Year 9 Loisirs Booklet Part 1. Coherence and Stories.

 I have been writing the booklet for the final Unit of Year 9 on Les Loisirs. Overall it's going back to a familiar topic from Year 8 so pupils can deploy their repertoire with fluency and independence. And with a lot more detail. It works on the kind of mini narrative that works so well at GCSE, based on opinions, reasons, if sentences, speech, what was happening, what happened next.

We start with stories about going to the beach, building them up slowly, then transfer the same template to stories about sport, shopping, going to the cinema, skateboarding...

Here is the Key Performance Exemplar for the end of the Unit:

Of course, for Year 9, the booklet has to be carefully scaffolded to make sure all pupils can access it with confidence. And also to make sure that speaking activities with large Year 9 groups happen successfully.

I have taken the usual "Going to the Beach" keep talking sheet and cut it down to introduce it in easy steps. It gradually builds up to its full version through the booklet, adding tenses and narrative by the end of the Unit.

The first activities use listening and speaking, carefully scaffolded with the keep talking grid. It starts with a variation on ski slope writing, here done as a translation. Look closely and you can see that while each sentence offers some scaffolding for the next, there is variation as well as extension.

The ski slope writing is to get pupils familiar with finding what they need on the Keep Talking Sheet and to let the new content integrate with their prior knowledge. It leads directly on to a speaking activity. First as a class, then in pairs.

The picture below is from a powerpoint where the story appears a sentence at a time, and then disappears. With each sentence, the pupils have to remember the story in French from the beginning. Here you can see that the first chunk, "I like to go to the beach" has disappeared completely. The second chunk, "because I can go for a walk" is faintly visible. And the new chunk, "but I don't like to swim" is still visible. This works as a challenge on the board, with pupils enjoying having a go, remembering or making up what they though it said. It recycles familiar language, practising building it into the beginnings of a story.

The ski slope translation and the disappearing story both lead in to the pair work activity. One partner gives a short starter sentence in French. For example, I like to go to the beach. The other partner can add to it or change it: I love to go to the beach because I can swim. They continue, taking turns to add or change the sentence: I love to go to the beach but I don't like to swim.

When we move to the next version of the Keep Talking Sheet, with more infinitives and adding talking about the weather, we continue the idea of changing a model sentence. This again starts off as a written task so pupils can find the words they need. Before turning into a task where pupils read their new versions aloud and other pupils have to listen carefully for what has been changed:

This tangled translation (below) is done as a speaking activity. First in English, then in French. Partly to practise recall of the language, but mainly as another opportunity to model how to deploy their French to make a coherent answer which is going to turn into a story:

And this next activity is all about thinking about how to best use the French in order to make something that is coherent.

The teacher reads each of the 3 texts while the pupils are looking at the Keep Talking sheet. The pupils are asked to circle all the infinitives (in the middle column of the sheet) that they hear in each one. They then turn to this page and highlight them in the text. The 3 texts have a similar template in terms of opinions, reason and if sentences. But they are very different in how they handle the content. One of them takes just one infinitive and talks at length but repetitively about playing with a ball. Another has many different infinitives which ends up sounding like an incoherent list of activities. The other has a judiciously chosen set of infinitives which make a coherent story. The class can discuss how well they think each approach works. Then, as you can see in Ex 4, they are given 3 sets of infinitives to create their own 3 versions to try out.

We are only up to page 6 of a 28 page booklet. But you can see the principles emerging:

Using the language of the pupils' core repertoire in a new context.

Integrating Speaking and Listening with Reading and Writing with careful modelling and scaffolding.

Pupils can use the Keep Talking sheet but are challenged to do more and more without it.

Focus on how to create answers with increasing coherence has taken over from a focus on the language.

In a future post we will see another principle:

New language (tenses) is added to the existing repertoire. 

With the focus continuing to be on how to deploy it in order to add to what pupils can say. Not for the sake of the language point.

Here's a glimpse of what is to come once we move away from talking about going to the beach:

Task Based Learning in the School Context

 There is a lot of detail around what makes up full-on Task Based Learning, which I am going to avoid. I want to focus on what makes it important to me as a languages teacher in the school context.

The main point of Task based Learning is... Tasks.

And the point of a Task is that it is carried out with the focus on completing the Task. The focus is the completion of the Task, not on the language that is used. The pupils are communicating (or comprehending) in order to perform the task; not in order to use certain specified language structures.

It stands in contrast to an Exercise. In an Exercise, the pupil practises using certain language structures that have been being learned. You could see Task Based Learning as being the antidote to Presentation, Practice, Production. In the Presentation and Practice stages, it is clear that it is specific language structures that are being rehearsed. But even in the Production stage, the teacher will design the task (small t) such that those structures can be deployed. The teacher has specified the language to be used, practised it, and now they want to see the pupils using it more independently in a more open context.

This is what we do all the time in school. We ask pupils to practise over and over, challenging themselves to be more fluent, independent, spontaneous, expressive. And this works very well.

The risk is that pupils are able only to use the structures they have been working on most recently. And instead of communicating, they end up playing the game of saying things just to show off an expression or a tense. It's a good fit for exam criteria. Exam criteria can be deconstructed to determine the key language pupils need (vocabulary, tenses, idioms...). And the practice makes perfect paradigm is geared up to creating accurate work that gets the grade.

But at some level, I have the nagging idea that we aren't just teaching pupils to get a grade. We are teaching them the language. That they should be able to try to say things because they want to say them. Not just to tick off criteria in an exam. Very idealistic and sentimental, I know. But there's more to it. I think it is fundamental to learning that the pupil has a evolving body of language, a core, an interlanguage. I want them to be aware of the language as a whole. So they can call on everything they have ever learned. So they can make connections, links, patterns, rules.

We've all seen pupils who can't do words like a or the or is. And therefore can't say the simplest things. Because they've not made the language their own. They are reliant on the stages of Presentation, Practice, Production to be able to Perform and move on. And we've seen those pupils on the Spanish Exchange who CAN deploy their language in new situations. Who can say things they've not been taught, but find ways to communicate it all the same. With a focus on communicating successfully. From the building blocks of language that they have a grasp of. And these are the pupils who then acquire more and more language. It brings me back to the perennial snowball metaphor. They haven't let their language melt. They've gathered it into a snowball, made it theirs, and now more snow sticks to it.

This is what a Task does. It requires pupils to communicate, selecting and combining language from their whole repertoire, understanding how it works. Or exploring how it works. Finding ways to make it fit together. The immediate focus is getting the message across. But the effect of doing so is to explore the possibilities and limitations of the language at your disposal.

This can happen in anything from chit-chat (Did you watch the match? Where did you get your bag?) to written work (Tell me about your Town. Would you like to go to School in Spain?). The key is how we share with pupils the idea that they are learning to communicate and that the language they are learning is ALL the language, not just what we need for this exercise.

The tasks we set our pupils could be Tasks. But we fight it! We try to steer them to saying things that deploy the structures we have been practising or which meet the criteria. Pupils try to say things they can't quite say, or try apply a rule to an irregular form, or use English syntax, extrapolating from what they know, in order to communicate. And when they do this, we label it as an error.

I think that in order for language to be successful, we need to keep these possibilities alive:

    When we set work, we are genuinely interested in what the pupils say or write.

    When we challenge pupils to express themselves, both we and they understand that they can take risks even if this will naturally lead to more errors.

    If we ask pupils to express themselves, we are requiring them to curate their own repertoire of language that they can draw on.

If we do these things, then we are straying into Task Based Learning.