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.
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| 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.
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