Novices and Experts

 This morning, Isabelle Jones posted a link to this interesting blog post on Novice learners and Expert learners.

As MFL teachers, we have met this concept in the Ofsted Research Review. It says that most of our learners are Novices. And only a few pupils at the higher levels of GCSE are in any way to be considered starting to reach Expert level. Expert pupils may start to cope with extracting meaning from texts with unknown words and be able to start to communicate and express themselves. But for most of our pupils, Ofsted mandate a concentration on explicit knowledge of phonics, grammar and high frequency vocabulary. Communication, self expression and reading that involves deduction and inference of meaning should be delayed until pupils are Expert.

Behind this there is a noble and extremely complex idea. It is a view of education which does away with the old idea of "ability". Instead of labelling some pupils as able and others as less able, it asks us to look at where those differences between pupils start to appear, how they are reinforced, and how they become self-fulfilling. 

It is closely linked to the idea of cultural capital and the importance of knowledge. Specifically to the idea that "skills" and abilities can be broken down into knowledge. By thinking in terms of "skills" and "ability" we have loaded the dice against pupils who don't have the same level of cultural capital to start off with. We have allowed some pupils to fly and some pupils to sink, explaining it away with the concept of "ability," effectively blaming (or praising) the pupils.

Instead of this, we are now exhorted to think not of the skills, but of the knowledge. Some pupils with a slightly better starting point, get a head start and are labelled as "able." Other pupils may be missing some knowledge and have a slower start and seem unable to perform the skills we ask. What is the knowledge that needs to be put in place? What is that knowledge that pupils who do well have, and other pupils lack?

Lovely ideas. And ones that perhaps teachers have always approached through working carefully with pupils as individuals, nurturing their attempts and their skills, watching very carefully to pitch the level of challenge and support.

But a child-centred approach is out of fashion. It is portrayed as being the opposite of what is supposed in the previous paragraph. It is portrayed as being a lazy, coasting approach with too much play and not enough ambition. We also have a fashion for defining the curriculum with rigorous sequencing, rather than a focus on classroom pedagogy and the pupil's development. And perhaps we are also a nation of Novice teachers, with a dearth of experience. And of course, teachers love to be offered a formula, a magic bullet, some pseudo science, a bandwagon, a fad.

You will have guessed, that the Novice-Expert distinction is one I am uncomfortable with. So why don't I like it? For a start, the idea that content can be broken down into knowledge is the easy part. Especially if we then test for recall of that knowledge. It can appear to be very successful. But the idea that "knowledge is key to acquiring skills" part of the deal can end up being completely forgotten. I have written here about how the rush for knowledge can be at the expense of thinking, creativity, expression, experimentation.

The Novice-Expert distinction legitimises this. It demands that we teach knowledge first, so that skills can come later. Much later.

I would say that this is an idea that doesn't stand up on its own. The post I referred to at the start almost acknowledges this by at the same time as setting up the Novice-Expert distinction, declaring that we need to see it as a continuum. Thank goodness. But once we forgo the attractive neat binary distinction, there's not a lot of the idea left.

Because it is part of a bigger idea. The bigger idea is that there is a very interesting relationship between knowledge and skills. And how we INTEGRATE the teaching of knowledge and skills is really important.

People blurt out the mantra, "But you need to know things before you can think."

This shocking image from an Ofsted video has been circulating on Twitter, shared by Early Years Teachers.

You may think it chimes with what I just said about the importance lying in how we integrate the teaching of knowledge and skills. But the context is that of a video stipulating explicit teaching of knowledge. And the caption on the picture makes it clear that knowledge comes first before a skill can be performed. With a picture of a child playing with a shape-sorter.

Surely playing with a shape-sorter is the absolute paradigm that explicit knowledge does not come first. When we say some pupils lack cultural capital, it may well be that they missed out on the opportunity to play with shapes. Not that they missed out on having it explained to them.

But it's the same right through to Secondary School. And even in "knowledge based" subjects like Physics. If you are going to learn Newton's First Law, you need to confront how you think about how things move. You may well think that if you push things they move. And if you stop pushing them, they stop moving. This is thinking. The science teacher wants you to examine this idea and discover that there's a better way of explaining it. Things do stay still until something pushes them. But things also stay moving until something stops them. If under the guidance of a teacher, you start with your thinking, observe objects moving, come to a new conclusion, then you are learning. If someone tells you the knowledge, "Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force" then that's not going to mean anything.

Of course, no-one is advocating that. Knowledge-based teaching is very careful to engage with prior knowledge and pitch the level of challenge so that it moves the pupils forward but doesn't overwhelm. But this does rather clash with the idea of "You can't think without knowledge." Learning happens by thinking, engaging with content. You can theoretically split thinking, knowledge, learning. You can theoretically split skills and knowledge. But in practice, what matters is how they are integrated.

In language-learning this is reflected in the debates around form and meaning. Or learning and acquisition. Or explicit and implicit learning. While the distinctions are useful for debate, the whole point is the interaction, the integration, the synergy, the balance.

In Languages, my parents' generation learned grammatical forms as a purely intellectual exercise. But since then it has been axiomatic that you don't delay the learner's ability to express themself until the grammatical system is mastered. We construct a curriculum which balances the pupils' ability to say things, with their evolving conceptualisation of the language. And the two are in no way incompatible. Conceptualisation of the language is what allows you to say more things. Wanting to try out saying more things is what drives conceptualisation of the language.

Where next for Languages?

 I wonder what the new National Consortium for Languages Education is going to be like and what will it mean for us in the classroom?

Just like NCELP, they are mandated to build on the 2016 review of language teaching and its core principles.

I have written on Twitter a little bit about NCELP. They will have a chapter of their own in the History of Language Teaching, as an extraordinary landmark attempt to try to bring about changes in practice and thinking.

I don't think that Chapter is coming to a close. They have made us think about important questions. And whatever comes next, we can't ignore them.

Firstly, the Sequencing of Learning. The NCELP schemes of work have raised the bar for any publisher in terms of the logic of what is taught when. We can't continue to see textbooks organised around ticking off grammar content in a grid, planning where it is met (once or twice) without now thinking in terms of the pupils' conceptualisation and accumulation of language.

Likewise, the focus on phonics is a well overdue shift away from the old idea that we shouldn't show pupils the written form, because it would interfere with their pronunciation.

There are other aspects which I think we have only just started to get to grips with, whether or not we ultimately end up accepting them. One is the idea that while we should be very careful to introduce things in carefully planned steps, they should also be deliberately contrasted. This is also linked to the idea of removing duplicate markers, so that pupils have to focus on the specific form (and its meaning). So instead of saying, "Je suis allée en ville hier", if we want the pupil to focus on the past tense, then we should show them, "Je suis allée en ville." That way they have to look at the verb form and can't depend on the word 'hier'. And we should ask them to distinguish between go/went or between different persons of the verb. The questions here are about how well we understand what NCELP are trying to do. It's not just about spotting patterns. It's about how pupils process language.

I can see that my pupils are happy to know that aller is "go". But despite our teaching, how much attention do they pay to the endings aller, allé, allés, allée, allées, allez, allais...? Are they just happy to pick up on "go". And are we as teachers happy that they then use that to try to deduce the meaning from the whole sentence, rather than processing the endings? Do we assume that inflection is something it takes time for pupils to grasp the importance of? Or do we think it's something we need to force pupils to process?

Then there's the High Frequency Vocabulary idea. This has so many implications, and I can't yet see clearly what it means for my teaching. Does it mean the end of topic teaching? I can see the importance of non topic words and the very high frequency words. The thing is sometimes these words are highly grammatical. Or are low on meaning, high on re-combinability. Meaning that they are very slippery to teach with a bottom up approach. Je vais à la piscine; J'habite à Paris; Je vais au cinéma; Un pain au chocolat; La dame au chapeau rouge... In each one à is doing something different. Might it be better for pupils to learn some of this in chunks without getting stuck over-thinking words like à or du, de la, des? Like the pupil in this post trying to say things like, I like pizza with pineapple.

Does a focus on High Frequency Vocabulary mean a bottom up approach, focused on processing known words and grammar? Or is it the key to a revived focus on authentic texts and materials? If these are the words that feature in all texts, and if they are the key to unlocking meaning, then more authentic texts should be accessible. We've always been good at asking pupils to look for the words strong in meaning. Which can be deduced from clues in the context or may well be cognates. If our pupils are going to be better equipped to deal with the little words and process grammatical inflections, does this mean we can have more (not less!) focus on authentic texts?

If a High Frequency Vocabulary approach means an end to topics and to lists of inconsequential nouns to allow pupils to talk about their trivial lives (pets, stationery, hobbies, clothes), then could it instead bring a greater focus on culture and Culture? A move away from the first person obsession would also fit well with the grammatical sequencing. In Spain they... This Spanish person... In England we... I...

Ultimately, I can't tell how great the role of NCLE will be in where this goes next. What we need to see is what the new GCSE means. I'm holding off digging deep into what it means until the drafts are tweaked and firmed up. We will need to understand the marking criteria in detail to understand what is rewarded. The DfE were right in thinking that if they wanted change, then changing the GCSE was the way to do it. But whether those changes will be exactly what they intended, we will have to wait and see.

Language World 2023 Part Two

 In Part One of these two posts on my talk at Language World 2023, I looked at how we find ourselves in the middle of a polarised debate about language-learning. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on explicit learning of well-sequenced grammar, selected vocabulary, and phonics. On the other is the idea that communication and meaning come first, with grammar only making sense once pupils have enough language for the patterns to emerge.

At the end of the first post, I said that for me, the key thing is a well-structured and deliberately sequenced curriculum. But one that shifts the focus from just accumulating knowledge of the language, to a deliberate development of what pupils can do with the language.

And we don't have to look far for validation of this approach. We may be worried about Ofsted or even our own schools being obsessed with knowledge, but what we are required to teach is the National Curriculum. And the National Curriculum is very clear that our pupils should be making progress in what they "know and can do" with the language.

What do I mean by developing what pupils can do with the language? I mean a curriculum where we deliberately focus on how well pupils can develop their answers in speaking and writing, with increasing spontaneity, detail, personalisation, complexity, accuracy and independence.

The next few slides showed examples from my school's curriculum to show what I mean by this. Here I will give links to previous posts explaining activities in greater detail. And at the end I will come back to look at some overall principles and what "grammar" really means for me.

First an example that happened just before the conference so featured as a last minute extra, without a slide. Here's a story for you.

One of my Year 10 pupils arrived early before the others. I asked him, in Spanish, "Do you like to go to the zoo?" He looked puzzled because zoo pronounced in Spanish doesn't sound like a word. So I wrote zoológico on the board and asked him the question again. He said, "Sí, me gusta." I raised an eyebrow in expectation. He thought and said, "Sir. I am going to need the words for monkey and scratch." I put these on the board for him. He then said, in Spanish, "I like to go to the zoo because I can see the animals. In the holidays I went to the zoo and I saw a monkey. He was eating a banana. But while he was eating the banana, he scratched his... I was sick."

This is where I want pupils to end up. Able to develop answers spontaneously. With a secure repertoire they can deploy. It meets the GCSE criteria of extended answers, justified opinions and narration. And pupils with this kind of a working core of grammatical knowledge do well when they move on to A Level.

In my talk, I went back to the beginning and showed how first of all we work on fluency and spontaneity. Even saying/writing nonsense. Just to get the French flowing with activities like World Record Sentence or Connectives Dice (see second half of this post).

With activities like this, two things can happen. On the one hand, pupils relish the randomness of the sentences and enjoy saying things that no-one has ever said before. (Isn't that the point of grammar?) Or on the other hand, they try to make it make sense. Which is taking the next step in the right direction.

We quickly establish that knowing the French isn't the issue. What we need to spend time on is getting better at using our French. Thinking of things to say, what to say next. Making it coherent, varied, more sophisticated, more detailed, more personal.

Activities like Pimp My French focus on this, by taking a simplistic repetitive answer and improving it using all our repertoire. Annotating model answers and writing in colours helps pupils think about how to deploy their repertoire and create a better answer.

We look at how creating a piece of writing with just one infinitive has positives and negatives. Positive: it sticks to one idea, it shows off the whole repertoire of what you can do with an infinitive, it saves your other infinitives for another paragraph, and perhaps this person really likes playing with a ball.

But of course, this paragraph is also repetitive. So we look a paragraph (C) with more infinitives. Which turns into a bit of a list with and, and, and,  because there was no real link between the activities. And then a paragraph (A) with carefully chosen activities which do link into a coherent paragraph. You can see, the pupils then write their own versions of these 3 paragraphs.

Except often they don't. When you ask them to write paragraph (B) or (C), they instinctively want to improve it and make it read well!

You can see the beginnings of my Year 10 pupil's monkey story here, as pupils start to develop one idea, rather than just link ideas together.

In my talk, I moved on to explaining how to develop this kind of narration.

I expect you probably already all teach the structures involved. Opinions. Verb + infinitive. Past Tenses. In my talk I showed how we deploy them to create a narrative. Each pupil has ownership of one of the key structures. And we go round the class to build the story. Here's a post on how to set this up. Initially it follows a template, but as it gets transferred across topics, pupils deploy the repertoire more and more flexibly, (as shown here) until they can spontaneously develop answers on any topic.

So where does this leave grammar? Firstly, you can see the accumulation of grammatical forms. But the important thing is that they are added on to a working repertoire. And they are added because they are needed and useful. With a specific use. Imperfect to set the scene and say what was happening. Preterite or Perfect to say what happened. Different persons of the verb when you need them to create conflict or a difference of opinion. I talk to pupils about their "snowball" of language. Instead of leaving their French to melt, they have to grab hold of some, make it their own, and then more and more language will stick to it.

And secondly it takes a slightly different definition of grammar. Rather than taking the formal grammar in the sense of a linguist's dissection of the overview of the language and chopping it up into what seems logical chunks and sequencing, it focuses on the pupils' grammar. Grammar in the sense of their growing repertoire and ability to deploy the language. How the language is articulated, put together, used by the pupil to create meaning and develop answers. Scott Thornbury has a metaphor for this. He says that the synthetic grammar syllabus is like trying to make an omelette by taking an omelette, chopping it up, and trying to rebuild it back into an omelette. Instead, what I am trying to do is to take the raw ingredients and slowly cook them into something tasty. Developing the pupils' grammar, not chopping up the linguist's grammar.

I finished my talk with a third metaphor, bringing it back to the title, "Having your cake and picking the cherries," with the idea of language-learning as similar to Food Technology. You have your ingredients and you learn to use them to make something nice. If you have ingredients left over you didn't use, there will be something missing. And don't keep demanding ingredients you haven't got. Make something tasty with what  you have got.

And I added one last image. We often talk about the swing of the pendulum. From one pole to the other. In this case, from Communication to Grammar. But rather than a single pendulum, this is a Newton's cradle. The balls on the end swing wildly. But the balls in the middle never move. We are bashed from both sides, but we can find a middle way!

Thanks for coming to my talk!

Photo byHelen Myers.