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.