Introducing the idea of a Game Plan in KS3

 You may have read previous posts about using a "Game Plan" as an extended metaphor for preparing the language needed for Speaking and Writing at GCSE. Today's post is about building up to that Game Plan, starting in Year 8, in the booklets I am rewriting.

What I am trying to do in rewriting the booklets is show that deliberately teaching meticulously sequenced language items is not incompatible with teaching pupils to express themselves and develop how well they can use their language. Or, to put it the other way round, to show that a curriculum based on developing how well pupils can use their language and express themselves, is not incompatible with careful, deliberate and coherent sequencing of the language.

(It still beats me why anyone would think that by espousing one you have to abandon the other.)

I am working on Year 8 Unit 3 Free Time. This builds on the previous two units in Year 8 on Town and School. Pupils are getting better and better at developing answers which give opinions and justify them using can / can't / have to / want to. So at the end of the previous unit, a typical answer might look like this: J'adore la géographie parce que je peux travailler dans un groupe. Et le professeur est sympa parce que normalement je peux parler avec mes amis si je veux. Mais en maths on doit travailler en silence. Je préfère la géographie.

Pupils are working on developing answers with increasing coherence, spontaneity and independence in speaking and writing. With lots of focus on the quality of the answer, developing one idea rather than stringing ideas together. And focus on the process - what can pupils do with and without support, how can we reduce the cognitive load of thinking up what to say, with activities like Being Ben. These are aspects of our curriculum with a strong literacy and oracy foundation, and based on the fundamentals of learning a language not only in order to communicate but by dint of being challenged to express yourself using what you know. I am not prepared to relinquish them to a doctrine that says communication places obstacles in the way of pupils' learning and that self-expression has to wait until "expert" level is reached.

That previous paragraph wasn't a digression. It was a statement of the content and purpose of the unit. In terms of new language content, we (re)introduce: the present tense of -er verbs, the present tense of the verb aller, the perfect tense in the first person.

What I want to show with the Game Plan idea, is that these are not introduced for the sake of it. They dovetail in to the pupils' growing repertoire of language. And we teach them specific ways and triggers for deploying the new language in order to continue developing the quality of their answers.

Here's a screen shot for the tactics for deploying -er verbs. Have a look at the two examples and see if you can spot the tactics before looking at the answer.

Here's what we get pupils to do next:

So they take a model, typical of the type of answer they have been giving up to now, and they work out how to deploy the new language to take it on to the next level. Their writing has had references to with my friends or with my family. Now these are exploited as a trigger, to use the conjugated -er verbs they are learning. To add them on to their repertoire, and build routines so that as they speak and write, the next idea flows coherently from what they have just said. Every time you say, with my friends, use a verb in the 1st person plural. Every time you say, with my sister, follow it up with a verb saying what she does.

The Game Plan idea continues when the verb aller is introduced. Again, the new language is introduced so that it extends the repertoire. And pupils think tactically about when to deploy it, building routines to extend and develop their answers.

Another example:

As well as looking at individual tactics, the overall Game Plan works as a framework for writing and speaking:

I think you've got the idea by now, but we can finish it off by adding the perfect tense:

Just in case, I should make it clear that there's a lot more in the booklet and a lot more in lessons than these Game Plan activities shown here. They appear regularly as part of how to use and deploy the pupils' language as part of a growing repertoire.

It's part of understanding that communication and self expression aren't something that just happens. Or aren't something too demanding that has been an undesirable obstacle to learning. Communication is like everything else. It needs work, needs developing. And while you work on developing communication, you are practising working on the language. There's no conflict between the two at all. Absolutely none.

Explicit and Implicit Learning - rewriting the Year 7 Unit on Food.

 This is NOT a post about whether you say, "Je n'ai jamais mangé un croissant" or "Je n'ai jamais mangé de croissants."

It's a post about how we structure and sequence the curriculum.

We are supposed to be at a time of transition from a curriculum built around topics and situations, to a curriculum built around knowledge of the grammatical system. Supposedly we have favoured topics, ticking off things pupils can say and situations they can deal with. The grammar is supposed to have been incidental and randomly sequenced according to the demands of the topic, not the logic of the language.

Of course this isn't true. We have curricula which cleverly intertwine grammar and communication, visiting and revisiting, using and recycling grammar, in a process of meeting, spotting patterns, practising, applying, and transferring to a new topic in an ever-growing repertoire of language.

Confident in the statements of that last paragraph, I am re-writing all the KS3 booklets, to make the grammar and phonics sequencing much more explicit. I am trying to find the balance between the two caricature extremes and show that we do manage to develop grammar AND pupils' ability to use the language very much in symbiosis.

I have done half of Year 7, half of Year 8 and half of Year 9. With no real pitfalls yet. Year 7 has been the hardest because we don't want lessons to be booklet based. It's about interaction and using the language. So I've had to dabble in powerpoints as well as the booklets. But now in the Year 7 unit on Food, I have hit some issues that bring us back to the central question.

And it is around the words some / any / not any.

In the first unit, we have a fairly traditional start. Where pupils meet the indefinite article  un / une to talk about a brother, a sister, a dog, a cat and other animals. In the second unit, we deliberately move to something pupils won't have done in Primary school, and work on describing artworks for an exhibition. This sees further work on gender and adjectival agreement. And focuses on the definite article the. "Il y a une licorne rose. La licorne est sur le pont." So far so good. 

The picture is supposed to be that definite articles and indefinite articles are picked up in the next unit on Food, and joined by the partitive "some." It makes sense, and it's what we've always done: j'aime le pain. J'ai mangé un croissant. Je voudrais du lait.

And pupils always love this Keep Talking Sheet, that means they can say great things right from the first lesson.

So pretty soon, they can talk spontaneously and write like this:

No problem. Except this year it was. I'd been talking to the group about du, de la, des. And this was the pupil's first draft. Along with his comment.

It seems that not only does he not understand how to change the into some. It has also thrown him off being able to write enough instead of agonising over which one to put. And worse, he's written le hamburgers and la fromage.

This throws up several interesting questions. You could say that the fact that he's thinking about it, and cares about it, and with his booklet he is immediately able to correct it, all means that he's going through an important process of conceptualisation and understanding. Or you could say that what he needs is simply a lot more input so that le fromage becomes automatic. In both cases this is accepting that this is not the finished article and that the learning process will continue.

You might be relaxed about the mistake. Either because you think it just doesn't matter or is not the priority, or because you know it will slowly be sorted out. Or you might believe that it's a disaster because la fromage might become fossilised and that pupils shouldn't be asked to express themselves at this stage because unsupported use of the language leads to errors. I have written here about these different attitudes to error.

But there's a further question. Why are we teaching le, un, du? In particular, why are we teaching du? Because it's fundamental to the grammar? We've taken the logical language system as a linguist would see it, and we've identified this as a key feature that pupils must master? 

Scott Thornbury has written about the difference between chopping up "the linguist's grammar" and building up "the learner's grammar" here.

There has always been this difference in approach. The new element is that we are being asked to think of it as a social justice issue. In the past, maybe we thought that for the pupils struggling most with languages, it was important to concentrate on communication, on opinions, on the topic words. And that the little words weren't important, shouldn't get in the way, could be quickly passed over. We are being told to question this. What if confusion around these high frequency little words is precisely what is frustrating learners? And what if these are the learners with less cultural capital in terms of linguistic confidence, and who are the least able to figure these words out for themselves by osmosis?

So, for example in Year 8, a pupil who says j'aime au foot or je joue le foot. What you want is for them to be able to talk confidently. Does this mean not worrying about the confusion, because getting stuck on that is an obstacle to communication? Or does it mean you should sort it out, because the confusion is an obstacle to confidence in language-learning? 

Further questions: Do they need more input so this doesn't happen? Explanation? Or careful and deliberate sequencing of how each one is introduced and when they are contrasted? Or is it perfectly fine to go through a period of confusing the two because it will sort itself out or because it's not worth getting stuck on?

So when we plan our curriculum, is grasping du more important than learning the words for fromage, pain, viande? Is du more important than learning to give opinions? Is du more important than being able to ask for food in a restaurant? We are being invited to consider that the answer is Yes it is.

If it's so important, should we be planning where pupils are going to meet du again? Apart from when they talk about food, when do pupils need to know some? Year 8 is built around saying things like: J'aime aller au parc avec mes amis surtout s'il fait beau parce que je peux jouer au tennis si je veux. Not a du, de la, des in sight.

And when they do meet it, it doesn't translate as "some": il fait du soleil, je fais du skate. An explanation here is not going to be better than just knowing it as a chunk.

The non-topic approach is meant to be about getting away from lists of nouns and away from chunks. And shifting the focus to the high frequency words. So in j'ai un chien, it is j'ai and un which are the important words in the new approach. Our Year 8 curriculum is much stronger on verbs than on nouns. But because of that, there's hardly any du, de la, des either. Should I be bringing in more nouns, so we can have more articles definite, indefinite and partitive?

What to do? Is du so conceptually important that we need to build in more use for it throughout Year 8 and Year 9? Surely not. Not just for the sake of it. Or is it OK to only use it when a topic requires it? Or if it's not that prevalent, maybe we should we avoid it and get rid of je voudrais du pain and just stick to j'aime le pain? Because otherwise we're letting a focus on use and communication get in the way of sequencing the language properly.

So what have I done? I have reinstated quantities. Un kilo de, une barquette de... Which seems as if I am going down the communicative transactional route. But it's in order to get at the core meaning behind du, de la, des which is that de  means of. Then I'm keeping everything we used to do. With some explicit focus on j'aime LE pain, je mange DES céréales, je ne mange pas DE viande. But that doesn't mean explanation. Or over focusing on it to tie pupils in knots. It means being careful how each is introduced and contrasted, with pupils and lessons focused on meaning and communicating about food.

I don't want to be over-thinking the curriculum around this. It brings me back to the idea that teachers had this in balance. Why? Because it has evolved that way. A curriculum honed over decades. Keeping a balance between meaning and form, communication and concepts. Messing about with it, trying to produce something meticulous on paper is bound to produce something that doesn't always get it quite right in the classroom. I'll keep going. And of course, what matters is what happens in the classroom next year! Watch this space...

J'aime la glace. J'aime manger de la glace au chocolat. J'aime la glace avec des guimauves.

 Excellent. Really have something to think about. And I think I know the answer, but I have to be open to the alternative and give it a real chance.

I am rewriting our Year 7 booklet on the topic of food. The booklet contains this sort of thing: Strategies for learning food words. Giving opinions about food. Ordering food in a restaurant. Looking at food on French menus. Talking about allergies and what you do / don't eat. Looking at food around the world and talking about what people eat.

Or in grammatical terms: food and genders; opinions and the definite article; functions for asking and "some"; tu and vous; present tense of manger; negatives with "de"; taste adjectives with is and are and adjectival agreement.

Some of this grammar is not new to pupils in this unit.

It brings us up against the arguments about whether to teach pupils "to say things" or to teach pupils language that exemplifies specific forms.

If we are teaching a synthetic syllabus, the language is carefully selected and sequenced around the "logic" of the language. Not the meaning. So we wouldn't be teaching the topic of "Food" at all. We would be teaching opinions and the definite article. Ranging from j'aime le chocolat to j'aime les chiens to j'aime les maths.

With this example, I've always found it very useful when we come to the topic of School, to be able to refer back to the topic of Food. Pupils learn j'aime le chocolat by the sound, the feel, the rhythm, the music of it. And so when it comes to je n'aime pas la géographie, they are perfectly fine with it. But I do want to think through where teaching topics might mean we are overloading underlying grammatical complexity.

I don't think that "explicit" always means "explaining". Things can be made obvious in other ways. Starting with how the syllabus is organised and structured. And then by focus on a form, isolating it, contrasting, spotting patterns, manipulating.

What I have come up against with the Food topic, is that there's a particularly nasty bit of complexity going on with articles.

J'aime le pain. Je n'aime pas le pain. J'aime le pain avec du beurre. Je mange le pain au petit-déjeuner. Je mange du pain. J'aime manger le pain. J'aime manger du pain.

This is an example of where a synthetic syllabus, built around carefully selected and sequenced language, wouldn't attempt this. It would stick to j'aime le pain. Teaching the rule of opinion + definite article. But it would risk sacrificing the desire to communicate, to talk about food, to express yourself. Because pupils have to recombine what you have taught them, but go no further. Because the teaching objective isn't for them to learn to say things. It's to learn about how the language works.

If you believe that mistakes are harmful, and that language learning means acquiring building blocks in a predetermined way based on the logic of taking apart the language, and that frustration with language-learning comes from all those confusing little words that can't be pinned down, and you think that explicit knowledge is all important, if you think pupils shouldn't play with language because they might break it... then it's a sacrifice worth making.

If you welcome mistakes, because it's a sign of pupils using their language with growing independence instead of regurgitating... If you think that language learning follows the logic of growing pupils' constantly evolving language repertoire and conceptualisation... If you think that pupils are focused primarily on meaning rather than form... If you think language learning happens from hearing the sound and the rhythm and the meaning... If you think pupils can pick language up and play with it... then you won't be worried.

And I never was worried. Pupils picked up j'aime le pain and je voudrais du pain and j'aime le pain avec du beurre. And if they get it wrong, then for me it wasn't a disaster. Firstly because there's plenty more time for it to straighten itself out. Secondly because it's not as important as communicating and expressing meaning.

And thirdly because focusing on it won't magically make it any better.

Sometimes I think that the communicative approach relies on a kind of "magic". Statements like "Language learning happens when pupils interact with meaning." It seems something of a statement of faith rather than an argument. (Although it's an argument I can make, but now is not the time.) But I don't see anything different in an argument about explicit knowledge. Explaining le / du isn't going to magically make it work. In fact it may make it worse. The same as teaching that je suis allé means I am gone doesn't make it less likely that pupils will mix it up with I am going.

To spell it out. I can explicitly tell pupils that the cheese is le fromage. And that du fromage means some cheese. But this explanation leaves them none the wiser when it comes to saying: I like cheese. I eat cheese. I eat bread with cheese. English doesn't have a the  or a  some. And in French you will need le or du depending on each different case.

Anyway, I never worried. Until all this started. And we were told to be acutely aware of the sequencing and grammatical logic of what we are teaching. And then this is what happened...

Here's a lovely piece of writing from a Year 7 pupil this year.

It's based on speaking, as you can see from the and... and... but... and...  structure. And it's a pupil enjoying expressing themself on a great topic for having opinions. But it didn't start out like that.

Here's their first version.

In this first draft, it seems they haven't got it at all. Singular, plural, gender. All gone wrong. And the comment. "I wrote a good sentence but I am not sure about the/some. I was so worried about the/some I didn't write a lot."

Interesting.

How to react to this? Is it a good thing that they were aware they were making mistakes? Especially as they were able to immediately correct this by checking in their booklet? Is it a bad thing they were making mistakes because it shows a lack of conceptualisation of number and gender? Is it a bad thing they were making mistakes because they just haven't had enough input to know that la fromage does not exist? Is it entirely normal they might make exactly these slips because their attention is on what they are saying and these little words don't matter to them at this stage?

Personally I would say all of the above. Even when they are contradictory. Because it is all part of a process with ups and downs and round and rounds.

Another question is "Has my teaching made it worse?" By explicitly looking at le / du or by setting up a situation where the pupil needed to use them. We had talked about learning du, de la, des. And whether it was better to have a rule or just to pick it up from lots of examples. A great discussion with the class. With this very pupil making the point that an explanation will need lots of examples.

So I think we come back to what I hinted at earlier. "Explicit" teaching of grammar isn't about how you teach it. It's about what you chose to teach. And what not to teach.

Rewriting the booklets isn't about whether you learn le, du by explanation or by example. It's about whether you decide to teach pupils to talk about food (including opinions, ordering, what they generally eat, what they can and can't eat) which introduces more complexity than you might have expected. Or whether you teach opinion + definite article, and avoid anything more that might confuse or complicate matters.

You want me to give an answer?

My answer is that on paper it looks as if you should limit, select, sequence. But that as soon as you are in the classroom with real pupils and teachers, then meaning and communication take over. Language is complex, but the human brain is up to the job.