AQA GCSE Reading Exam Success

Sometimes I can be a bit slow. Eating out in restaurants in Spain with teachers from our exchange school, I often would think, "Gosh, the starter is quite big." Or "Thank goodness the main is quite small." It wasn't until we went over as a family to stay, that my wife said, "Spanish starters are bigger than the mains." And then it all made sense. The same thing happened with the AQA GCSE Reading Exam.

In the 90s and 00s, the Listening and Reading exams didn't need a lot of focus. You worked through the topics and you concentrated on building pupils' repertoire so they could speak and write. The Listening and Reading exams, while containing tricky distractors, were based around testing the language that pupils were learning. So different foods, or numbers, or places in town, or illnesses. At some point this changed. And I missed it.

It might have been around the time we moved from Coursework to Controlled Assessment. When the GCSE that destroyed language learning came in, we were preoccupied with how to preserve teaching pupils how to speak and write spontaneously, when the exam rewarded pre-learned fancy monologues. But while we were grappling with that, there was a change in the Listening and Reading exam that suddenly meant pupils were doing much worse.

I started to notice some things, but it wasn't until the current GCSE came in that I was able to clearly identify them and take them into account in how to prepare for the Listening and Reading exams.

Here are the two main points:

1. The current GCSE has a huge topic vocabulary list in the specification, reflected in the published coursebooks. But the exam boards have wisely ignored most of this vocabulary. Instead, the texts are largely built out of the non topic vocabulary. If this is a new idea to you, click on the link to this previous post to see examples.

2. The Questions in the Listening and Reading exams are not comprehension questions. This previous post gives an explanation, but the most egregious example is the question that asked, "What impressed her about one of the schools?" The honest answer to the question was, "They grew fruit and veg on the school field." But AQA only accepted "They grew fruit and veg on PART OF the school field." Now clearly, the fact that it was part of the field was not the thing that impressed her. But for AQA that was required for the mark. Because AQA questions aren't comprehension questions. They are show you know what all the words mean questions.

And you've probably spotted it. But like with the Spanish starter dishes, it took me a while: The two points above are one and the same. Not only are AQA texts largely based around the non topic words, but these words are also the key to the accepted answer.

So this is what we've been doing with Y11 this week.

Perhaps the usual exam technique would be: Read the questions, locate the answer, answer the question. Instead, we concentrated on identifying Topic and Non Topic vocabulary. This is the version on the projector as we fed back as a whole class. But in the lesson, the pupils had their own printed version. For the first paragraph, I gave them a list of non topic words to find and highlight in yellow: more, then, if, often... In the second paragraph, they are going to be hunting for them for themselves. And they are looking for topic words to highlight in pink.

This led to useful discussion about the importance and difficulty of the pink words and the yellow words. The topic words are often basic words that they know, or are cognates. And where they are unknown, their meaning is often easily deduced from the context. Because they are words strong on "meaning". In a tricky text, the topic words were surprisingly accessible. 

The yellow words. For a start there are lots of them. Many of them should be known. But do they get relegated and ignored compared to the topic words? They are often harder to deduce. Because they are more about nuance or the relationships between words in a sentence, rather than referring to concrete meaning. And some of them can have more than one meaning depending on context.

For a comprehension question, the pink words might have been enough. For an AQA answer, you are going to need the yellow words.

Next lesson:

The same text. With questions on the board. And answers on the board too. But while the answers are not wrong, they would not get the mark chez AQA. So for example, "Why are young people healthier?" has the answer, "They are active." Which is correct, but would not be acceptable to AQA. Pupils have to read the text carefully and give the answer, "They are generally more active than older people."

Then you can see the questions for a subsequent paragraph. Here I haven't provided the inAQAdequate answers. It's up to the pupils to make sure their answers reflect what they understand about what AQA require.

I strongly suspect that this will continue with the new GCSE. It's definitely in line with the intentions of the reforms. And the exam boards, if their specifications are accepted, have done a good job of minimising the changes. But once you realise what is going on, it has the potential to change something frustratingly stupid, into an understanding that can help your pupils get more marks!

Year 9 Spanish beginners - writing on the tables, telling their own stories

 You may have been following my Y9 after school beginners Spanish lessons, as we work on narrating amusing stories about aquariums, theme parks and sea gulls. Last week's lesson went really well, with the pupils confidently rebuilding the aquarium story from their knowledge of key structures and verb endings. After a lesson the previous week where I worried I had got the pace and challenge all wrong. So this week I wanted a lesson that was going to stretch and support and move them on to the next level.

So I used Writing on the Tables to enable them to create their own stories.

First we recapped the aquarium story quickly, going round the class. Then we transformed it into the theme park story, keeping the key structures but with new infinitives. This is where we were up to at the end of the last lesson. The template is flexible, but roughly like this:

I like to go to a theme park because I can go on the rides, especially if it is sunny, because if it rains I prefer to go to the aquarium. My brother doesn't like to go on the rides. He prefers to buy loads of sweets and fizzy pop. Last year, we went to Chessington. I said, "I want to go on the rides." My brother said, "I want to buy lots of sweets and fizzy pop." We decided to buy sweets. Later we were riding on a roller coaster and my brother vomited. I cried.

You can see it contains the verbs go, buy, ride, and vomit. We throw in cry for free because it is the ending of all the stories!

Then I gave each pair of pupils a felt tip and a dictionary. They each chose a place - stately home garden, cinema, beach, park... And they chose 4 infinitives to look up in the dictionary - words for something they like doing, something their nemesis likes doing, and something that went wrong. I don't know what the fourth infinitive was for. Probably cry.

They wrote the infinitives on the desk with their felt tip. In the first half of the story, the verbs stay in the infinitive. But in the second half, they need endings. So they wrote their infinitives again, this time ready to be changed. They had to decide which of their verbs was going to be what was happening. And which were the things that happened. Then they rubbed out the ar/er/ir endings - remember these are written on the desk in felt tip. And added the endings. For first person endings, they can do this from memory. For 3rd person endings, they used their verb tables.

Then they were ready to write their stories:

So, I like to go to the waterfalls because I can take photos of nature when it is sunny. But if it is raining, I prefer to go to the cinema. My friends like to have a picnic. We went to Crystal Falls. I said, "I want to take photos." They said, "I want to have a picnic, pretty please." We were taking photos of the waterfall when I fell. I cried.

What is the point of doing it on the tables? Firstly it's fun. Which I know is a dirty word, but you can see it comes out in the gleeful excitement of the stories. Pupils are excited about writing. Excited by all the words in the dictionary. Excited by the felt tips and the spray to clean the tables. Excited by the possibilities of saying things they wanted to say, excited by the progress they are making, excited by their Spanish lesson. It doesn't take a lot! And secondly it's memorable. I know. I know that there are those who will say, "They will remember writing on the tables and getting to wipe it off with spray and a paper towel, but they won't remember the learning." Except they will. They will remember the very physical process of writing the infinitives. Changing the endings. Inserting them into the story. It highlights the process of writing.

Here's a post on more ways to use different approaches to writing. And another one on making constructing sentences physical, to break it down step by step for pupils who don't think writing French is something they can do.

And what is the point of the stories? Firstly they meet the GCSE criteria of opinions, reasons, tenses, narration, developed answers, spontaneity. Secondly they meet the national curriculum criteria of developing what pupils can do with their language, not just what they know. Thirdly, the core of language the stories contain, allows more and more language to stick and transfer across topics.