word you hear was porc or port until you've started to put together more of the context. But the exam board, wanting to test knowledge of items of language, not ability to construct meaning, often use slightly off-beat contexts, in order to throw pupils back on word-by-word parsing. I'll say that again. The exam boards deliberately pick contexts to bamboozle the pupils. This leads to a mixture of hilarity and concern amongst teachers on twitter. At once amused and outraged by texts on unicycling mountaineers (yes, really). But this idea of being tested on word by word (unnaturally slow) sentences is key to the new proposals. So yes, the exams will be very similar. Because they are intent on keeping their worst features.

In fact, with a reduced defined vocabulary list, the exam will still have to discriminate in the same way, with the same number of candidates getting questions wrong. So it is likely to be even more based on tricks and traps and tying pupils in word knots than the current exam.

It is true that there is a huge vocabulary list for the current GCSE. But this is a bit of a red herring. (Or red hake in the case of the 2020 Spanish exam.) Every year there is a question that comes up with words teachers have never heard of. But which turn out to be on the list. This hits the headlines, but it's not central to how the exams are constructed. And it demonstrates that we are NOT building our curriculum around the list of words in the specification. Teachers weren't even aware the words were there. We are mainly getting on with teaching pupils the language they need for the Speaking and Writing.

The current situation is that there is a discrepancy between the language we teach pupils in order to speak and write, and the language they need for the Listening and Reading exams. For the Speaking and Writing, we teach the most powerful language for giving opinions, justifying them, talking about past and future. For the Listening and Reading they need non topic language like so much, too, a bit, not very, started to, part of, never, until. I think a genuine attempt to solve the discrepancy would have been to make the Listening and Reading more similar to the language we teach for the Speaking and Writing. But they've decided to do it the other way round!

There will be some differences in the Listening exam. The biggest of these will be the dictation. This is supposedly to test phonics. But as we saw with porc and port, you can't transcribe the word without grappling with meaning. Or in the case of porc and porcs grappling with the grammar. The earlier we all get started with practising dictation, the better. It's not a simple phonics test. Pupils' brains will naturally try to make sense of what they hear. And then maybe write words they know, rather than transcribe the sounds. And as part of a GCSE, the dictation has to grade the pupils. So it won't be a friendly check of the sound spelling link. It will need to be a test where a grade 5 pupil on the higher tier gets half of it wrong. There may be some help with the idea of untangling listening for meaning and transcribing the words, if the exam boards use a text which has been previously used in the same exam as a comprehension question. I'm not quite sure how this is going to work with the stipulation that the comprehension questions are made of known words, but the phonics dictation should contain some unknown words. My money is on names of people and places.

The Speaking exam will look largely familiar. With Role Plays and a Picture based task. These will require short answers. Whether these will be phrasebook style, or built out of the pupils' knowledge of grammar, I don't know. The thrust of the reforms is that they should test accuracy and recall, but we shall see. All we know is that the responses are to be short. Which brings us to the biggest thing about this exam. And which will have the biggest impact on our teaching. There is no conversation. No scope for pupils to show what they can do with their language to express themselves, develop answers, interact.

I think the new GCSE is reacting to the horrendous situation under the old Controlled Assessment GCSE, where pupils learned and delivered fancy scripts by rote. The proposals are based on a review of languages from 2016 by something called "The Teaching Schools Council". And they don't want to go back to long rote-learned answers. Unfortunately, because their research is from 6 years ago, they are replicating what the Controlled Assessment GCSE did: stamping out teaching which develops pupils' ability to use their language, extending answers spontaneously.

If like me, that's what you spend KS3 and KS4 doing, then just like in 2011 (remember the longest ever TES forum thread when we realised?) you will have to abandon teaching pupils to use a growing core repertoire and how to get good at deploying it. Unless... Unless you believe this is fundamental to language-learning and make the foolhardy decision to persist with it.

In the Speaking exam, as with the Listening exam, there is a new Phonics test. This time it is a reading aloud test. I am a big fan of phonics and I think reading aloud is important. Thinking of it as part of an assessment is going to take a lot of working out. Again, it will have to be a GCSE test which discriminates between pupils of different grades, with most pupils getting a lot of it wrong. As with the dictation, I am worried about how pupils do when simultaneously focusing on meaning and the sound-spelling link in an exam situation. This is compounded by the fact that pupils will also have to respond to comprehension of the meaning of the text, with questions on it (or on the topic?) after they have read aloud. Again, if this means there's a clash between texts for comprehension being made of known words and texts for phonics containing unknown words, 

I wonder if the solution is names of people and places? If it's names of Paris metro stations, then it would panic me personally! How do you say Barbès–Rochechouart? Or Ménilmontant? Wagram? Or perhaps they could use cognates, so that the words are comprehensible but still a test of phonics. This would set alarm bells ringing because when the pupils see a cognate, it takes a huge wrench to tear themselves away from pronouncing it the English way.

I don't know about the Writing exam. Is this because less is known? Or have I not been paying attention because I'm focused on the removal of developing spontaneous answers in the Speaking exam? My money is on more translation, so the exam can focus on knowledge of specified language features. And on accuracy.

I don't know how much difference all this will make to your teaching. Start trying out dictation and reading aloud. Make sure you've got phonics sorted. Work out how you can increase your focus on grammatical accuracy. Reduce the amount of time you spend getting pupils to express themselves, improve their answers and think up things they can say with a repertoire of language. Instead focus on their recall of specific language you want to test them on. Decide whether to keep and tweak your curriculum, or whether to throw it out and use the NCELP scheme of work and resources. Or if it makes sense to mix and match - although unless I am mistaken, the strength of the NCELP resources is their meticulous sequencing and revisiting, so dipping in and out might not work. And decide what to do with the pupils already starting Year 8 in September 2022.

It's all a bit of a conundrum. And I still don't know what to do after a year of reflecting on it.

Failure

**Important update. Now this post stands out as a clear calling out of the "gaslighting" MFL teachers suffered under the previous government, I do need to make it clear that there is no personal blame or attack on MFL figures who were trying to make things work. Or indeed succeeding in driving forward the debate around MFL teaching. The Ofsted Research Review was produced in a formulaic landscape of other subject reviews, all tied to the spurious Novice-Expert model, trying to fit MFL teaching into an ambitious step by step approach just as the Frameworks of Objectives had done a generation earlier. And NCELP stand out for their work on an incredibly intricate curriculum where every word counts in a way that had never been envisaged let alone attempted before. And the people leading these initiatives are the most respected and loved individuals in the MFL community. As well as driving forward the debate on language teaching, they are renowned for their generosity and for championing the work of others.

Here is the post as it was written in 2022 under the former government:

 The government want to bring in a new dawn for modern languages. Where teaching based on a meticulously sequenced curriculum of incremental knowledge puts an end to pupils' frustration and confusion. Implicitly (or even explicitly) this is labelling the current teaching of languages as "failing". And putting the blame on the values and practices of teachers.

This accusation of obdurate failure of an entrenched educational "blob" goes back to Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. They wanted to "move fast and break things" and have said that they were surprised at how far they were able to go without meeting resistance. It is a favourite of politicians who want to be seen to be doing something, or with an idea to push.

So how true is this picture of failure?

If it is based on the level of language that pupils achieve, it's worth pointing out how this has progressed. In the 2000s, for a top grade at GCSE, pupils needed to write short pieces of coursework on familiar topics, including opinions, reasons and reference to past and future. They could do this using all their resources and previous pieces of work. There were marks for presentation. It is what we routinely teach in Year 8 and Year 9 now. At GCSE in 2022, pupils have to write extended pieces in exam conditions, on unprepared questions.

If it is based on the 2016 curriculum review by something called "The Teaching Schools Council", then this was during the disastrous period of the Controlled Assessment GCSE. The exam favoured rote-learning of fancy long scripts. Teachers who tried to teach pupils to speak and write spontaneously using a growing repertoire of language found they could not compete with schools whose pupils just memorised answers. It was the zenith of competition between schools and punitive pressure to succeed. It was the period of targets and the imperative of getting pupils "the grade they deserve". Ironically the Controlled Assessment approach, brought in after the Dearing Report found the speaking exam was "intimidating", turned it into an unpalatable chore. And put a stop to successful language teaching for a decade. I am not confident that we aren't going to return to something similar. 

If it is based on GCSE grades, then these have been set in advance, and are nothing to do with teachers' or pupils' levels of performance. Before the first pupils even started studying for the new GCSE in 2016, it was already set in advance that they would typically get lower grades than in their other subjects. Because this is how the grades are given out. Ofqual know that it is a problem. As I wrote in an earlier post, Ofqual know that grades in MFL at GCSE and A Level are not aligned with other subjects. But it's not their brief to make sure they are. It's Ofqual's brief to make sure standards in each subject stay the same year on year. Within this brief, they have tried to do what they can to move MFL results more into line with other subjects. They looked at the fact that for an elite subject with a high number of A grades, A Level languages had a dearth of A*s. They looked at the effect of native speakers on A Level grades. At GCSE they looked at how levels matched up with European pupils, in a desperate attempt to find something in their legal brief (international comparability of standards) that would allow them to intervene.

And of course because the outcomes are set to be lower in languages, the targets pupils are given are lower than in their other subjects. Giving them a clear (and correct) message that they are likely to achieve a lower grade in languages. What isn't always made clear to them, is that this isn't any reflection of their individual ability in the subject. Or their teachers' performance. Or the difficulty of the content. It is just the way grades in languages are allocated.

If it is based on the number of pupils choosing languages, then how is this judged? The government wants 90% of pupils to be entered for GCSE languages by 2027. Again, we are being set up for "failure". If the government wanted, they could make languages compulsory again, give it back the status of a core subject, have a national strategy and a plan for recruitment and staffing. Instead, they use the cowardly and phoney "ebacc". Which masquerades as something pupils can gain, when in fact as a qualification it is utterly spurious. If languages are one subject in an option block of 5 or 6 subjects, and all perfectly good subjects, like history, geography, computer science, drama, technology... then why is it a "failure" for languages if pupils pick those other subjects. And in many schools the number of GCSEs pupils pick has been reduced, without noticing a particular further squeeze in how many are opting for languages.

In our school, surveys show that the majority of pupils in Year 9 are positively considering taking a language. Even when they don't end up opting for a language. The surveys also show that even before we ask pupils to start thinking about options, our pupils have a career in mind and have ideas as to whether or not a language is important for this. And we know from a recent Cambridge University study, that the parental attitude to languages is twice as powerful as anything that happens in school, when it comes to picking (or not picking) a language at GCSE. 

We mustn't be bullied into thinking we are "failing" because of ridiculous targets.

Then there's the whole caricatured narrative around how we teach. Ofsted seem to think that we have never considered the balance required between a focus on communication and a focus on grammar. Or considered that in the reality of the classroom, the two may not be opposites at all. We don't refuse to teach pupils the sound-spelling link. We don't bamboozle pupils by talking at them in the target language until it alienates them. We don't teach phrases wholesale without pupils knowing what the words mean. We don't have a curriculum driven by ticking off things pupils can say, without thinking about the development of their grammatical conceptualisation. We don't teach lists of nouns without enabling pupils to use them. We don't teach topic content and then abandon it when we start a new topic.

The whole narrative is a political fiction. It's us, the teachers, who are making the whole system work, in the face of the externally imposed nonsense of targets, grading, performance measures, assessments. We'll be the ones making the new GCSE work too.

It turned out all right in the end

 One problem with tweets and blogs is you only see the shiny successful fancy stuff. Never the lesson that went wrong. Probably less because people don't want to talk about it or won't admit that it happens. More because we're wary of portraying our schools and our pupils in a negative light.

Anyway, we all know it happens. Here's what happened to me last week with a lesson that just flopped and how it turned out alright in the end, because it's not about one activity, one lesson. It's about progress and moving forward together.

I was planning on doing Ready Steady French with my Year 8 middle set. I know Ready Steady Cook is from before they were born, although it has been revived recently. So I briefly explained that it was a cooking programme where people brought along ingredients and had to make something tasty out of them.

The metaphor of "ingredients" is particularly powerful. Through this lesson, I wanted to get across the idea that you use the French ingredients you have. To make something tasty. And it's not about learning more and more French. It's about getting better at using the ingredients you have. And using them in the right proportions. Lots of cake, a bit of icing, and a couple of smarties. And not sitting there making nothing because you've decided to make something that requires ingredients you don't have. 

And for the Ready Steady French format, the distinction between store cupboard ingredients and the specific ingredients you've brought in or been given.

I had borrowed the Red Tomatoes, Green Peppers logo to shine on the board and I'd set up three rounds. Round One was an individual round, working with one ingredient plus our store cupboard ingredients. How many things can you make out of "nager"? Making single sentences and exploring all the things in our store cupboard we can always use. Things like opinions, verb + infinitive, conjunctions, people and places.

Round Two was going to be a pairs round about combining ingredients. So with "nager", "jouer", "faire les magasins" and "aller", could you use the store cupboard ingredients to make a mini paragraph along the lines of "I love to swim in the pool but if I go to the beach I don't like to swim because I prefer to play football on the beach..."

Round Three was going to involve them making a bag of "ingredients" picked from the unit vocabulary list to give to another pair to make something nice out of in French. This did not happen.

They just were not buying it. I don't know if they were thrown by the format? Or didn't take it seriously. Or if I was too focused on the activity and not enough on taking them with me. Or if one of them was confused by the metaphor and thought we were really cooking. Or if the set changes made by the head of year had changed the group dynamic and they'd already had a bad lesson in history. Or if the fact we were working on paper instead of exercise books changed their attitude. I thought the paper was so they could try things out and have a go. Did they think it was a test? Anyway, we struggled through Round One. And then did Round Two together rather than as a challenge.

Then I abandoned Round Three. Instead I gave them a "recipe" on the board to follow and made them do a bit of writing following it. Basically the recipe was:

positive opinion        because I can...        especially if...

but     negative opinion    because I have to...    I prefer...

I also did list the ingredients on the board so they had everything they needed.

It kept to the ingredients/cooking metaphor but got rid of the format. And they did it very well. It could be that the TV show format had unsettled them. And they worked better just being told to work in silence on their piece of paper. Or it could be that this class often have ups and downs, not necessarily linked to what I am asking them to do. I know their history teacher says the same thing.

So what happened next? The next lesson I told them I still wanted to see how good they were at using their ingredients. I stressed it wasn't a test. And that I was going to give them a series of opportunities with different levels of support. But that first I wanted to see what they could do just with the French they carry around in their head.

This is the sort of thing that I got. Or this:

Confident writing, from the store cupboard ingredients they use for all topics. Plus topic specific vocabulary for Free Time which is what we are working on. All unprepared and written with French they know.

My comments on their work aren't about the French at all. They are all about what we can do in our next piece of work to make it a better piece of writing. Better organised, more personal, less repetitive. And that's what we will do after half term. I told them this was just me looking at what they could do and that they would have the chance to improve it. We'll see what they come up with!

Talking about Statistics (sort of) Part Three

 We all know that barely understood statistics based on KS2 English and Maths results are used to tell pupils that they will probably achieve lower grades in languages than in their other subjects. Because the grades given out are set up in order to make this come true. On average. And we may or may not understand that while this is set in stone for the whole cohort, it doesn't mean that the "target" grade has any validity at all for the individual pupil.

The pupils' target grades for languages are lower, not because they personally are worse at languages, but because nationally the grades given out for languages are lower than for other subjects. Knowing that can help get rid of the misconception that the target grade is a reflection of the pupil's ability in the subject. But it doesn't help with the perception that the grades are harder to get in languages, because it is an accurate perception. 

Not because the subject matter is harder. But because even before the current GCSE had been examined, it was set by "comparable outcomes" that it would preserve the numbers of pupils getting each grade. With the old A-G grades it was half a grade harder. With the way the new 9-1 grades match up, it is a whole grade harder.

In this post I am going to look at another aspect that got tangled up with this. National Curriculum Levels. The old National Curriculum had levels from 1 to 8. They applied to the years where languages were compulsory or an "entitlement". So KS3 and KS4. They were designed mainly for reporting levels at the end of Year 9. These were assessed by teachers using their own assessments and reported nationally each year.

The problem was, rather than being used for summative assessment, they became seen as some kind of progression model. A purpose for which they were not designed. And where teachers stuck to this flawed (failed) progression model, it did harm the evolution of the successful teaching of languages.

Schools thought that progress was made by pupils starting at Level 1. And working their way up to Level 2. And maybe making it to Level 3. This was reinforced by the totally fictitious invention of "sublevels": 1a, 1b, 1c. It wasn't even clear if you started at a, then worked towards b. Or if "a" meant you were at the top of the level, b in the middle, c at the bottom. Because they were based on nothing. But further gave the impression of a gradation of progression to be worked through. In Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. Separately.

And there were schools which thought that this progression model was mandated for every unit. So every time you started a new topic your pupils would start at Level 1 and slowly work their way towards Level 2. Unfortunately, Level 1 meant learning single words. Level 2 was phrases. Level 3 was sentences. Level 4 was paragraphs. Levels 5 upwards involved tenses. And because the National Curriculum applied to KS3 and KS4, it seemed reasonable to expect that KS3 would be Levels 1 to 4. And GCSE would be Levels 5 to 8.

So you could end up with a situation where teachers were carefully working their way through a "progression" model that took pupils in Year 9 to a level where the highest they aimed for was to be thinking about moving from sentences to short paragraphs. And maybe using I'm going to... in order to claim they were using tenses.

Of course, the best way to get pupils to extend their answers and write paragraphs, isn't to spend most of the curriculum time working on learning single words or set phrases one topic at a time.

The best way to get pupils good at extending answers and writing paragraphs, is to spend most of the time working on developing their answers. Teaching speaking, writing, reading and listening together, to develop a core repertoire of language pupils can use across topics.

You can see what the proponents of the new GCSE are reacting to, when they say we need to move away from lists of topic based nouns.

Except of course we already reacted. We already moved away. In 2002 the Open University filmed me teaching a lesson in which pupils were using a core of language to speak spontaneously and develop their own answers creatively in speaking and writing. In the video we talk about Levels 5 and 6 with the Year 8 group. Because the way to get to "Level 6" is to go straight to Level 6 stuff and spend time getting good at it.

In 2005 I published this article in the Language Learning Journal about the grammar needed for GCSE.

It makes the case for going directly to the Level you want to achieve. Equipping the pupils with a "kit" of grammar that they can deploy. And then spending the time getting good at using it.

A grammar which is generative, not censoring. A grammar which pupils can consciously or unconsciously use to create meaning. Grammar defined as the building blocks which allow them to put the language together to create meaning.

Only this first page of the article is accessible. The rest is behind the paywall. The "kit" it goes on to describe is what I used to call the pupils' "Emergency Sheet". The structures for giving and justifying opinions, talking about past and future, which they could use for any topic.

Interestingly, this "kit" is what we now routinely teach in Year 8.

And it serves two purposes. It equips pupils with the language they need for immediate use. To work on developing and extending their answers. But secondly, by giving them that repertoire, that core of language, it means that more and more grammar and grammatical understanding sticks to that core. But the ability to use the language is key. The pupils who go on to A Level and to tackle more and more grammar, often quote me back to myself, saying their moment of realisation was the idea that it's not about learning more language. It's about learning to use the language that you have. And once you start doing that, more and more language and conceptualisation of the language will stick.

Whereas the new GCSE/NCELP/Ofsted new orthodoxy is the opposite. For them, conceptualisation of the language has to come first. And use of the language may or may not follow. Because of the political doctrine that "knowledge" has to come before "skills". Which we can see de-skilling our pupils across the curriculum.

The Secret of GCSE Reading Exams

 Please don't tell my Year 11. Because they think that I carefully planned their lesson this week. And I didn't. I just understand how the Reading Exam seems to work.

With their Speaking Exam done, and all their books and resources at home, lessons now are a mishmash of vocabulary revision, exam technique, past paper Listening and Reading questions, core repertoire for the writing exam, and keeping relaxed and positive.

In the AQA spec, there is a very long list of vocabulary for each topic. Which I don't think I have looked at since 2016 when the spec was rushed out. We start Spanish in Year 9 and we don't have time to learn all the recondite words for "hake" or "freckles". We used to have Quizlet sets that contained all the vocabulary from the list that had made it into the Viva textbook. But as it was just random lists of words that didn't fit with the core repertoire pupils are developing, it didn't work. Our new Quizlet sets develop the repertoire for giving opinions, justifying them, talking about the past and future, narrating stories, hope, conflict, disappointment. And some topic vocabulary that fits with these structures and sticks to the pupils' growing snowball of language. The previous sets gave a nice even covering of Spanish which just melted away.

So if "hake" and "freckles" are in the exam, then our pupils are particularly exposed to danger. Because they won't know it. And "hake", which I had always used as an example of why you don't need to frighten pupils with the indigestible list in the spec, DID come up in 2020. Even so, when you look at the exams, unless this year there is a new exam setter with a new approach, it's not the topic words which are most important. (Fingers crossed.)

I haven't shown my pupils the pages and pages of topic vocabulary in the spec. But I have printed off as a booklet pages 24-40 (AQA Spanish spec) of General Vocabulary. They think this is quite enough! These are words that have more "function" within the language than "meaning" relating to the external world.

So, this week, we spent the first part of the lesson repeatedly testing each other on random words from this General Vocabulary section. And making up sentences to put them in context or to see them in context and make them memorable. Then I opened a past paper and picked a random question. This was where my class thought I had deliberately planned the words that we had seen. The entire text was made up of the words we had been testing. And it's not a lucky coincidence.

I don't want to show you the text because it's behind the AQA security to keep it safe for mocks. But here's a break-down of the words it contains.

You can see there is a preponderance of non topic words. And that's without accounting for the fact that the words in column 1 were repeated while the words in column 3 appeared only once. The first sentence of the text was 17 words long. And only one word was a "topic" word. The "topic" words are also not particularly abstruse (no hake here) or are easily recognised cognates. (A cognate does NOT have to be identical. It means "twin" words which are born together. And twins can be identical or non identical.)

We have seen from the Listening Papers, that the non topic words aren't just important in how the examiners build the texts, but also in what they accept as the answer. Most famously in the "What most impressed her was the school grew fruit and vegetables on PART of the school field" example. A perfectly good answer to "What impressed her?" (They grew fruit and veg on the school field) was not acceptable without the words "part of".

So maybe actually we should tell my Year 11. It wasn't a tightly planned lesson. And it wasn't lucky chance either. These are the words that matter in the exam.

And someone should tell the new GCSE panel (if it still exists) too. They sold us the new GCSE on the grounds that a limited list of vocabulary, based on high frequency words (no hake here) would solve the issues of the hated Reading and Listening exams.

But it turns out that the hated Reading and Listening exams are already based on these non topic words. The problem is that the exams are not about testing comprehension. The texts are often slightly bizarre to stop pupils deducing the language from the context. Because they want to test "knowledge" of items of language, not ability to make sense of the passage. The markscheme insists on pupils showing word by word parsing (PART of the field) even when it's irrelevant to the actual question.

So the new GCSE is promising even more of the same when it comes to the Listening and Reading exams. If you responded happily to the "consultation" thinking they were going to end the tricks and traps and nitpicky questions, then they have sold you a cat not a hare (as they say in Spanish).

And that is only the half of it. My pupils spend most of their time working on their repertoire for Speaking and Writing. Being able to develop their answers spontaneously, express themselves, speak more and more fluently. This is what they love about Spanish and what I love about teaching it. But even if you don't care about that and want to focus on "knowledge", then it's having that growing core repertoire that means the vocabulary has something to stick to. Creating a new GCSE which doesn't reward spontaneous developed answers where pupils can extend their answers in response to further questioning or prompting, is going to ruin language learning in this country, the same way the Controlled Assessment GCSE destroyed it for a generation.

The current GCSE is not great for Reading and Listening. It's OK for Speaking and Writing, especially compared to what we had before. The new GCSE proposes to "improve" the Reading and Listening but in fact will keep them very much the same. And under the cover of these bogus promises of "improvement", it will completely destroy Speaking and Writing. It is going to get rid of assessing how well pupils can use their language, and replace it with testing how much "knowledge" they can recall. And they are shooting themselves in the foot. Because it's taking ownership of the language, using it to express meaning, and getting better at using it, that gives pupils the core of language that everything else sticks to.

If I seem to be casting nasturtiums in this post, it may just be that coming from a week where pupils did an oral exam by speaking spontaneously, extending their answers in response to prompts for more information, and interacting with the examiner, I am angry at the idea of this being snatched away again by people who claim to want to improve on the situation in 2016, but actually in effect want to return us to it.

Update from the future (2024): We may have seen off the threat to developing speaking and writing in the new GCSE. Seems like a win!

Je voudrais or Je ne voudrais pas?

 Teaching Year 7 to order food in a French restaurant. Would seem a fairly mainstream thing to do. The one thing that parents command their children to do when they take them on holiday to France. But a bit like teaching "Je m'appelle...", it turns out to be mildly controversial in the current climate with its feverish debate over whether we are teaching pupils to communicate or whether we are teaching them grammar patterns. (Spoiler: We are capable of doing both.)

So if a pupil in a dialogue says, "La soupe", is this better or worse than saying, "Je voudrais la soupe"?

We've all gone back and insisted they say, "I would like". I suppose because we have a literacy/oracy push where full sentences are expected. Or maybe because we are getting ready for its role in, "Le week-end prochain je voudrais aller en ville mais je dois faire mes devoirs" in Year 8. But basically it's a crystal clear indicator that even when we are teaching "useful" communicative language, we still have our eye firmly on the structures of the language.

And there's plenty of grammar to unpack on the topic of food. Swapping between un - le - du / une - la - de la. Including the definite article when giving an opinon - j'aime le chocolat. Introducing tu / vous. Question forms. Phonics.

In fact, I find myself wondering if I shouldn't be doing less grammar and more on the practical communicative functional situational language. Is it OK to teach, "Je voudrais un steak" without equipping them to say how they would like it done? Or ask if there's a gluten free vegan option? Or is this the plethora of fluff we should be avoiding because it puts hurdles in the way of pupils who need to meet only language that exemplifies the grammar patterns?

We used to run a French Staff Restaurant every year to make this a real communicative experience for the pupils. The teachers had to order their food in French from the Year 7 pupils. Dealing with the real situation meant they had to communicate for real, drawing on all the French they had been learning, coping with situations that arose and teachers who didn't follow the "script." It put the emphasis on French for real communication, with the teachers also put on the spot. Nowadays, would this be treated with scorn as distracting from the real learning?

Another thing we do in lessons is start with scripted dialogues, then let pupils adapt them. Giving them scenarios to act out: The customer has a small dog hidden in their bag... The waiter is trying to hide from their old geography teacher sitting on the next table... Or is this just distracting fluff?

We have definitely boosted the part of the unit around giving opinions about different foods. Using the core structures to say things like, j'aime la glace avec des guimauves mais je n'aime pas les gateaux avec de la moutarde. Where does this fall? Is it sufficiently shifting the focus from the list of foods onto the powerful verbs? Or is it too much based on chunks of language and pupils recombining them to say fun things? For us it's all about the pupils' snowball of language, with more and more French sticking to it and not melting when you move from one topic to the next.

Or maybe this unit, instead of focusing on "Je voudrais" should be all about the food. French culture. And the culture of other French-speaking countries. Looking at foods and the culture and values around food. When we do this topic with Year 9 Spanish beginners, we concentrate on being able to have a conversation about the menu. What type of dish is it? What does it contain? How is it served? And we look at food websites to be able to ask and answer those questions, looking beyond the name of a dish. The "difficulty" of finding the information in the authentic materials, mimics and rehearses the communicative situation of needing to ask and decide what to order.

In French, we look at table manners. Pupils enjoy taking about what you can and shouldn't do in different circumstances. And guess what? It practises using the core structures of on peut, on doit, on ne doit pas. 

What a delicious unit of work with all these things on the menu. It's almost as if we have always carefully monitored the balance between the focus on the structures of the language, the cultural aspects and the communication.