Writing: Criteria, Cognitive Load, and Feedback

 When we ask our pupils to do writing, we are not just testing their recall. We are working on how well they can deploy their French in order to create a better piece of writing. We are looking for detail, personalisation, and coherence.

But when we do this, we increase the cognitive demands considerably. As well as having to recall the French, our pupils have to think about the selection and ordering of ideas, how they link and are developed or contrasted.

And this invitation to express themselves opens up more challenges. Instead of sticking to a Present, Practice, Production model, and churning out exactly the things they have just been learning, they may bring in language from their own repertoire and find ways to say things they want to say. This drive to communicate, to say things, to have their own control of what they want to say and how to say it is not something we want to crush! But sometimes it does feel as if we are stamping it out with our feedback. 

This happens in two main ways:

You're trying to say things you can't. Just stick to what I've taught you.

You've said what you want to say, but you haven't used the language features I wanted to see included.

Here's some examples of pupils' work and my feedback where I wrestle with this.

Of course, sometimes, you get a pupil who has the perfect balance. They can think carefully about what to say AND organise it coherently AND write accurately AND build it out of the structures we've been learning AND bring in language from their own wider repertoire of French:

I like the way they put together the ideas to contrast what they have to wear and what they can choose to wear, and what they have decided to wear. Good selection of ideas, developing thoughts around one idea at a time, rather than linking separate ideas. Careful attention to the language features of the topic (adjectival agreement). Bringing in French from their personal repertoire (j'ai décidé de / au lieu de) to make it read how they want it to sound. They have the perfect balance of building something out of French they know, alongside wanting to express themselves, and wanting to craft a piece of writing that works.

On the other hand, sometimes you get work like this.

This pupil has made errors in just about all their adjectival endings and some of their verb endings. The thing is, I know that this pupil, when they were just writing sentences in their booklet, had correctly written une veste noire and une chemise blanche.

So what has happened? What do we need to do about it? What should I say to this pupil? What mark should they get?

Here's my feedback on this piece of work:

This is a pupil who will instantly look at the mistakes in gender agreement and realise what they have done. But when they wrote it, their attention was on other features. They were focussing on meaning and on expression and on what they were saying. And they did a good job. They discussed what they used to wear and what they wear now, and which they prefer. This is very different from the sentences in their booklet just itemising in a list all the things they wear. And they are bringing in words from their own repertoire in order to achieve this. And this is what I want. I don't want my pupils to have no interest in expressing themselves.

I have this next example which interests me a lot. It is a pupil who does very well in languages, can read authentic texts with confidence and tackles things other pupils struggle with. But this piece of writing made me raise an eyebrow because it was too careful and accurate!

Their comment at the end is revealing. Unlike the other pupils, their focus was always on the language not on the ideas. But it reads like a series of sentences, without the flow or sense of expression the other pupils were aiming for. It's more accurate. But in some ways less ambitious.

This is where I am going to need a good metaphor to feedback to the class. I am thinking of something along the lines of a circus act. Someone who does a couple of backflips on the ground is quite impressive but fairly safe. Someone who does a backflip on a narrow beam, is very impressive but it might all go wrong. Someone who does a backflip on a high wire risks total failure. But well done for trying. Hopefully when it comes to their French, they have a teacher who can help them understand what went wrong and help them get back on the horse rather than scaring them off forever.