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.
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