GCHQ Challenges

 There's lots to fill you in on with how I'm doing rewriting our booklets - although the really interesting part will come when we see how they go down in the classroom. Meanwhile, I need to do an update on the GCHQ challenge our International Leaders did with Year 8.

I was wondering if GCHQ were going to produce materials to promote languages. I know they have done spectacular Cyber Challenges and Competitions in the past. As languages is part of their core activity, I would have expected them to be leading the way in promoting languages in schools and their usefulness for the UK. I have heard that they are going to be launching a national languages competition sometime soon. So I very much look forward to that. Meanwhile they have these school activities on their website.

The activity takes the form of a scenario: You are listening to intercepted conversations with members of an organised criminal gang. GCHQ identify and exemplify 4 different features of their work: decoding encrypted messages; language skills; cultural references; "veiled" or opaqe use of language. The scenario requires all four of these activities.

Our Year 9 International Leaders tried out the materials and decided the "Year 11" ones would be best for our Year 8s. It was done as a Tutor Time challenge, with pairs of International Leaders going to each form for 2 twenty minute sessions.

They gave a brief introduction to GCHQ as the UK's intelligence gathering organisation and talked briefly about careers there - there are further videos on the GCHQ website if teachers want to follow up with these. Then they gave out the resources for pupils to tackle the scenario. First a simple substitution cypher to decode encrypted words. Then work with dictionaries to translate the French. This went better than expected, with Year 8 pupils well able to look for the overall meaning of the sentence rather than getting bogged down looking up words like "sont" or being frustrated by not finding feminine forms of adjectives in the dictionary. I think this was down to expert help from the Year 9 International Leaders.

 The "veiled" language was not a problem for pupils who had paid attention to the instructions, where it was spelled out that the criminals often used names of fruit to refer to drugs. Perhaps the criminals stole this idea from a previous generation of French teaching resources,- didn't "cauliflower" refer to smuggled diamonds in the 1970s BBC schools series set in a French fishing village? 

This left the pupils with some cultural knowledge to tackle. To pinpoint the date of the illicit transaction, the criminals referred to French festivals. The Year 8 forms were given an overnight deadline to find this information and submit their answers.

All forms submitted what information they thought had been intercepted. And we gave out certificates for participating and for the winners.

The materials were great for illustrating the 4 facets of interpreting communications that GCHQ wanted to exemplify. They were a fun challenge for pupils to tackle involving French. The Year 11 materials were more suitable for Year 8, and were easily tackled by pupils working independently supported by the International Leaders. For my purposes, this was a key aspect: I am looking to recruit a new cohort of International Leaders from this year group for next year, so this was a great opportunity to highlight their role.

I do suggest you have a look at the resources. And hunt around on the GCHQ site for videos of what it's like to work there and how they use languages. I have taught at least one pupil who has used their languages in intelligence, but I can't reveal any details. And I am really looking forward to the national competition that GCHQ are preparing. I hope they can continue to support language-learning in schools with activities like this which highlight the importance of languages and the usefulness of language-learning.

Re-writing booklets. Year 7 Unit 1.

 I don't know how it's been for you, if you've followed developments in language teaching in England over the last year a bit, but for me, writing this blog has been useful to start to think through some of the issues and I am ready to make some decisions.

I am rewriting the booklets we use as a department. The headline for this blog is that I am going to make it much clearer to teachers and pupils how the learning can be broken down. And how we balance the focus on meaning and the focus on the form of language. The sub heading is that overall, I am going to change as little as possible.

Here's what I'm doing with Year 7 Unit 1, as an example.

Rather than take lots of little pieces (phonics, verb to have, verb to be, gender rules, high frequency vocabulary) and see what it adds up to, we will be starting with whole phrases, whole conversations. Year 7 pupils love hearing French and being pleased they can figure out what is being said. They love getting their tongues around sentences, and the challenge of being quick to reply. Teachers love having French as a medium of communication in their classroom right from the start. What we will do, is exploit those conversations for phonics, meaning, and grammar. Then we will work on the component parts so that pupils can move on from the scripted conversations. First of all to adapt them to themselves. And then to be able to vary and manipulate them more and more widely, using their growing knowledge of how the language works.

We are going to have real French characters through the booklet and reappearing in future units.

The first character is the actor and singer Louane. Here's the first dialogue for pupils to find out some basic information about her.

We will work on understanding what it says. But also what it literally means and the ways French is different to English.

We will exploit it for phonics. We use Rachel Hawkes / Comberton Village College Francophoniques. There are keywords and actions for the sounds. We work intensively on this so that the actions become linked not to the word, but directly to the sound. So the teacher can anticipate the pronunciation of the word comment with the dents action for the sound en.

Then we work on memorisation and fluency.

At this point, we are still ostensibly working on the original Louane dialogue, but I don't think pupils or teachers will be able to resist substituting their own details.

That's what happens next. We work on pets, numbers, months, family members. Each in turn exploited for phonics and grammar. So pets, with oiseau and poisson, works brilliantly for phonics. And it also means we have to tackle un / une. Where again, the issue of pronunciation is perhaps more critical than gender. Pupils do get gender (and increasingly refer to using the correct definite/indefinite articles as getting the "pronouns" right). But everything falls apart if their pronunciation of un / une is indeterminate. And with pets we introduce je and ai and our friend Mr Apostrophe. And je  and ne and ai and pas. Again, in an expression with meaning first, before breaking it down. Not the other way round. And numbers and plurals.

And then similarly family members, numbers, months. All great for phonics. And then, the pupils are equipped to go back to the Louane dialogue and adapt and manipulate it.

Then we go through the process again adding personality (je suis and adjectival agreement) and physical description to the Louane conversation. And then to the pupils' own conversations. And then to seeing the Louane information written up in the third person. And the pupils writing about themselves in the third person.

The next step will be to introduce Bigflo and Oli as characters. And go through the same process, to introduce a conversation with vous / nous and written up texts with ils.

It's a tricky first unit to do as a booklet. So much of it is spoken, it's not going to be booklet based! When I was working on rewriting the Year 8 Unit 1 booklet, I found that sequencing the focus on grammar and phonics didn't mean you were making anything that added up to how a lesson would work. So this Year 7 Unit 1 has turned out to be not so much a booklet as a series of powerpoints. Which teachers can then adapt.

This the key thing. What I am doing is about how we manage consistency and individual strengths in the department. This isn't about me, or a theoretical debate about language learning. This is about my own specific individual department that has had staffing fluctuations and where we are all still only just getting back to working together in the long (and not over yet) aftermath of covid.

I haven't invented or added anything I don't already do or that wasn't already in the scheme of work. But it is spelling out and making clear how everything is supposed to work. Maybe some teachers focus relatively more on the building blocks of language but don't develop how well pupils can use it. Maybe some teachers' pupils have a lovely accent and fluent responses, but don't have such a good understanding of the individual building blocks. I know consistency is in fashion, but this is all about balance. Florencia Henshaw sent me a picture of the swing of the pendulum which made me think about it in a different way. We know that the politics of language teaching swing from one extreme to the other. But Florencia's image is of the Newton's Cradle, where the ball in the middle is constantly bashed from either side, but actually does not move at all. That's us in the middle. Trying to keep on making learning happen in our lessons.