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...