The lost art of teaching with the whiteboard?

 I thought I had messed up with my Year 9 after school Spanish beginners. Last Monday we were doing the round the class My brother touched a starfish story. And I hadn't pitched it quite right, or they were a bit tired after school, or something else. But probably, I hadn't pitched it quite right. So this week, I made sure that the pace and challenge of the lesson evolved directly and flexibly in response to their interaction. Teaching with a whiteboard and a whiteboard pen. No plan except the unfolding logic of what the pupils need next.

So when they arrived, the story of the Brother and the Starfish was on the board. They were pleased to see it, and before the lesson started, were already telling each other what they remembered it meant.

Several things to note. Firstly, it's a nice story of going to an aquarium and dropping your phone in the touch pool. Secondly, it is designed to meet the GCSE criteria of opinions, reasons, tenses and narration. And thirdly, it is built around the powerful core language pupils are going to use across topics.

We began the lesson with reading aloud and translation, in pairs and then picking pupils to tell the class. It was good to see that something which had stretched them the week before, was now something they were enjoying working on.

Next, I removed the words and verb endings that make up their core repertoire. Just by rubbing them off the board. I have removed the words like I like, because, I can, I went and the endings for what was happening and what happened:

As a class, we went round and told the whole story. This is helped by the fact that each of the structures "belongs" to a pupil - in the original Brother touches a starfish lesson, they had it written on their desk in board pen. So if one pupil gets stuck, there is always one pupil in the class who definitely knows the structure. We did it as a class with each pupil in turn supplying their missing word. Then the pupils did it in pairs, telling the whole story. Then we did it with a class, with me deliberately NOT picking the pupil who owned each word. Here you can see us in the process of telling the story and putting the missing words back in.

Of course, now we've put the core repertoire words back in, I can now delete all the aquarium words:

In pairs, the pupils reconstructed the story and as a class we took turns to tell the whole story together.

Then I rubbed the board completely and pupils told me the story.

And before we left, we did this:

A list of infinitives for the Theme Park story. So using the same (now rubbed off) template as the aquarium story, the pupils told me a completely different story by changing the infinitives. We did this quickly at the end of the lesson with each pupil in turn deploying the structure they have "ownership" of. And next lesson, that's where we will start. Going through a similar process as in this lesson, with the new story.

Join the Dots Speaking

 Had fun (some of them rather too much fun) with Year 11 doing this easy and effective speaking activity today.

It was at the end of the lesson, and I put the words I like, I can, I have to, I want, I said, he/she said, I went... on the board. Pupils took it in turns to speak using the words. As they spoke, a pupil at the board listened out for any of the words and joined them up in the order they were used.

So in the example you can see, it was something like this (but in Spanish):

I like to to to the beach because I can swim in the sea but if I have to go with my family, I prefer to go to a café because I want to drink something. At the weekend I said, "I am going to the beach" and my dad said, "I don't want to". I decided to go on my own and I went swimming.

Then we look at the picture and try to decide what they have drawn. In this case, I'm not sure. We thought it was probably someone whose shoe laces have got tied together and has fallen over in the mud.

Then I can rub off the drawing, add more key words on the board, and ask another pupil to pick another topic to speak on.

So another pupil could say something like:

I went to McDonalds because I like to eat fast food, but if I go with my parents I have to eat a salad. I prefer to eat hamburgers. At the weekend I said, "I don't want a salad" but my dad said, "You can't eat a burger."

And we would end up with a different picture!

It can be easily adapted with different words, and pupils can work in pairs on paper instead of on the board.

It works really well. Pupils think how to make sentences while moving logically from one word to another in the order that best suits what they are saying. They get used to developing answers spontaneously, thinking what to say next that makes sense. They build answers that meet the key criteria of giving and justifying opinions, giving examples in past and future. And instead of having one fixed answer to learn by rote, they are confident making up answers on the spot from their repertoire of Spanish.

My lovely Year 11s started off picking their next word based on the logic of what they were saying. But they quickly worked out they could draw rude pictures on the board by carefully choosing what word to use next!

Disciplinary Literacy and MFL

 Disciplinary Literacy is one of the latest terms to be imported in to the school context. You can tell it belongs elsewhere because of the use of the word "discipline" in a very academic sense, not the everyday meaning it has in schools. It means the literacy of the specific school subject. And it's about time we paid attention to it rather than seeing literacy as an extension of the English department somehow foisted on the school. We have entire subjects which are teaching pupils language at least as much as content. In Geography, the subject consists of teaching pupils that their Anglo Saxon words are not good enough. They have to learn the Latinate words. So erosion not wear away. Saltation not bounce down the river. Precipitation not rain and snow. Irrigation not water the crops. I could go on about this at length but I need to get on to MFL.

So in MFL, when we are asked how we pre-teach vocabulary and whether we define the vocabulary pupils are learning, then we can smile and say yes. If we are asked how we make sure that vocabulary is recycled and not lost, and how we make that vocabulary intellectually rich and age appropriate, then we frown and say that's what we are working on. If we are asked when we deliberately programme the teaching of High Frequency Vocabulary, then we get into an argument about fishing and wrestling.

But what if we are asked how we explicitly foreground Technical Vocabulary?

Technical Vocabulary. What would it be? How important would it be? Would it be helpful to test pupils on it explicitly? I have lots of separate ideas and arguments and I need to bring them together, discuss them with everyone else in the department, and decide if we need to change what we do.

There is a social justice argument that we have wrongly neglected explicit grammar teaching. That we assumed pupils who struggle with language-learning need an approach that avoids terminology. And so we are depriving them of the clear building blocks they need. We can also say that pupils appear to love terminology. We know as soon as they put their hand up to answer a grammatical question, they are going to say, "Is it masculine/feminine?" "Is it a cognate?" "Is it a doing word?" These are the 3 most common and perhaps the only explicit grammatical concepts pupils cling on to. And invariably you know they are going to come out with the wrong one for the question you have asked.

So is it worth foregrounding the teaching of grammatical terms? Or is it secondary to an intimate knowledge of the language itself? It is possible to know the terms raven, nightingale, albatross from literature, without being able to identify one in the wild. Just as it is possible to closely observe that little bird with the loud song and sticky up tail in your garden without knowing its name. What makes more sense? To learn lots of names of abstruse (avestruz) birds in the hope one day you see one? Or to see lots of birds and learn their names?

Here are some immediate thoughts that will eventually get pulled together, I promise:

Connectives or Conjunctions?

Conjunctions is a grammatical term. Connectives is an invented term, popularised under the Labour government Literacy Hour drive. It is not a grammatical category. My first instinct is to avoid using "connectives" as non-grammatical and out of use under the current Primary SPAG regime. It includes things like relative pronouns as well as conjunctions. We will come back to this and I may have a surprise.

Modal Verbs?

If you have read any of my posts on our curriculum, you will know the emphasis we put on building pupils' repertoire of language, heavily based around verb + infinitive constructions. Some people call some of these 'Modal Verbs'. Including some teachers in the MFL department and also in some resources used by the English department. The definition they are using is un-grammatical. It's based on a confusion of two ideas. Firstly it is related partly to their function in a sentence - they are followed by an infinitive. So they include can, have to, want to. But they don't include like, love, prefer, going to. Which have exactly the same position in the sentence. Because they use a secondary definition based on a vague idea of meaning - wanting, wishing, probability. This attempt at defining Modal Verbs doesn't delineate a grammatical category. As a definition, it is gaining currency, and I have even seen it transferred into native speaker French grammar definitions. Even though French does not have modal verbs. It's something that English takes from its Germanic roots.

A modal verb is a verb which has no infinitive and is invariable for 3rd person. So can, might, will, would, could, should and must. You can't say "to can" or "he cans" for the verb which means "to be able to."

My instinct is not to use the term Modal Verbs when teaching French. And unlike on Connectives, I don't think I am going to change my mind. We shall see...

Indefinite Articles

I'll talk about Articles. But really they are a proxy for all the other grammatical terms. Definite articles, partitive articles, comparatives, superlatives, possessive pronouns, subject pronouns. Do we need pupils to know the terms? Do we need pupils to know that un/une are indefinite articles? Or 'determiners'? Or do we just need pupils to know that un/une are the French words for a? My instinct is we can give them the label to make the teaching neat and tidy, but what we want is for pupils to understand and use the words un/une correctly.

Let's start to pull some of this together.

Using the example of Indefinite Articles, I am not in favour of SPAG style learning to label things for labelling's sake. Knowing to call something an Indefinite Article is not the point. The point is being able to use the word un/une in a sentence.

Where the technical term is useful in expediting an explanation, a conceptualisation, a distinction and the ability to apply it directly to real language, then we can make use of them. And I think this will be very specific to the grammar which is being learned.

With the case of un/une, we might label this in the booklet as Indefinite Articles, but there is plenty to be dealing with (gender, pronunciation, memorising), without adding terminology to be learned.

So maybe in the case of connectives/conjunctions, I turn out to be in favour of connectives. Because conjunctions is an abstract grammatical category. Whereas connectives is a description of how certain words are deployed, and an invitation to use them in order to improve your expression.

Having a word for can/have to/want to might be useful. But I am not going to stretch to calling them "modal verbs" because French doesn't have modal verbs. In this annotation/highlighting activity (pic below), we don't have a name for them. The best I can do is "verb + infinitive". Which perhaps is enough. Especially when it comes to distinguishing between using a verb in this way, or by conjugating it.

So what terminology is useful? We've discussed this at school, and everyone I spoke to shared the idea that the important terminology is self selecting. Where we need to use it in order for pupils to understand how to deploy their language correctly, then those are the terms we need to highlight and teach explicitly. So there is no need to consider what technical language we "should" be teaching. What is required is that we look at what language we are already using. And make sure we are not assuming that pupils know it without ever explaining it.

So for us, Technical Disciplinary Language means the words we actually use to talk about language. The words we use to guide pupils through the correct selection, formation and deployment of words. 

We'll be meeting as a department this week to look at this. My candidates to get us started would be: 

verb, infinitive, conjugate, tense, person, regular, irregular, negative

noun, gender, singular, plural

ending, agreement

connective (?!)

These aren't the list of words we "should" be teaching. These are the words we use all the time, perhaps without ever pausing to think if we have checked pupils know what we are taking about.

As always, it brings us back to Scott Thornbury's analogy. It's not about chopping up the cold dead omelette of the language and trying to piece it back together. It's about how you take raw ingredients and cook them into something tasty.

Part 4. Year 9 Les Loisirs Booklet: Stories

 We left the booklet at around page 12 in Part 3. With pupils using past tense "cheats" to write their stories. And seeing model stories in French using the imperfect to set the scene and the perfect to say what happened. This post will take us through some of the pages up to the end of the booklet, with pupils making up their own stories in speaking and writing.

We've seen that all the language and the activities have to be scaffolded, so that all Year 9 groups can use them successfully. We have seen that it builds on pupils' well established repertoire of French. We have seen that all new (or nearly new) language is integrated into their existing repertoire. And we have seen that learning to deploy their language is just as important as learning the language itself.

The first thing we do is get the verbs ready that we are going to need in the rest of the booklet. This is so we can do it methodically, working through the step by step process of choosing tense, type of verb, person of the verb to arrive at the correct ending. Then when pupils need them later, they know they have them ready. This is part of the way we use Food Tech or other Technology subjects as a metaphor for language-learning. Pre-prepping some of the tricky ingredients is familiar to pupils from Food Tech, as is the idea of then assembling the dish for the customer.

Here's the page for the verbs in the Imperfect. There is a grammar explanation and an accompanying powerpoint. Then the pupils prepare the exact verbs they are going to be needing later.

Then there is a double page working on the verbs in the Perfect. The explanation and examples on the left act as a guide to assembling the verbs they are going to need on the page on the right:

The page on the right contains the verbs they will be needing later in the booklet.

The first story to assemble is the Aquarium story. You may remember that the pupils read a version of this earlier in the booklet as a model. This can support them now, but it is worded differently so they can't just copy word for word.

They retrieve their imperfect and perfect verbs from the chiller cabinet and have them ready for when they are needed. Then they translate the story into French using their core repertoire, adding the ending saying what was happening and what happened using the the verbs they had ready.

They do exactly the same process again for a story about going to a museum. And for the unpleasant experience on a roller-coaster story you will remember from Part 3. But this time, they write the story in French.

By the end of the booklet, they are invited to select their own infinitives. They process them into Imperfect or Perfect, and make up their own stories in speaking and writing:

So by the end of Year 9, the pupils are producing answers which meet the GCSE criteria of: opinions, reasons, personal detail, past and future, and narration. We work on their ability to do this with increasing coherence, accuracy, confidence, independence and spontaneity. Having the core repertoire means new language sticks, and it helps with the development of a conceptualisation of grammatical structures. Most importantly, all the language they learn is language that they use. They have it at their fingertips and they are keen to learn more.

Part 3. Booklet. Year 9. Les Loisirs

 We left Part 2, with the pupils happily riffing on any infinitives you care to give them, spontaneously developing answers with opinions, reasons and if sentences, working on making their answers coherent and realistic. And we promised a story about a terrible combination of roller-coasters, sweets and fizzy pop. We'll get there!

We are up to page 7 of the booklet. And we are going to start adding tenses to the repertoire of opinions and reasons. First of all we do this with some past tense cheats.

We are still on the topic of La Plage, and the pupils have the next iteration of the Beach Keep Talking Sheet. This time with I was going to, I said, He/She said, the weather was..., and I decided to... As you can see from the little anecdote above, these cheats can be very effective in developing answers into little stories.

Pupils work using this template, modifying the story using different infinitives:

Again, some of the work is listening to the teacher, spotting the changes in the text. Then the pupils produce their own answers, maybe starting slow, carefully and in writing. But the aim is for them to be able to riff on any infinitives they are given, using their template to create spontaneous answers.

We are going to move on from the "cheats" to using verbs in the imperfect and the perfect. The imperfect doesn't work on its own. Just as I was going to... is followed by but I decided to..., so any verb in the imperfect (I was swimming...) is followed up with but something happened.

Pupils have seen the imperfect separately for describing what somone was wearing. And the perfect for saying what they did at the weekend or in the holidays. But here they are being used together to create narrative. So we work on spotting one from the other, and then have lots of examples where pupils are reading or listening to stories modelling how they are used:

Pupils work on identifying the verbs and identifying the meaning, before substituting other verbs into the story. At this stage, they are given the verbs conjugated in the infinitive and in the two past tenses, so they are selecting the correct form to replace the verb in the original story.

And now we are ready for some more stories. At this stage they are models given to them in French so they can concentrate on meaning, on the form, and on how the models are constructed.

First this one:

And then the famous roller-coaster story:

In Part 4 we will move onto pupils manipulating the tenses and creating their own stories...

Part 2. Year 9 Les Loisirs Booklet

 Instead of moving on (yet) to how the booklet introduces tenses, I want to spend a bit more time on one of the activities from the previous post from the early pages in the booklet.

Pupils look at this version of the Going to the Beach Keep Talking Sheet. It's on its way to building up to the full version, but without any reference to past events at this stage.

For the first activity, the pupils are concentrating on the middle column - activites / verbs in the infinitive. The teacher is going to read out 3 texts. For each one, the pupils listen for any of the activities mentioned and circle them in the middle column of their Keep Talking sheet.

Here's the first text to be read out:

You can see it has four infinitives: walk, look for shells, explore, return home.

The second text only has one infinitve: to play with a ball!

You can see that apart from the choice of infinitive, it is deploying very much the same repertoire of opinions, reasons and if sentences as text 1.

Text three has 8 activities:

Go to the beach, swim in the sea, make sand castles, draw elephants in the sand, go into town, drink something in a café, take photos, see my friends.

Once the pupils have done these as a listening, they turn to the page with the texts and again identify the activities/infinitives in the text. Then as a class they discuss what they think of the 3 different texts. Some of their ideas will be related to the content: whether they can identify with the person's experience. Of course, what I really want is a discussion about the writing: The last one has lots of detail and nice ideas; the second one is too repetitive; the first one is a bit boring; the second one shows what you can do with only one infinitive if you are stuck; the last one turns into a bit of a random list.

There is a "right" answer. The right answer is to carefully choose a limited number of infinitives which go well together to make a coherent paragraph. Like Text 1.

This kind of focus is key to how we teach languages. Our mantra is that it's NOT always about learning more and more French. It is vital to work on how well you can USE the French that you have. There's a strong literacy/oracy imperative here - working on pupils' ability to develop ideas. And it's also central to language-learning. It gives the rationale for re-working the same language. It means everything pupils learn is added to their repertoire with anything new fitting in, and with nothing getting left behind. And it helps create that idea that they have a growing body of language that they can deploy.

So here's the next activity:

Pupils write 3 texts of their own. One with a carefully selected number of infinitives. One with just one infinitive. One with a random list of infinitives. In each case they recycle the same repertoire of language. And what they are working on is thinking ahead, choosing ideas that link well, and developing the coherence of their writing.

This gives us a glimpse into what's to come in the second half of the booklet when we start to introduce tenses. If you have these infinitives, can you see how the answer is going to develop?

go to a theme park    go on the roller-coasters    eat sweets    drink fizzy pop    vomit

From focusing on the coherence of answers based on opinions, reasons and if sentences, we are going to move into story telling in a combination of tenses...