Language World 2023 Part One

 Fantastic to meet up with so many people at Language World 2023! As always at Language World, there's a wonderful atmosphere and an opportunity to recharge your batteries by talking to people who share the same passion and purpose.

My talk was about balancing Communication and Well-Sequenced Grammar.

In this first post, I shall pose the questions. And in a later post, I will sketch some possible answers and try to redefine the debate.

Surely the two things are not incompatible? Sometimes we are being invited to see them as sitting at different ends of a spectrum.

On the one hand, we are being told that the most important thing is explicit and direct teaching of phonics, grammar, and vocabulary. And on the other hand, we hear that language is acquired through Comprehensible Input and developing intercultural competency. It is argued that that we should give pupils lots of exposure to the language before starting to break it down and look for grammatical patterns.

In our teaching, this supposed incompatibility is reflected in something as fundamental as the idea of teaching a series of topics. What if, when we teach a topic, we then abandon that language and move on to another? What if the topics we commonly teach mean that because each pupil wants to be able to talk about their own interests or pets or family or ambitions or outfits, then our teaching becomes a list of trivial fluff, mainly lists of nouns so they can each say the thing they want? Planning the curriculum by equipping pupils to talk about a series of different topics or scenarios may not be the best way to sequence the grammar. And there may be things in the unit that we teach them to say, which contain grammar that is incidental rather than planned. What if we are focused on the outcome of the unit; a test or conversation or poster, rather than the learning?

All of these are great questions. But none of them mean we have to abandon communication or self expression. Or even topics. All of the above dangers are present when our Year 7s create their Art Exhibition. But surely, if we bear these questions in mind, it can and does work. So the whole point of teaching the grammar of gender, agreement, articles and word order, is so that each and every pupil CAN write what they want. They all create different artworks but we have equipped them with the grammar to be able to describe them. Grammar is a shortcut where knowing the rules means you can say things you want to be able to say, not just rehash what you have learned. Grammar is creativity and communication. That's the whole point.

So, to borrow from Professor Henshaw, on the one hand we are being asked to see language learning as a collection of grammatical forms. And on the other, we are being invited to see it as a collection of things pupils can say.

There must be a middle way.

So how can we ensure that well-sequenced Grammar teaching and Communication are compatible. What does it look like in practice?

Well, there are many ways that each school can do this, once they've set themselves the challenge of making it happen. In the rest of my talk, I showed examples from our school's curriculum that demonstrate how we do it.

But there is a principle involved. Our curriculum is based on what the National Curriculum asks us to do: Develop what pupils know and can do with their language. And the key element is that we are deliberately developing what they can DO.

So if at one end of the spectrum there is a grim emphasis on Knowledge (just look at the slide from the Ofsted webinar on the principles of curriculum design) and at the other end, there is a hope that just letting them interact with the language will see acquisition happen, then we are trying to sit somewhere in the middle. 

We are school teachers, so we do explicitly teach grammar and vocabulary. But we also constantly work on the quality of what pupils say and write. By quality, I mean increasing spontaneity, fluency, development of ideas, personal expression, independence, accuracy and complexity.

None of these things happen by accident. They are deliberately worked on.

Here you can see the exemplars for each of the units in our Year 8 curriculum.

You can see, we do have topics. If you look closer, you can also see that the language for all topics is very similar. It is based around opinions and reasons (using verb + infinitive constructions) and conjunctions. This forms a strong core, to which other grammar is added. Present tense verbs, perfect tense verbs. But the main thrust of the year is not about learning more and more French. It is about getting better and better at using your French.

In part two I will look at materials, activities and examples of pupils' work to show what I mean by this focus on how well pupils can use their language. And try to work out what this means for what grammar we teach and how we define grammar.

Top Tip for Dictation

 This post is going to start out as a top tip for Dictation. And may end up being just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Dictation means for teaching listening in MFL.

It's inspired by @MissWozniak's talk at this weekend's TM MFL Icons Teach Meet. (Recording here.) Listen to Jennifer's talk for ways to start thinking about how to make Dictation accessible, especially in French.

My top tip is, instead of using gapfills, use whole sentences with a word that is changed.

So for example you could give the pupils the sentence with a gap:

J'aime aller à la plage parce que je peux _________ dans la mer.

Then they hear the full sentence J'aime aller à la plage parce que je peux nager dans la mer. And they have to write in the word nager.

I have found it's much easier to give the pupils a full sentence for example:

J'aime aller à la plage parce que je peux jouer dans la mer.

They listen and change jouer to nager.

Our KS3 tests contain this kind of exercise and it is generally done well and with far less panic than you get with a sentence with a gap in it.

I can see two possible reasons for this. Firstly, if you are giving pupils a sentence with a gap, there is already a level of cognitive challenge. The sentence is meant to be there to support them, but with a word missing, they are having to work hard to access the "help". In this case the missing word nager is a key word from the sentence, strong on meaning. Perhaps the first word that they would have been drawn to if they were given the complete sentence to make sense of. We, as experts can make sense of the rest of the sentence without the key word, using meaning and form to deduce what might be missing. This is an exercise in itself for the learner.

Secondly, maybe the tendency is for pupils to focus on the gap. To ignore the rest of the sentence, which as we saw may not be as helpful as it was intended to be. So when they listen, they are focused entirely on the gap in isolation, trying to work out which sounds to fill it with. Which inevitably come and go too quickly, without putting together sound and meaning let alone spelling.

So giving them a whole sentence with one word to be changed means that they have to listen to the whole sentence in order to spot which word is different. And the sentence they are given is a complete sentence that they can start to make sense of. They don't need to try to work out what type of word might go in the gap. They can see jouer and it's then just one step to replacing it with nager.

From experience, I would say it has been quite successful as a way to start asking pupils to transcribe words from dictated text. If you just want a top tip, you could stop here. Because, as I said, this could be just the tip of the iceberg!

What I think this is really getting at is the nature of dictation. It is not a simple exercise in phonic transcription, a friendly test of pupils' grasp of the sound-spelling link.

The Ofsted Research Review is wrong when they say that comprehension of French proceeds in a linear fashion from decoding sounds, to recognising known words and grammar, to arriving at meaning. You cannot tell if the word you heard was port or porc from the sound of the word. You have to have a feedback loop between meaning and sound at the sentence level.

And in French there is a multiplicity of ways of phonetically transcribing any utterance. Some of them meaningful, some of them nonsensical, some grammatically plausible, some not. So dictation is always going to be a test of meaning and grammar as well as the sound-spelling link.

Here's a fun example based on one of the proposed example dictation texts from one of the exam boards: Demain j'ai un concert. This is phonologically indistinguishable from deux mains géants qu'on serre. Of course no pupil is likely to write that. And it contains a grammatical error in the gender of mains. But it shows the wild variation in how an utterance can be interpreted. And makes us question exactly what our pupils are hearing when they listen to French.

We had a similar thing when we created listening materials to go with some of the recordings that go with the KS3 Expo textbook. Each listening question from the textbook turned into a 4 page set of activities that the pupils did in the computer room, with access to the listening track so they could pause and rewind as required. And we used it with GCSE groups not KS3. In order to make the listenings from the KS3 book accessible to KS4, we needed to structure 4 pages of work per listening track. Because they were not accessible at all. Here's one ridiculous activity that was in there that really makes the point: What are our learners "hearing" when they listen to these tracks?

One of these is inspired by the pupils always hearing huit tissues instead of produits issus. Not to mention what they hear on the listening, again from Expo, about les_expositions!!! Oh, and there's another one where dans la chambre is now universally heard as Donald Trump. Once you've heard it you can't unhear it.

Picking the correct option in each case, is less to do with the sound you hear and much more about making sense of the sound. And turning it into words that make sense as a sentence.

So this isn't really just about dictation. It's about our whole approach to Listening. I think the inclusion of dictation in the new GCSE will be the start of unpicking what happens when we use Listening in the classroom and in the exam.

Firstly, I think dictation will end up not being dictation at all. Because it can't. You can't have an exam which pretends to be a phonics check but which inevitably is much more a check of grammar and meaning. You can't have an exam where there is a near infinite number of correct phonetic renditions of a text. What you will have instead is an exercise where there are sentences read out, but what is really being tested is the spelling of know words. Like nager in the example we began with. So the pupil isn't transcribing, they are recognising the words and being tested on whether they know how to spell it. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say, they are being tested on their ability to spell known words and not attempt to transcribe them because that's where interference from English phonics would lead to error.

Secondly, I think the difficulty of dictation will reveal the difficulty of Listening, as I have sketched out above. The current situation of Listening in the GCSE exams is absurd. I remember being on a panel of mainly Spanish native speaker teachers who thought that our Listening exam level was low. Because we have slow scripted speech and questions in English. It was only when they themselves got some of the questions wrong, they began to realise what was involved. They were used to training pupils to listen to natural speech and answer questions that showed they understood details of what was being said. I have written about it here, but basically they realised that our Listening is not about comprehension but about processing word by word and being tested on specific language features. Not on meaning, but of knowledge of the language. In a kind of dictation that you have to do in your head. A sort of word by word processing is required with a focus on the exact language, which is different to the comprehension of meaning as you listen.

And this will again come back to the error in the Ofsted Research Review. Our learners do not arrive at meaning by processing word by word. They start by approximating overall meaning, content, context. And then proceed to the detail of the language, holding bottom up meaning of words and inflections of words in constant tension with overall top down meaning. The questions in our GCSE target the lowest level of that process: the grasp of the tiniest inflections, sometimes even losing sight of the meaning of the overall sentence. For example the question, "What did one school do that really impressed her?" The answer that shows comprehension would be "They grew fruit and veg on the school field." But this was not an acceptable answer. You had to show word-by-word processing and put "They grew fruit and veg on part of the school field." Can you see how the approach to Listening has lost sight of comprehension of meaning?

I think the difficulties of dictation mean we will have to re-examine what we are doing with listening. On the one hand, where we are expecting word-by-word transcription, it will have to be fairly basic. And it may reveal that listening questions in the past have required mental word-by-word transcription to the extent that they are impossible. Perhaps this revelation may lead to a reconsideration of listening.

Deep Learning or Distraction?

 It's March, so it's time for the Year 7 French Exhibition at the local Windmill arts exhibition centre.

Every pupil in Year 7 creates an artwork and describes it in French. Then it goes on display to the paying public.

The idea is that from the beginning, pupils can use their French creatively, for a real purpose and for a real audience. In 2011 we won the European Language Label for an MFL curriculum built around creative outcomes for every unit. This post outlines how it was part of a LinkedUp project between schools, using tangible outcomes as a driver of pupil engagement and deep learning.

The idea of Deep Learning is that it should be creative, personal, collaborative, involve time outside the classroom, and have a real purpose beyond the classroom. It should have an outcome that is big and important. There should also be a creative process where the pupil makes decisions crucial to the success of the project.

The opposite view, which is much more in fashion at the moment, is that all this is a distraction. That we shouldn't have to motivate pupils or show them the relevance of what they are studying. Instead, we decide what is important, we break it down into explicit steps, and they learn by memorising and being tested on it.

Through this shift in thinking, we have kept our curriculum and examined it in the light of the changing fashions in ideas. We have rewritten the booklets to make the teaching of grammar and phonics more consistently explicit for all teachers in the department. The question is, do projects like the Windmill Exhibition now feel more of a distraction than a driver of deep learning?

How could it be a distraction? Here's why: 

• What if we are focused on the product not the process? So there's a deadline and we skip over important learning because we need to get the picture and the text done.
• The pupils' attention might be too directed towards the meaning and not enough towards the forms of the words.
• What if the pupils' descriptions bring in random words that they are never going to need again? When we should be teaching carefully selected vocabulary that exemplifies grammar patterns and which they will meet over and over in a carefully programmed way.
• What if pupils are trying to say things they can't? So they fall into error but we gloss over it because they are "communicating well."

I think all of these considerations do need to be taken into account. In fact this Unit of work very much brings you up against them. But while they are things to be aware of, they are not things that mean we should abandon the approach.

Here's an example of one of the exhibits:

You can see what the grammatical objectives of the unit are: Word order, gender, adjectival agreement, prepositions.

Here's a page from the booklet using describing shapes and colours to work on the concept of gender and why French sentences need it:

So what is really happening in a curriculum that asks pupils to use their language for a purpose? From the "Deep Learning" point of view, they are taking ownership of their language, relating it to things that are important to them, and taking responsibility for the quality of work that is to be presented to an audience.

But from the point of view of well-sequenced grammar teaching, it also works. Asking our pupils to be creative is exactly what drives the need for grammar. Grammar, by definition, is what allows you to say an infinite number of things, not just repeat what the teacher has taught you. They may decide to draw a pirate ship or an astronaut or a daffodil or a heron. Good. The possible plethora of random items they put in their pictures is grammar in action.

The description of any one of the artworks looks simple. Stating what is in the picture, the size, the shape, the colours, the position. But the fact that hundreds of pupils can all produce their own unique version using the French that they have been learning, is what you want from grammar learning. We teach definite and indefinite articles, gender and and word order, precisely so that pupils can use any nouns and adjectives they chose. This isn't wasteful low frequency fluff. This is the whole point of teaching grammar. Grammar is creativity.