Sunday 16 October 2022

Unintended Consequences. How the new GCSE may end up moving us in the opposite direction to what they wanted.

 One of the "selling points" of the new GCSE was always its defined vocabulary list. Firstly claiming to reduce the amount of random topic vocabulary and secondly to boost the important high frequency vocabulary. On the one hand this was supposed to be attractive to teachers who find aspects of the current Listening and Reading exams frustrating. And on the other hand it was meant to suit a curriculum which is no longer based around topics. Instead pupils should have one long learning experience, accumulating language which is always useful and never abandoned.

This is not what is going to happen. The new GCSE is going to have unintended consequences. And the biggest is going to be an increase in the amount of topic vocabulary to be learned.

Currently, the GCSE specs have a ridiculous list of topic vocabulary. Which you can safely ignore. For the Speaking and Writing exam, teach your pupils the core repertoire of opinions, reasons and tenses. Across topics. As a cumulative learning experience, focused on how well they can deploy their language. For the Listening and Reading, focus on the high frequency non-topic vocabulary. These words are key to how the exam boards construct the texts. And key to the markscheme, where pupils who understand the text but omit these key words don't get the mark.

The GCSE review panel don't know that the current GCSE matches their objectives so well. Because their brief was explicitly to respond to the 2016 Review of the landscape of the previous GCSE. And because where they are familiar with the new GCSE, it is maybe the Edexcel version. Or perhaps they are familiar with the spec (and its irrelevant vocabulary list) but not with actually teaching the course.

So how is this going to be different in the new GCSE? The vocabulary list will be shorter. But this time you WILL have to learn it. The exam boards will have to make sure that all the items on the list do come up in the exam, rotating the content and checking that words are being tested. People attending NCELP KS4 training report that it is being sold as "a big vocabulary test".

So you could well end up with an exam where in practice you have to learn more topic words than in the current one. And skew your curriculum away from a core repertoire that works across topics.

The exam boards are going to have to pick contexts and construct texts that work using the words on the list. And they will be keen to make sure there's as much continuity and as little change as they can manage, in order to ensure comparability of standards, and to create a specification that they know teachers will be able to opt for with confidence.

There was clamour in the MFL community for new content based on the culture and Culture of target language speaking countries. It would have been a spectacular opportunity for the GCSE review panel, if they wanted to see progress away from the First Person narratives and diet of opinions and reasons, to work with the community and make this happen. It didn't happen. I don't know what contexts the exam boards will come up with, but I suspect in the face of changes, they will try to stick as closely as they can to what we are familiar with.

15% of the words on the list can be specified by the exam board to fit the contexts they decide on. They are going to have to create texts and tasks year on year for the specified contexts using the limited number of words. So when it comes to choosing the other 85% of their words from the "High Frequency Words" list, they are going to need to chose as many words as possible which can be directly linked to one of the chosen contexts. And with this exam, you WILL have to know these words. It's a test of the specified knowledge.

So in terms of Vocabulary, we may well end up with an exam which has fewer items on the list than the current GCSE in the specification. But in practice it will feel like an exam with more vocabulary, including more "topic" vocabulary that you actually need to memorise. This has implications for teaching at KS4 and also for how the curriculum is organised. And also for KS3. I've been rewriting the curriculum and the resources, but I am reluctant to make further changes until I know more about what is going to happen at GCSE.

This may be where I should end this post. But there are more worries perhaps for a future post. If the idea of pupils expressing themselves and showing off what they can do with their language is to be replaced by testing of knowledge and accuracy, then there is a risk that this will reintroduce rote learning and phrasebook learning. Think of what currently can happen on the Role Play in the existing GCSE. A pupil who sets out to express themself and try to say what they want, communicating and extending their ideas, will score worse than a pupil who has a quick ready response. The new Speaking exam criteria given to the boards specify this kind of short accurate answer. It's hard to say more without knowing more about what is coming. I suppose we have to trust to the expertise of the exam boards and whether they listen to teachers more than the GCSE review panel were prepared to do.



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