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.