Questions - fundamental to the new GCSE

 Starting to have time to think about planning for the new GCSE. Details of publishers' resources are being released, and we're looking to see what the 2 years of study, progress and exam preparation would look like.

One thing that I think I could improve on and which is going to be central to the new GCSE is pupils coping with a range of unprepared and unexpected questions in the Speaking exam.

In the current GCSE speaking exam, there is one unexpected question in the role play. Most pupils pick up on a couple of words and say something, hoping there's a chance it fits whatever question was being asked. So it's very hit and miss, but it's only worth a couple of marks. For the current photo card, there are 2 unknown questions, but these are generally framed to be a platform for the pupils to show what they can say. Not to catch them out. And that principle applies in the current GCSE conversation too. My questions are not trying to catch the pupils out. I want them to show they can give opinions, reasons, examples in past and future and tell stories.

So in the current Conversation, I will often start with a very open question asking for an opinion. "Qu'est-ce que tu aimes faire pendant ton temps libre ?" Then my follow up questions will depend on the answer the pupil gives. Often in fact, they won't be questions but prompts. Pourquoi ? Et alors... ? Par exemple... ?

So the conversation can evolve spontaneously with natural interaction, tick the examiner's boxes, and work for pupils of all levels:

Qu'est-ce que tu aimes faire pendant ton temps libre ?

    J'aime jouer au foot.

Pourquoi ?

    Parce que je peux jouer avec mes amis.

Par exemple ?

    Par exemple samedi je suis allé(e) au parc avec mes amis.

Et alors le week-end prochain ?

    Alors je vais jouer au tennis si je peux.

Or at a higher level:

Qu'est-ce que tu aimes faire pendant ton temps libre ?

    Alors, si j'ai le temps, j'aime bien aller en ville avec mes amis surtout s'il fait beau.

Pourquoi?

    Parce que j'adore faire les magasins, même si je n'achète pas grand chose parce que je n'ai pas beaucoup d'argent et je dois payer pour prendre l'autobus pour y aller.

Par exemple ?

    Le week-end il faisait beau alors j'ai dit à mon ami que je voulais aller en ville et il a dit que je pourrais aller avec lui et ses parents dans la voiture. 

Et alors ?

Alors on est allés à Norwich mais j'aurais préféré y aller juste avec lui parce que ses parents parlent trop.

The new GCSE will still give a platform for this kind of conversation in the questions that follow the Photocard. (I am looking at AQA, but the specifications are broadly similar, although with some important differences.) The Role Play does away with the unexpected question. But there are 4 unprepared questions which follow the Reading Aloud task.

The questions that follow the Reading Aloud task are not seen by the pupils in the preparation time. They are scripted in the teacher booklet and must be read to the pupils exactly as they are printed. So these are marked for the answer the pupil gives (requiring full answers with some development), but also testing comprehension of the question being fired at them.

Here is an example:

From AQA Sample Assessment Materials

You can see that the first one is an open platform for the pupils to give an opinion and some detail. "Tell me about...." The others are much more specific in what aspect they are asking about. Question 2 is open in form ("What do you think about...") but asking them to instantly come up with an answer on a very specific question. In fact, all of these questions leave me wide-eyed and scratching my head. To instantly think up something to say in French to give a full answer to these questions. I have no idea what I would say for Question 2 or Question 4 here. And most pupils I know don't watch films. And would give an answer to Question 3 that was just the name of a celebrity.

This section of the exam is going to need a lot of working on in class. And it can't be done at the end of the course as exam technique. Responding to random unexpected questions with a full answer, is going to have to be a central part of the course.

Here's one thing I intend to try.

I am going to work a lot on using target language questions with texts. I know that in the Reading and Listening exams, there are no longer questions and answers in the target language. But this is practice for the Speaking exam. And it is so that we can use texts as a scaffold for speaking in class.

Here's an example text from the OUP French textbook which is out already for no obligation sample copies to be sent to you. Contact your area rep! Pearson are also bringing out a book for AQA as well as for Edexcel and I quite like the look of that one too, but I haven't got a copy of it yet. I think I am signed up for an electronic sample.

OUP AQA GCSE French Higher textbook

So in class, I am going to use a text like this one as a scaffold for responding to questions. I fire questions at the pupils and they locate the appropriate answer in the text and read it to me.

As-tu une passion ? Nager est ma passion.

Qu'est-ce que tu ferais pour réussir ?     

Que ferais-tu si tu étais célèbre ?

Que ferais-tu si tu étais riche ?

The focus is on understanding the question. The answer is given in the text.

It could be with the text in front of them (as a reading aloud!) or from memory once we have read the text.

I could do this with questions in the order of the text, or out of order, or re-phrased (Quelle est ta passion ? / Est-ce que c'est important de gagner beaucoup d'argent ? / Quels sont les avantages d'être riche ?) or repeated questioning as a high paced catch you out game. 

And then I would allow pupils to vary their answer, adapting or replacing the answer given by the text or developing an answer given by another pupil. So they are responding to the same questions but giving a personal answer. 

Quelle est ta passion ? J'adore la musique surtout écouter du jazz.

Quelle est ta passion ? J'adore la musique mais je n'aime pas le jazz. Je préfère écouter Taylor Swift.

This would be spread over several lessons, giving opportunity to revisit the grammar and vocabulary content of the reading. This would recycle recycle, recycle: moving from an initial reading of the text, examination of the grammar, response to target language questioning with increasing speed and fluency, to independent answers.

Or perhaps we could do it backwards, with pupils answering questions first, to construct a version of the text before reading it. So first answer these questions imagining you are a swimmer:

As-tu une passion ?    J'adore nager.

Qu'est-ce que tu fais pour réussir ?   Je m'entraîne tous les jours.

Que ferais-tu si tu étais célèbre ?     Je gagnerais beaucoup de concours et je voyagerais à l'étranger.

Que ferais-tu si tu étais riche ?    Je donnerais beaucoup d'argent à ma famille.

Then when they come to the text, they will be able to read it easily and focus on the high frequency words and structures like encore plus or même which will be important in getting the marks for the Reading and Listening questions.

And as I mention in this post, I will be creating parallel versions of texts from the textbook so that we can go over them again and again, seeing the grammar and vocabulary in different contexts. Again, using these as a vehicle for increasingly confident response to quick fire target language questions.

Looking at the textbooks, this is the sort of thing we are going to have to come up with in order to exploit the texts, create a lesson that works in the classroom, recycle content, develop fluency, and tackle the requirements of the exam. Lots of work to do!

Planning for the new GCSE - a backwards approach

 This term we are all going to have to make huge strides in planning and resourcing the new GCSE that starts in September. I could start by making a spreadsheet of the topic content and grammar, or with the contents page of whichever textbook I am hoping to adopt. But in this post I am going to take the opposite approach. I am going to start with a single text and think through some of the things I could plan to do with it. And why I am doing them. That way I can think clearly about what I want my overall KS4 curriculum to achieve.

Here is a text from the draft materials of the OUP French textbook for the new GCSE.

OUP draft advance materials

What might I want to do with a text like this in the classroom?

Firstly, I might want to use elements of the text as a model answer for what pupils might say or write themselves. You can see the scope in this text for a "sentence builder" based on I live in... with... at... we go to... it is... And at KS3 I might take that approach, as we work on pupils being able to see that putting French together isn't magic, it's just a step by step process. I'm not sure it's appropriate at KS4, and reliance on sentence builders may actually be a recipe for not learning. If that statement surprises you, have a look at this post on why it's important to go beyond sentence builders. At KS4 I would hope pupils can confidently say, I live in... with... at... we go... it is... without support. What I would work on is being able to do this at speed, thinking quickly to repeat and change an element as the sentence is bounced around the class. And then to add opinions, speech, conflict of opinions, examples in past and saying what might happen next time. Here's a post on how I would expect pupils at the drop of a hat to be able to riff on this topic saying things like, I live in Dereham with my family but I prefer to go to Norwich with my friends if I can, but if I go with my family I can go in the car, I suppose. At the weekend I wanted to go to Norwich with my friends but my mum said, "We are going to Norwich" so...

So by the time pupils see this text, the bare bones of what they are saying about where they live, who with and where they like to go, are easy pickings. I would probably do speaking first and then use this text as a listening, with me reading the text aloud at varying speeds.

Will anything be changing for the new GCSE in this approach? One thing is that rather than working on pupils being able to spontaneously improvise extended answers, I will have to develop their ability to respond to the scripted questions that follow the reading aloud task  in the Speaking exam. So although in the Reading exam they won't have questions/answers in the target language, I will be using more questions in the target language in class. So with these texts, I would practise asking questions in French, with the pupils answering in the first person. Where do you live? I live in Bruges. There are many possibilities for this, whether it be with the text in front of them as a reading; or from memory after reading or listening to the text; or as a model where they can give their own answers in response to the question. The text becomes secondary to the process of hearing a question in the 2nd person and fluently responding, switching to the first person for the answer.

Secondly, I could exploit the text for reading comprehension.  Except that's the wrong word. We know from the current GCSE that the Reading and Listening exam questions are NOT comprehension questions at all. If that statement sounds extraordinary then please read this post, because it will change your way of thinking about the exam. And we know the new GCSE is designed to be even more focused on testing items of grammar and vocabulary, rather than comprehension. So what should we be focusing on in this text?

One technique I like to use, is to show pupils how they can give a perfectly correct comprehension answer, but score zero marks. In this post I give a examples of questions that answer the question correctly, but which would not satisfy the AQA markscheme. The pupils have to read more carefully and do what AQA want: show they understand exactly what each word means. So for this text I would give the pupils these questions and answers:

What do they do in the holidays? Go to Ivory Coast.   Zero

What happens when they play video games? They win.   Zero

These are examples of how we are not looking for comprehension of the text. What is needed at GCSE (and I expect this to be carried over to the new exam), is an answer that directly translates all the words of the sentence. So I would want pupils to spot that they need to add to the answers to give the details:   They often go to Ivory Coast. They always manage to win.

This exercise does several things. It gives them a way into the text by providing a basic answer to the question. It trains them to look at the question and find the exact sentence that provides the answer, and to then give a full answer with all the linguistic details. And it focuses them on the non topic words such as always, often which appear in all topics.

This has moved me onto the third aspect of the text I would want to exploit: Learning Vocabulary. With its focus on the defined word list, the new GCSE does feel a bit like one big vocabulary test. And we are being invited to think of teaching languages as being a deliberately planned exercise in tracking where pupils repeatedly meet words in different contexts. This is where I hope the new textbooks are carefully constructed, cleverly bringing in all the words on the list multiple times, rather than being over-reliant on the 15% of lower frequency words the exam boards were allowed in order to make a topic-based approach viable.

You can see from the approach outlined in points 1 and 2 above, that I am already looking to move away from topic comprehension and topic vocabulary. You can see that the texts from OUP have been constructed to squeeze in words you might not expect. The words to succeed and to fill aren't the basic words you expect for the topic of going on holiday or for a day out. And it would be easy to gloss over them and concentrate on words pupils need in order to talk about this topic, or to give an answer to a comprehension question. But it's important to keep an eye on these non topic words.

Some, like often, always can easily be applied to any topic and should become a fundamental part of pupils' repertoire, as familiar as I like, because, I can... Others seem harder to fit in, so we need to be deliberate in making sure we see them repeatedly. One thing I am thinking of doing is creating multiple versions of the texts in the textbooks. For example, this text I have written picks up on the language that has been used in the OUP sample texts:

It deliberately looks familiar to a pupil who has worked on the original OUP text. And it deliberately contains réussir and remplir to make sure that pupils aren't just focusing on the words that easily fit into the topic.

I might use these mirror texts in the same lesson or sequence of lessons as the original text, or I might use it later in the course, timed to bring back the words before they are totally forgotten.

I would also centre pre-learning of vocabulary around these words that have been shoe-horned in to the text. Sometimes I like pupils to meet words for the first time in a text, because thinking about a word and deducing its meaning is one of the ways to end up learning it. Including if you initially get it wrong. Getting something wrong is very memorable. But the words that have been squeezed into this text risk being ignored. They are not central to the topic or to the meaning. But they may end up being the ones important for the exam, so anything we can do to constantly highlight them will help.

Point four: The text has been designed to bring in grammar points. The text is using some fancy comparatives such as worse and as much as. And verbs ending in -ir. The first thing I would want to do is decide if my pupils are ready to have these added to their repertoire that they themselves can deploy, or whether it's something that they just need to recognise and understand. If we are going to spend time on learning how to use worse than, then I will want pupils to have it as something they can use in almost anything they say or write. It does seem like a useful tool for developing answers on topics such as family, sport, school, where competition and friendly conflict can help set up a story of hope and disappointment. And bearing in mind the importance of responding to quick-fire questions, What is the worst thing about...? might be an important question to be able to deal with.

The verb endings for -ir verbs is another question. There are so few regular -ir verbs that pupils tend to want to deploy. How often will they be using them for real rather than for the sake of practising them? The exam boards can put them in the Listening and Reading, but how can they manoeuvre pupils into actually having to show they can use them? In the Role Play asking about what time you finish school might do it. But this may have been learned as a wholesale expression, and anyway, the ending finis, fini, finit is silent. In the translation, there might be a he finishes / I finish question. Or the dictation might have a je finis where depending on the exam board the spelling may or may not be tested. Otherwise, a pupil wanting to use finir might go for the safe option of using it in an infinitive construction: je peux finir quand je veux / je n'aime pas finir tard / je vais finir mes examens.

So I will be looking at the textbooks very carefully to see how they are handling -ir verbs. It takes some pupils a very long time to pay attention to details like finis / finit. I will want to see how often the textbooks recycle verb endings to keep pace with how pupils learn them.

Possibility Five: Reading aloud and dictation. You may have thought that working on reading aloud would be one of the first things to do do with the text. I am wary of this. The brain always wants to reach for meaning. So to avoid cognitive overload, I would want to work on the meaning of the text first before asking pupils to read it aloud.

But, yes, I would want to use it to focus on key sound-spelling clusters. The nasty one in here both for reading aloud and for dictation is the ent ending. Reading and dictation is not just a question of phonics. To know how to pronounce parent and habitent you need grammatical knowledge. Another reason to save this, perhaps, until after working on the meaning of the text. It's another way to bring back a text another day to keep recycling and revisiting.

So how does this inform my curriculum planning?

You can see that it is turning into an immense jigsaw puzzle.

I need to plan the organic development of pupils' own repertoire and their ability to deploy it. Our existing curriculum in KS3 and KS4 is based around developing pupils' growing repertoire of language, so I am confident we can adapt this, in fact I will want to change it as little as possible. They will still need to give opinions and reasons, describe, and give examples in past and future. I need to strengthen their ability to bounce from a question form (you) to an answer in the first person. And we need to add grammar items that the exam board may want to contrive to test in the dictation or translation.

Alongside this, I need to make sure that topic and non-topic vocabulary is being met over and over again. Making sure topic words aren't left stranded in just one topic. Making sure key non topic words become part of the growing repertoire that is deployed in all topics. And making sure any obscure words that don't fit easily into any topic don't get skipped over. One way to tackle this will be to deliberately create similar versions of texts to be repeated, making sure that words that are squeezed into a topic text, are seen again as often as the topic words.

It's going to feel like a horrible combination of jigsaw and juggling. You can see where that metaphor leads. Trying to be meticulous while also accepting mess and scatter. I'm comfortable with that.