Hot and cold over Cold Calling

 I've let some of the heat go out of the Cold Calling debate on twitter before writing this. What I want to say about it is too much and slightly too complex for a tweet. And I'll try to be true to the Nice Man ideals on here and do it without the eye rolling  and side-taking you might fall into on twitter.

I don't like the name. Cold Calling. Sounds like a poem by T.S. Eliot. I don't think anyone likes the name. I don't mind the concept. But it worries me that it's such a Big Thing. I can't imagine teaching a lesson where you are only interested to hear from the pupils who have their hands up. Rather than rolling my eyes, I am shaking my head at that idea. But there are circumstances where exactly that scenario plays out. I will come on to that.

Then there's hands up. Again, I am looking askance at the idea that you can't have pupils putting their hands up and then go ahead and ask one of the pupils whose hand isn't up. Of course you can do that.

So how do I try to build participation and engagement in my classroom?

Hands up:

• Ask the question to the whole class and expect everyone to think about it and be ready to answer.
• If I ask a question or ask for participation, pupils put their hands up. I might narrate what I am doing: You know I'm going to ask you sometime this lesson, so put your hands up now so you don't end up at the end with a question you don't want to answer.
  
• I might, or might not ask one of the pupils whose hand is up. I will narrate what I am doing: If your hand is up, I have noticed, but I might ask someone else.
• I might give more time for pupils to put their hand up: I'm starting to wonder about the people whose hands aren't up. I need to find out what they are thinking. And then I will decide who I want to ask. Hand up, or no hand up. I decide.
  
• If there's a series of questions on the board, I won't necessarily go through them in order. I'll let pupils pick which one they want to answer.
• I keep a list in my head of which pupils haven't participated yet. And I let pupils know that I am doing this. And just because someone has answered, doesn't mean I won't come back to them.

Does this mean that I am asking 30 questions per lesson or having 30 interactions per lesson. Quite possibly yes. I do a lot of Question and Answer, building model answers or asking for participation in speaking French. There are ways of involving more than one pupil in a question. If there are pupils who have their hands up but you ask someone else, you can check that answer with the other pupils before accepting it. Is that what you were going to say? Was there something you want to add to that answer?

With my Year 7 class recently, I did my reminder spiel about how I'd be asking everyone at some point. And one of my most potentially reluctant pupils put their hand up and said, "I don't know the answer but I do know that..." and reeled off three things that all related to the question and made the next questions to the class much more focused and fruitful. That's what I'm trying to achieve. Not catching pupils out!

And how you respond to pupils' answers is also vital to a climate of engagement and participation. If a pupil doesn't want to say a word because they are worried they would say it wrong: "It's literally my job to find out what you're struggling with and teach you." Being genuinely interested in what pupils think. If someone does get something wrong, then thank them for helping tackle it. And when later in the lesson, people get it right, go back and thank them for making sure we all paid attention to it. Most importantly, being prepared to deal with what their (wrong/partial/tangential/unexpected) answers throw up.

This week I asked "How do you say I would like?" and the pupil took an unexpectedly long time to reply and said, "Is it je veux aimer?" Which was the perfect answer to get at several key features of je voudrais. The different way English and French deal with the conditional tense, and the fact that French uses vouloir not aimer.

And this brings me on to where the hands up/cold calling dilemma does come into play. In my normal class teaching I am actively seeking out where there is misunderstanding or partial understanding. I am leading the class in collective thinking, correcting errors, making links and exploring the boundaries of their knowledge. What happens to change that?

Two things change that situation completely. One is if it's not my class. The other is if the lesson is being observed. 

If it's a class I have borrowed, because I'm covering for an absent colleague for example, my narrative of knowing each pupil and where they are with their learning, and me being responsible for their progress, and having the right atmosphere of trust and engagement, doesn't apply. I might just gratefully take contributions from the pupils with their hands up, just to keep things rolling and get to the end of the lesson.

If I am being observed. Do I really want to be probing and seeking out misconceptions and things that could derail or divert the lesson? As a teacher of some 25,000 hours' experience, who really doesn't care what an observer thinks, then I might. As a less experienced teacher, being judged by the observer, then I might not. I might naturally do everything to keep the lesson precisely on the rails by gratefully accepting the participation of pupils who volunteer the right answers.

So a trainee teacher or a new teacher may well find themselves with a class that isn't yet really "theirs", and also being observed. The double whammy! In these circumstances, the hands up v cold calling debate does kick in. With an unfamiliar class, picking pupils at random using lollypop sticks with names on is a way to take the blame for picking on a pupil away from the teacher. It was random, it was fair and it could even be fun. And it's the start of that conversation about, "I'm not testing you to try to catch you out. I am genuinely interested in your answer."

The French teacher's secret weapon is to pick the pupil using Am stram gram... Pupils love it and surreptitiously try to memorise it and join in. And of course if you get picked by am stram gram, you have to contribute because them's the rules.

Also helped by the fact that my friend Charley Guigon on my year abroad (pre Google) had a collection of these rhymes from around the world which he passed on to me!

That's why I couldn't fit it all in a tweet. I don't like the name cold calling. I don't teach in a way that's about right/wrong answers and catching pupils out. I want all pupils to know that I will value their participation. I expect their participation, but give them some opportunity to do so on their own terms. They can put their hands up, but if they don't, then they know I'll be interested to know why not. They can pick which question to answer or answer a slightly different question, or answer it with a question, or give a partial answer or even a wrong answer. And we'll take it on from there. And they know that whatever happens, I'm keeping track and I know where to go next. And when it works, it's fantastic with the class buzzing to take part confidently.

And sometimes it doesn't work. And I'll tell them that I seem to have pitched it wrong today and I'll have a think and pick it up again next time.

So that's the debate I think we should be having. How to create a class with participation and engagement, with a teacher who monitors and adapts. That's the rich and fruitful complex area I'd like to be exploring. Not picking sides!

What I do want to ask the experts and the gurus, is what to do when it's just not working. When it's a rainy Thursday afternoon after PE. Or the pupils are too hot. Or I'm too tired to think straight. Or it's that class that just hates me and French and the universe today. When you've tried everything. How do you get them to glimpse how great lessons could be if they took some risks, had a go, listened carefully and thought about things? Starting from admitting that sometimes things are just not working for me!

Here's a post on what happened when a Year 9 Spanish lesson just wasn't working. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-lost-art-of-teaching-with-whiteboard.html

Here's a Year 8 French lesson that just didn't work. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2022/05/it-turned-out-alright-in-end.html

And I had one with Year 10 Spanish last week where we worked on something for 3 lessons and what I wanted to achieve by the third one just didn't happen. I'll write that one up too sometime when I've decided what to do about it.

It's not the neat either/or picking sides that matters. It's the messy ground in the middle where relationships, experience, adaptation, quick thinking, genuine interest in pupils, and clear vision of where learning is probably going happens. Let's all get stuck into that!

The New GCSE Vocabulary List. The Final Word?

 I've had at least two goes already at tackling the implications of the High Frequency Vocabulary List for the new GCSE. Wouldn't it be nice if we could put it to bed for ever? And even better if I could conclude that this means we need to change NOTHING for the new GCSE. An opportunity to change things we want to change. But NEED to change...? Maybe not!

The Vocabulary List was a promise and a threat.

The promise was that it would give a defined list of words for pupils to learn. Then they would be tested on whether they had learned what they were supposed to be learning. It would get rid of the situation where the exam contained unknown words that pupils were meant to deduce. Or bizarre words that were on the vocabulary list but no-one taught. And more fundamentally, it was part of a push away from a topic based approach where words were seen in one context and then never met again.

It promised to solve the perceived problem of the current GCSE, where there is a big discrepancy between the words learned for the speaking and writing exam (opinions, reasons, tenses and topic words), and the words learned for the listening and reading exam. This promise was always bogus. Because we don't in fact make pupils learn the whole list of words from the specification. If merluza or gamberro come up in the exam, we take that hit for a couple of marks. What we do ask pupils to learn is the list of non-topic words such as few, often, some, early, more, worst which the exam boards love to test. This kind of high frequency non-topic words is nothing new.

And of course, it does nothing to get rid of the real problems of the listening and reading exams: the tricks and traps. In fact, with a defined vocabulary list to learn, there may have to be more of these, because the same number of pupils will still have to get the questions wrong, even if they have learned the words.

The promise was bogus because while it offered the hope of reducing (or defining) the vocabulary demands, and unifying the words learned for speaking/writing and listening/reading, it has done no such thing. The word list basically does not apply for speaking and writing. There is no way that teachers are going to say to pupils, "You might like skating, but we're not learning that word because it's not in the exam, say football instead." Or in a French restaurant in 2040, a father says to his child, "I can't order chicken, it wasn't on the exam vocabulary list. You'll HAVE to have the rabbit instead."

If the GCSE panel wanted us to have speaking and writing tasks where pupils didn't want to say skating or chicken, then they should have gone with the calls from @MFLTransform and others for a curriculum based not around pupils' multifarious and trivial interests, but based on the study of culture. This would also have given a push to move away from the 1st person domination of the course and the language.

And a High Frequency Vocabulary approach should have been compatible with use of authentic (or modified) cultural materials. If these are the words that appear in all texts, then a switch to a focus on high frequency vocabulary should have been the key to properly unlocking real texts. Somehow the Ofsted Research Review managed to conclude that authentic texts were unsuitable at the "novice" stage. Because they hold the view that meaning is arrived at by word by word parsing of known words and grammar, and that reading texts should be for modelling the language pupils are learning to speak and write.

It seems perverse that we ended up with a High Frequency Vocabulary approach, matched to a specification which presents itself as being based around individual inclusive first person lifestyles. The diversity and individuality don't seem to fit at all with the approach that we should stop teaching all the words for every pupil's pet or hobbies or nationality.

And given the nature of the tasks, this approach is not going to prevail. We will not be cutting out the words that pupils need in order to talk about themselves and their lives.

So that was the promise. Not going to happen.

What about the threat?

The threat is that even if we don't want to follow this approach, the new GCSE is going to push us in that direction. Our old texts and resources will be full of words pupils don't need. And missing the words they now need. And if we try to write our own new texts, they will be full of the wrong words. We'll be tearing our hair out to write texts and tasks that only use words that are on the list.

Can we put that threat to bed? Certainly for the speaking and writing, we can continue to teach exactly as we always have. The pupils are going to have to answer the same sorts of questions, perform the same sorts of tasks, and tick the same boxes as always.

And for listening and reading? Well, nothing's changed. We've exchanged one vocabulary list in the spec that no-one looks at, for another. Look at the new vocabulary list. Do any of the words on there actually scare us? Not really. Pupils might meet them during the course or they might not. They might just meet them on some cards or a list of words to be learned. Are they going to meet them throughout the course in different contexts, carefully tracking and meticulously planning how many times and at what intervals they meet each word? For 1750 words? Not going to happen. Time to relax and stop pretending it's going to.

And like that, in a puff of smoke, all the issues of the new GCSE disappeared into thin air. Empty promises. But also empty threats. If we stop believing in the good (or bad) vocabulary fairy, then you can do exactly what you want for the new GCSE. So stop worrying and start looking at it as an opportunity.

Describing - Planning for Aspects of the New GCSE

 You might be surprised that "Describing" is one of the aspects of the new GCSE that I am focusing on. But for the current GCSE, I don't really tackle Describing. (My pupils will be disappointed that I'm not referring to it as describering, to match scuba-divering and swimmering.)

I know a lot of resources tick the box for opinion + reason by teaching "I like... because it is..." And pupils do also automatically reach for this, and then realise they don't have a convincing opinion and the answer is going nowhere. Instead, I teach them to say, "I like... because I can..." And in fact, it then turns into "I like... because I can... but if... then I prefer... Sometimes I have to... especially if.. for example..."

Even if they did say, "I like... because it is..." then I would expect them to follow it up with "so I can..."

It's not just because this creates good routines for extending answers and meeting the criteria for the current exam. It's also because it creates a repertoire of language they can transfer across topics. And because once they have this core of language, other new words and grammar coalesce around the core. It becomes like a snowball of language that doesn't melt away, and in fact gets bigger and bigger as more language sticks to it.

I don't find that it is + adjective has the same power.

How do I get away with not teaching describering for the current GCSE? Because if you ask "What do you think of..." then you are going to get a better answer than if you say, "Describe..." or "What is x like?". So in conducting the exam, I always go for a question that gives the pupils a platform for showing what they can do, rather than questions to test if I can catch them out.

What about the new GCSE? The increased number of unprepared questions scripted by the board will be a major feature. I have written about this and how I plan to tackle it here. And the High Frequency Vocabulary List approach means there's a lot of adjectives to learn and be tested on.

Currently, "it is" + adjective isn't a big part of my teaching, because the word "describe" does not appear in the criteria for the speaking exam, whereas the word "narrate" does. The word "narrate" has disappeared from the criteria in the new GCSE. And it gets worse for my approach. The new GCSE exam guidance from AQA, where they interpret what is going to be meant by "good development" is a bit of a shocker:

From the AQA guidance accompanying the SAMs.

"Good development" is exemplified as "I don't like... because it is..." And to add insult to INRI, the adjective they give is "boring." This does NOT mean I will be stopping teaching routines and repertoire for extended answers. Firstly because they will still need to talk for 5 minutes. And secondly because of the importance of having this core repertoire for all other language to stick to.

But if we look at the scripted questions, will I have to boost my teaching of description? What if the card says, "Describe your school" and the pupil says, "I like my school because I can see my friends but I don't like the teachers because we can't work together except in Spanish where we can talk Spanish, of course." Would AQA give this answer no credit because they didn't "describe"?????? I'm not going to risk it.

The thing is, describering is tricky. If you mean verb to be + adjective. It's always an irregular verb. Of course we should teach irregular verbs. But it doesn't mean it sticks. Pupils know is but are is much more tricky. Then there's ser/estar in Spanish. Of course we teach it. But it remains a minefield, as we know from the current photo card, where pupils should switch between the two, but don't. Plus confusion between is and there is and sometimes the verb to have or sometimes the verb to do/to make when it comes to it is sunny. And in French the huge trap of there being no present continuous. We all know the feeling when in the exam a pupil has a photo of some people working and they start with the words, "Ils sont..."

And then there's adjectival agreement. And don't even get me started on pronouns. And I don't even mean object pronouns. Getting the right word in French for "it" in "it is..." is complex and tricky beyond the point where most pupils can be bothered to care just to say something so simple. And I think the exam boards have probably given up too. Do we just accept c'est rather than asking pupils to identify the gender of the noun in the question and use il / elle ?

Of course we should teach these things. But they don't make for a strong core of useful language which pupils can deploy. It doesn't make for a strong core around which other language can coalesce. They are tricky and bitty and conflicting. They are precisely the sort of language which can start to stick once pupils already have a good size snowball of language. And precisely the sort of language that melts away if you start with it and it has nothing to stick to.

Let's have a look at the SAMs from AQA and see where the word Describe is used.

Wow!!!! Thank you, AQA! These are examples of the scripted questions that could come after the Read Aloud task. Pupils do not see these questions in the preparation period. They are unexpected questions they have to listen to. Not a single describe in sight. They are the kind of open questions that give pupils a platform to speak. They go for the formulation "Talk to me about..." which gives pupils permission to say "I like... because I can... but if... then I prefer..." rather than "It is..." Can we trust AQA to stick to this? I hope so but I'm not going to risk it.

AQA Sample unprepared questions following the Read Aloud task

What about the AQA Role Play questions?

AQA Sample Role Play Questions

There we are. "Describe" is on every card. This is a slightly different teapot of fish though. These answers are prepared in the preparation time. And they only require a short answer. They are all about people so the choice of il/elle and the gender of the adjective should be clear. Or just learn sympa and extra which are invariable.

So what would I plan for the new GCSE and what would I look for in a textbook?

• I don't want to start with describing.
• I want to build a core repertoire of powerful, useable, transferable language first.
• I want to see describing added on to this core of language, in small doses in every unit.
• I don't want to try to make describing into a massive feature if all that's needed is My friend is nice.
• I do want to make sure all the adjectives are covered for the Listening and Reading exams.
• I think the photo card is less about description using to be + adjective than you might think. But I do want talking about a photo to be built in to every unit, with lots of reusable and recycled language for talking about any photo.
• I do want the complexity of describing (verbs to be, gender, pronouns) to be dealt with explicitly, once pupils have enough language for it to all make sense.
• If a textbook does start with the verb to be and the verb to have, and spends a unit describing people, I want to see where this is picked up in subsequent units. Where does it lead? How is it sustained?

There. You might have been surprised I wanted to do a whole post on describering. But I am glad I did. I got a few things straight. And also found that for AQA it might not be as much of a big deal as I was fearing. I'll have to look at the photo card in more detail in a future post though...

Vocabulary and the new GCSE - a second attempt

 In a previous post, I tried to think through what I wanted from a Scheme of Work for the new GCSE in terms of Vocabulary and the Vocabulary List. I ended up going round in circles. It's been going round and round in my head ever since, so I'm going to try again to get it straight, and at least work out what the issues are I want to solve.

Here's a list of Vocabulary headlines:

• I don't want to give the pupils the entire exam board vocabulary list and say "Learn this" - whether that be at the start of the course or in panic revision mode at the end!
• I don't want to chop up the exam board vocabulary list and give them a chunk a week, that has nothing to do with the words they are seeing in lessons.
• I do want weekly vocabulary homework lists to relate to the words we see week-by-week in class. Whether that be for seeing vocabulary in advance of the lesson, or for revising vocabulary after the lesson.
• I don't want words to be met as a one-off because they appear in a text or because they are on the list or because they relate to a topic.
• I want to make sure the vocabulary homework lists cover all the words on the exam board list, and that they are met and re-encountered in class in different contexts across the course.

What I can see now but which I failed to pin down explicitly enough in the previous post, is that this isn't about the vocabulary homework lists at all. The vocabulary lists we put on Quizlet are extracted from the course. So what matters is that the course itself - the way it is planned and resourced - makes sure the whole vocabulary list is built into the texts and content of the course.

In the first instance, we could look to the textbooks. Have the publishers constructed such a course, starting from the vocabulary list? Or have they started from a topic approach, using such words as are appropriate to the topic? They may have identified in the unit vocabulary pages which words are on the exam list. Have they shown us the other way round? Where are all the words on the vocabulary list met and re-met?

I also think there is not going to be a perfect solution. And maybe we are not going to see the change of approach the new GCSE was supposed to bring in. The exams may look pretty familiar. And the language pupils need for Speaking and Writing is not going to be limited to the Vocabulary list.

So I think I need to stop hankering after a perfect solution, and think clearly what I can realistically do:

• Vocabulary homework lists which combine the core repertoire of opinions, reasons, descriptions, tenses with the vocabulary for each topic.
• Vocabulary homework lists which combine the high frequency non-topic words (often, a bit, some, nobody) with the vocabulary for each topic.
• Deliberately re-writing texts from the textbook to mirror them in other topics, to re-encounter and emphasise some of the words that could belong in any topic. Especially verbs (manage, succeed, follow).
• Monitoring which words slip through the net (puissance, souci or gérer), including giving pupils this responsibility.
• Assessments which do not have a topic based focus.

What I have just done is recreate the previous post. With less ranting and less going round in circles. But coming to the same conclusions! I suppose that's progress. And it means I think I have the Vocabulary question in a state where it can fit in with the other elements that need putting together, without it being the piece of the jigsaw that just didn't fit. It's going to have to fit!

How close am I to concluding that if the Vocabulary List doesn't mean we have to change everything, do we actually need to change anything much at all? Try this post where I finally shoot the Vocabulary List fairy.

Planning for Aspects of the new GCSE: Vocabulary

 In recent posts, I have been looking at aspects of the new GCSE. (Link to these posts here.)  I don't have the answers, but writing the posts has helped me think through what I need to plan. This post is going to be on the thorniest issue, and I have a feeling that by the end of this post I will NOT have come up with the answers.

What is it that keeps me awake at nights? The vocabulary problem.

The vocabulary lists are central to the new GCSE. If our pupils learn the words on the list, then they will do well in the Listening and the Reading exams. The Listening and Reading exams will be made up of the words from the list.

We could just give the pupils the list and say "Revise this". And I am sure we will! But what we really should be aiming for is a situation where the pupils have met these words repeatedly in different contexts throughout the course. And where the texts we use are deliberately built out of these words and don't "waste" time and effort on words that are not going to be in the exam.

Will the textbooks rescue us here, with texts carefully constructed to recycle all the words on the vocabulary list, tracking when pupils meet and reencounter them so all the words on the list are learned?

A couple of factors muddy the waters. For the Speaking and Writing exams, the vocabulary list has gone out of the window. Pupils will use words which are not on the list, in order to answer the questions about themselves and their personal likes, dislikes, activities and circumstances. So textbooks and teachers are entitled, nay required, to deviate from the word list. When we model the answers pupils will give in the Speaking and Writing, we will not be sticking to the vocabulary list. They will need words like chicken, skating, clarinet, socks, Portugal or axolotl.

These factors will disrupt the clarity of what is to be learned for the Listening and Reading. And require pupils to have a larger active vocabulary than receptive. But the real danger is that it skews our teaching to the small set of useful topic words on the list, so we regularly use horse, dog, fish. But miss out repeatedly using puissance, souci or gérer.

And this confusion has muddied this post. I wasn't meant to be talking about that. I wanted to look at what it means in practical terms.

Let's start again. With the current GCSE, our pupils have vocabulary to learn. This is hosted on Quizlet. It is NOT based on taking the current GCSE vocabulary list and chopping it up. It was originally based on the vocabulary from the textbook, page by page - week by week. This meant learning could be set so pupils saw words in advance and came to lessons with some of the vocabulary they needed or that they were going to meet in texts or listenings. Or it meant that during the week, they met words in lessons and then went home and revised them. So we were relying on the textbooks to provide coverage of the vocabulary.

This had to change. It quickly became obvious that pupils were meeting words as a one-off, never to be seen again. So we changed it. We moved away from it being a list of single words, to having phrases. This meant vocabulary items were in longer, more useful chunks. The vocabulary revision became revision of high frequency useful language, using the vocabulary from each unit in order to recycle the important language in different contexts.

So with the new GCSE, what I want is:

• Vocabulary lists so the pupils can be confident they have covered the content of the exam.
• The vocabulary to be in chunks, not single words.
• All the words on the specification to be met again and again in different contexts, with well though-out spacing.
• The list to directly match the words that pupils are meeting in lessons that week.

How am I going to arrive at these lists?

Can I go through the texts in each unit of the textbook and make lists? Or will this result in topic based lists where words are met in one unit and never seen again? Or lists where topic words are over-emphasised at the expense of high frequency words?

Can I start with the exam board list and try to match it to topics? Or will this end up with pupils learning words they don't actually meet in lessons? And how will I get my head around meeting and reencountering so many words? And will the lists end up being topic based again, neglecting less obvious words?

Can I keep our current word list, but check it (with the multilingual profiler) to remove words that aren't on the list? How would this guarantee we cover all the words we need? Would this approach mean we may as well keep our current textbooks, or continue using them alongside new textbooks?

This is where we need to be able to trust the textbook publishers to have done a good job. Each unit has a vocabulary section. In some, it shows how many of the words are/are not on the vocabulary list. If we take the words from each unit of the textbook and put them into chunks and put them into lists for the pupils to learn, will this cover the whole of the vocabulary list in a way that means words are learned and then cleverly recycled rather than forgotten?

I really want to find a solution to this. For the current GCSE, our pupils learn the words they need for the Speaking and Writing core repertoire and topics. They learn the non-topic words that come up so often in the Listening and Reading exam - siempre, bastante, poco, desde hace, estoy harto de. Will this be enough for the new GCSE?

Maybe we should keep an eye on Oak Academy and LDP resources. I am hoping they have inherited the NCELP approach of meticulous tracking of deliberate vocabulary encounters. Will this be something we can adopt or tap into?

What I mean by this, is that if we include the word réussir on Tuesday the 12th of September in a text on Family Relationships, unless we meet that word again 10 times by Thursday the 15th November at 12.30 in different contexts, then the word will be forgotten and we may as well never have taught it. OK. I can do that. For the word réussir. But it's beyond me to do it for all the 1700 words on the list. And that doesn't make me a bad teacher or the learning pointless. You can tell by the sarcastic 15th November, it's not how I see things. Here's a post on exactly that - teaching is like thickening a roux. Your eyes are on what's in the saucepan, not on the quantities on the recipe list. Although thinking about and trying out ideas you don't initially agree with is the best way to learn and develop. And there's a bigger but..

BUT...

But even if you roll your eyes at this view of learning, what if the new GCSE is specifically designed to impose this approach on us, whether we want it or not? It has to be something we think about.

I am very nervous of something carefully planned on paper that just doesn't happen in the classroom. I prefer something that emerges from what works, has evolved to cope, and is robust enough to survive in the real world. My instincts are telling me that I will have to go with these threads:

• Vocabulary lists based on the words pupils meet in lessons - new textbooks, old textbooks, our own texts, model answers and pupils' own answers.
• High frequency non-topic language - deliberately recycled and highlighted in all topics.
• Core repertoire language for the speaking and writing exam, combined into chunks with the topic vocabulary.
• Cleverly and deliberately re-using words across topics, by writing new versions of texts encountered in previous topics.
• Deliberate monitoring of what words are being missed, starting by looking at what words are on the list that we don't currently teach, and making sure they appear across topics.
• Deliberately creating assessment texts which don't stick to a topic, eg using full past papers from early in Year 10.

That looks as if I might have answered the question about how to make useful vocabulary learning lists for pupils. But that's not really the question. The question isn't about the lists. It's about the course. How do I make a course and resources which deliberately use all the words on the vocabulary list over and over again? It's not about extracting vocabulary lists from our texts, for pupils to learn. It is about how the words on the vocabulary list are programmed recurrently throughout the course. And I'm not sure how I can do this!

I am going to have to come back to this. Again and again!

One thing though. If it weren't for the Vocabulary List, would we even have to change anything at all? Spoiler alert - I got there in the end. Try this post to end all posts on the matter.

Now you've got to the end of this, if you've got your answers to the questions, please share them. If it's left you with annoying questions you didn't know you had, then please read this follow up post, where I've had another go at tidying it up and making Vocabulary ready to fit alongside all the other pieces of the jigsaw we have to put together.

Links to posts on planning for the new GCSE

Links to all posts on planning, resourcing and actually teaching the new GCSE:

Working on the three different sorts of answers you need for the speaking exam. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/11/working-on-three-types-of-questions-for.html

Moving to a new topic after half term. How well do the key types of language knowledge transfer to the new module? https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/11/when-everything-youve-told-pupils-about.html

The first half term teaching the new GCSE: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/10/getting-started-with-new-gcse.html

From Module 1 Booklet: Cheating Translation. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/08/cheating-translation-neat-trick.html

Module 0 booklet for before pupils start the new GCSE textbook. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/08/new-gcse-module-0-booklet.html

Starting to plan the shape of the course and materials to supplement coursebooks. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/06/planning-new-gcse-vision.html 

Will "describe" replace "narrate"? https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/describing-planning-for-aspects-of-new.html

Vocabulary. Post to end all posts on the matter. In which I shoot the Vocabulary fairy and the kingdom is restored. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-new-gcse-vocabulary-list-final-word.html

Vocabulary second attempt to hopefully get it straight: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/vocabulary-and-new-gcse-second-attempt.html 

Vocabulary - lists, texts, resources. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/planning-for-aspects-of-new-gcse_11.html

Why I think preparing for Unexpected Questions is even more important than in the current GCSE. Plus a couple of ways I'm thinking of doing it. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/planning-for-aspects-of-new-gcse.html and this earlier post on the same topic https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/04/questions-fundamental-to-new-gcse.html

Planning the order of the course - how do topics fit with the accumulation of learning and pupils' ability to deploy it? https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/text-book-course-book-part-three.html

Using texts to model pupils' answers. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/textbook-course-book-part-two-texts-as.html

Cultural texts. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/text-book-or-course-book-part-one.html

Thinking through what the new course will have to deliver. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/04/planning-for-new-gcse-backwards-approach.html

Ideas for Dictation. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2023/06/thoughts-on-dictation.html

Will textbooks solve the problem of the new GCSE? In particular the vocabulary/topic problem? https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2023/11/will-i-need-new-textbooks-for-new-gcse.html

The scary monster of change. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2023/12/evolution-or-intelligent-design.html

Planning for Aspects of the New GCSE: Unexpected Questions

 The part of the current GCSE exam where my pupils do worst is the unexpected question on the Role Play. If any of them ever score marks there, it is generally through lucky chance. Processing the question, thinking of what to say, saying it in Spanish, all while still worrying they have barely understood the question... pleased to have said anything at all.

Fortunately it only requires a short answer and is only worth a couple of marks.

But the new GCSE will have 4 such questions, requiring developed answers. And worth considerably more marks.

For AQA these 4 questions follow the Reading Aloud task. And for Edexcel they are split between the Reading Aloud and the Photo tasks.

I have already written this post identifying these unexpected questions as something I need to work on. I remember Rachel Hawkes at the introduction of the current GCSE (or maybe even the one before that?) talking about the importance of questions, and I am aware I never got to grips with it in the way I wanted. I've also always thought Adam Lamb's idea of Tú - Yo practice is a great idea. Adam regularly does quickfire practice of changing the second person verb form you hear in a question into the first person form you need for an answer: vas - voy, quieres - quiero, te gusta - me gusta, tus amigos - mis amigos. There will definitely be a need to build this in to our plans for the new GCSE.

In this previous post in mentioned that I wanted to use texts as a scaffold for pupils getting better at quickfire unexpected questions requiring a full answer. I think I need to explain this more. And it then leads into another similar idea based on the exam board sample questions.

Rather than use examples from one or other of the new textbooks and risk upsetting the publisher, I'll use an example text from the 2009 OUP GCSE Spanish book I co-authored.

From the 2009 OUP GCSE textbook

I know there are no longer Target Language questions in the Listening and Reading exams. But I am going to use them in class with texts as practice for the Speaking exam unexpected questions. The pupils can use the text (reading aloud!) to give their answers.

So with this text, if I ask ¿Tienes un jardín? the pupil can use the text to reply Donde vivo no hay jardín porque vivo en un apartamento.

Other questions (in Spanish) could be Where would you prefer to live? What would you change about where you live? What problems are there where you live? Where do you like to go with your friends?

I would return to this activity several times to build speed and confidence. I would start with the questions in the order they correspond to the text. Then I would change the order of the questions in a quickfire activity where the pupils have to listen to the question and identify what they are being asked, but still able to use the text to support their answer. I would vary the wording of questions or the question form (especially in French). Later on I would ask the pupils to give a different answer to the one in the text, adapting the sentence to talk about themselves. And eventually I would expect pupils to be able to give an answer without a supporting text.

It's about getting them used to Target Language questions and giving a full answer in a sentence with some development.

Another idea is to start from the unexpected questions from the Sample Assessment Materials and for me to write reading texts from those. Then we can do the same activity, with pupils answering quickfire questions using the information in the texts. That way I can be sure I am covering the kind of questions the exam board are likely to be putting in the real exam.

Here's an example of the sort of questions pupils will be asked:

Example unexpected questions following the Read Aloud task in the AQA SAMs

And here is a text I have written to go with these questions.

Où est ton collège ?     Mon collège est en ville à trois kilomètres de ma maison.

Remember, the pupils do not see the questions; they are being asked to respond immediately in full answers to a question they hear. So they will have the text in front of them and can read it through. Then I use it for quickfire questions (in order or out of order). The pupils register the question and can find the correct bit of the text to read aloud in order to give a full answer. Then we move on to letting them modify the answer in the text. And eventually to giving their own full answers to unexpected questions.

A couple of issues that came up when writing that model text. Firstly, I had the time to think about my answers! Especially to find a way to develop them. Secondly, I hope I the text is modelling the sort of language pupils will be learning and which will tick the success criteria. Thirdly, I was careful to avoid using the pronoun "it" in the answers about school or uniform. I deliberately repeated the noun. Knowing whether to use ce / il / elle for subject pronouns (plus knowing what to do with object pronouns) is too much of a trap at this stage and I will sidestep it by telling pupils to give full sentences I like my school... My school is... rather than bounce off the question and try to say I like it because it is... 

And finally, I don't want to give you or my pupils the impression that in the exam, the answers to the questions are to be found in the reading aloud text. That is not the case! This is a technique for getting lots of practice of responding to quickfire questions by using model answer texts. By the time we get to the exam, I am hoping my pupils will be able to cope with questions without any such support!

I don't know what focus on unexpected questions the textbooks from the various publishers will have. And how sustained any focus on developing quickfire response to unexpected questions will be in their books. But hopefully the ideas in this post mean you can try to build it in, whatever course you adopt.

Let me know what you think!

Text Book? Course Book? Part Three: Planning the Order of the Course

 In Part One and Part Two of this series of posts, I have looked at what I want a published textbook/coursebook to provide in terms of cultural reading texts and texts which model the types of answers pupils are learning to give. I have concluded in both of these posts, that I am treating the published resources as Text Books (with resources and texts I can exploit) rather than as Course Books (a course I will be following). Of course that's personal to me and you may disagree.

In this post and subsequent posts, I will continue to try to analyse what it is that I want my GCSE course and Scheme of Work to look like. So I can compare it to what the published books are offering. Which ever book we decide to buy, I will have to supplement it with other materials, and it is entirely possible that we will tackle the course in a different order to the textbook.

Firstly I definitely want pupils to start the course by developing a rock solid core repertoire that they can use across all topics. Here's some reasons why:

• I don't want the early topics in the course to be below GCSE standard.
• I want pupils to have the full 2 years to get good at using their repertoire.
• In French (but not Spanish), our pupils have had at least 3 years already working on this.
• Pupils should be able to transfer their core repertoire across any topic.
• When pupils have a strong core of language, more and more language sticks to it.

For Spanish, where our pupils are beginners, I want the course to start with a topic where they can really work on their repertoire of opinions, reasons, and tenses, to work on their ability to give extended answers and develop them into little stories. Then that would be transferred to subsequent topics as in our current curriculum.

For French, I am toying with the idea of having a cross-topic start to the course, maybe continuing our booklet approach from KS3 rather than starting straight in with the textbook. We will work on developing extended writing and spontaneous speaking using their core of language, showing them how it can be used across the GCSE topics.

Either way, the topics I want to see near the beginning of the course, are the ones best suited to this repertoire of opinions, reasons and tenses. Once pupils get very good at this, other grammar can be dovetailed in. So the best topics for me for the start of the course are: 

• Holidays
• Free Time
• My School
• Where I live

They lend themselves to saying what you like and why. What you can do, have to do, want to do. If sentences. Other people's opinions. Where you went. What was happening. What people said. What happened. What you would have preferred to do. Like this example in a previous post. Pupils need to have it as a deliberate game plan they can deploy on any of these topics.

The new GCSE won't reward fancy phrases thrown in for the sake of it. But I would have preferred isn't just in the repertoire to show off to the examiner. It's there as the culmination of a conflict of opinions, decisions taken, hope and disappointment as in these examples. In the new GCSE, the criteria for "good development" are I like to play football, it is exciting. But pupils will still have to speak for five minutes. So even if the criteria don't reward extended answers, they will still need to be able to deliver them.

Anyway, it works, so I am keeping it. Here's an example of where this approach has taken my Year 10. They started in Year 9 with one lesson a week after school. By April of Year 10 they have a solid repertoire they can deploy on any topic, and all the other grammar they are learning is easily added on to that core.

Next I would like to tackle the topics which are a little more remote from the pupils' own lives, where they will need a slightly different set of language:

• Media and Technology
• Work
• The Environment

Media and Technology works as an extension of the Free Time topic, but with a little more Describing Of Things, which is going to be a major feature of this new exam. I will tackle this in a future post.

The topic of Work will pick up on the core of opinions, can, can't, have to, want to, but add in a mini-repertoire for dealing with the future.

The Environment is slightly more remote from pupils' experience but will develop can, can't, have to with woulds and shoulds.

Then I want to tackle the topics which are less first-person:

• Celebrity Culture
• Customs and Celebrations

By this stage, the pupils have a strong repertoire and are ready to add the French needed to move away from talking about themselves. We've been working on this since Year 7 and Year 8, but having the grammatical knowledge and being able to deploy it fluently aren't the same thing.

This leaves the nasty topic that I want to leave until later. 

• Self, Family and Relationships

It doesn't lend itself as well to the coherent repertoire. The Family and Friends topic is full of little things that have to be learned but which don't gel well together. If it comes later in the course, the random little bits of grammar and vocabulary can stick to the pupils' coherent repertoire of language. If it came earlier in the course, it wouldn't provide a strong cross topic core. It is too bitty.

This would be my rationale for ordering the topics of the course. With a strong core repertoire of language running through all of the topics. And I would use every opportunity to work across topics, developing the core of language and pupils' ability to use it. It is NOT the order of topics I see in the textbooks I am looking at. This isn't a disaster, as I am not intending to use them as a coursebook to be followed.

It is also only one strand of what I think is going to be important. And some of the other strands may push me into a different way of ordering the learning. I am thinking already of Describing and of Unexpected Questions as major elements of the course. Watch out for future posts on these strands!

Textbook? Course Book? Part Two: Texts as modelling.

 In Part One, I looked at "cultural" texts and their role in the GCSE language-learning classroom. This is an area the different publishers are pushing hard in their pitch for the new GCSE textbooks we are currently evaluating. As I look at them, I am increasingly thinking that I won't be just following them as a "course book", but instead I am looking for texts I can exploit in the creating of my own "course", tailored to my pupils' language-learning and exam focus.

In this post, I will be looking at something you hope the textbooks do well: Using texts to model pupils' developing use of language in Speaking and Writing.

The constant modelling and development of pupils' ability to deploy their repertoire of language, with increasing fluency, coherence, accuracy and sophistication is central. This post on "If you give a mouse a cookie" shows how pupils deploy a core of language to develop and extend answers on any of the GCSE topics. But do textbooks/coursebooks do this? If the answer is no then that's one major reason to think of them as a book of useful texts, rather than as a useful course.

There are reasons why they might not. One reason is not their fault: recent incarnations of the GCSE have had a growing split between Speaking/Writing and Listening/Reading in the exams. It seems as if there's one body of language for the productive skills. And a whole other body of language to learn for the receptive skills. So for Speaking and Writing, teachers develop opinions, reasons, and examples in past and future. The favourite topics for this are Free Time, Holidays, School, Region and Family. Meanwhile in the Listening and Reading exam, the texts don't look like this at all. They seem to target the more obscure topics, and are based on testing either obscure topic words (hake, anyone?) or non-topic words (until not long ago/nearly everyone). The new GCSE promises to heal this split, with its mandatory vocabulary list. Unfortunately, rather than making the Listening/Reading texts more similar to the Speaking/Writing, it threatened to do it the other way round. (More on this idea here.)

Other reasons why the texts in textbooks don't model the answers pupils are learning to give might include: The need to cover content rather than well designed accumulation of a core repertoire. An unwillingness to make the book too exam focused, especially if in early units the structures needed to do well aren't yet in place. A text-based approach rather than an interactive lesson.

It is bizarre when you think about it, that textbooks aren't full of texts explicitly designed to model the answers pupils are expected to give. It's certainly something that I will be looking out for in the new GCSE textbooks. Rather than pick them apart here and risk upsetting one publisher or another, I'll carry on from Part One of this post, using examples from the 2009 OUP GCSE book I co-authored.

Here's a text that could serve as an example for pupils' own speaking and written answers.

From the 2009 OUP GCSE textbook

This is a series of texts where imaginary people (amusingly named after people I know or worked with at the time) talk about their shopping habits. The texts are packed full of expressions I want pupils to use in every answer they give: I love, I like, I prefer, I can, I have to, I want, I went. Along with verbs in present and past tenses, speech, exclamations, time words.

Interestingly, it's not explicitly modelling an exam answer. In fact it's part of a lesson based on recreating a Trinny and Susannah style TV programme where we are identifying who is a shopaholic and who is a shopaphobe to give them advice on how to sort their life out. Now you'll have to go back and re-read the texts above from that perspective rather than just looking at the language!

Because in the olden days we wanted to make language-learning engaging. We taught the language, and a good exam would test how well pupils were doing. Rather than the exam grade being more important than any actual learning or enjoyment of the learning experience. 

But in our current climate, with textbooks being specifically written for a specific exam, I will be looking out for this. Where there are exam tasks at the end of the unit (a photocard, a role play...) does the chapter actually equip the pupils to do those tasks? If not, it will ring alarm bells. But it won't actually mean I won't buy that textbook. It just means I have to plan a course where those things happen despite the book.

So what would we do with this kind of text? You could just ask pupils to harvest the sentences and structures that apply to them personally in the 4 texts and cut and paste them together to make an answer. Or you could get them to take one of the texts and manipulate it so it's true about them. This is the sort of thing that textbooks often suggest. The problem is it is so dependent on copying or adapting, that pupils aren't developing spontaneity or fluency. So maybe we read the texts as a model, but when we ask pupils to create their own version, they do it without the texts in front of them. So they serve as inspiration but not as a source. Maybe we do it in reverse. We ask pupils to use their core of language to build answers about this topic first, so that when we come to do the reading, it makes it so easy.

One thing I want to do with this new GCSE, is to work on pupils hearing questions in the target language, and having texts to support their answers. So the focus is on the questions, not on creating an answer. I've written about this here, and I think it's a very important aspect of this new GCSE. So for the first text (Hector), questions in Spanish asking things like: What do you like to spend money on? Do you prefer to buy things in shops or online? What's your opinion of going shopping? I will try to make this quickfire Q and A in the target language. Pupils focus on understanding different unexpected questions, knowing they can find the answer in the text. Then we can move on to letting them come up with their own answers, giving a variation on the text. Including coming back to it in a subsequent lesson, without the text in front of them.

Another limitation of the textbook I want to break free of, is the topic approach. With a model text, I want to be able to exploit it to develop pupils' ability to develop answers across topics using a core repertoire of language. So I might ask them to use the Hector text and ask them to rewrite it on the topic of Holidays instead of shopping. Or do it spontaneously as a speaking.

Or to do this the other way round: I am going to be re-writing versions of the texts in the book adapting them to other topics. So pupils are seeing the same structures and high frequency words deliberately recycled across topics. This scaffolds the reading for them, and models how the same structures fit the tasks and tick the markscheme regardless of the topics.

This means I can use a topic based textbook to construct a course which breaks down topic barriers.

It also means that I may be imposing my own order on the course around the things I think are central. This means I may well not plan my Scheme of Work in the same order as the published textbooks. More on this in future posts as my ideas start to come together. But definitely looking at them as "text-books" to exploit rather than as a "coursebook" to follow.

Part Three looks at the different demands of the topics and what seems like the logical way for me to order them in a Scheme of Work, regardless of what the publishers have done.

Text Book or Course Book? Part One: Authentic style texts

We're all busy looking at inspection copies and sample units of textbooks. I prefer "textbook" over "coursebook" probably because I don't follow them as a "course", but rather as a source of texts. So what sort of things might I do with some texts?

The examples in this series of posts are from the 2009 OUP GCSE textbook which I still use and will continue to use selectively.

The OUP textbook I co-authored for the 2009 GCSE.

Maybe you want a text to be used for interest, information and learning about the Spanish-speaking world.

From the 2009 OUP Textbook

Here's an example telling pupils all about a typical wedding in Mexico. I had a class 2 years ago who didn't believe a word of it, but luckily we found a video of someone's wedding on YouTube that confirmed all the goings-on. Even the money in the shoe and the death-march-clothes business.

There is a school of thought that it is through this sort of text where you are genuinely reading to find out new things, that language-learning actually happens. I find this something of a romantic notion. I don't think it is true either that it is a recipe for automatic learning, or that learning cannot happen through texts more focused on practising language than on the content.

In fact there is an opposing theory, that such texts are not useful for language-learning. Because pupils are distracted by the interesting content. Because pupils are overloaded so we concentrate on the exciting cultural content and skip reading carefully. Because pupils are guessing most of the meaning from a few cognates and what makes sense. Because it is not written to carefully model language. So there is an impression of learning but it's all an illusion.

Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is important for pupils to be able to read interesting content in the language they are learning. But it has no magical powers. At the same time, it is important that they have a constant feedback loop between the meaning of the overall text and the meaning of each part of each sentence. Sometimes knowing words and grammar leads to understanding of meaning. Sometimes grasping what is being explained means you can focus on detail of grammar or vocabulary.

So what would I do with this text?

First of all, vocabulary: The topic vocabulary will be in the word list we work on in class and for homework. And it will feature in other texts and speaking/writing activities on this topic so pupils are meeting it repeatedly. Things like wedding/bride/presents. Of course for the new GCSE we will want to trust that the new textbooks have somehow constructed their texts from the words on the vocabulary list.

Then there's vocabulary from other topics being revisited: shoe/lake/food/tables. Again, we want to be sure that the new GCSE text books do this deliberately in order to make sure all the words are constantly recycled and met in new contexts.

And high frequency non topic vocabulary: all/after/then/while/the most. Which it turns out we have always had in texts. Because it is by definition high frequency language!

So I can ask pupils to locate this vocabulary. Either by asking them to find words in each of these categories (celebrations topic words, other topic words, non topic words). Or by listing words in English for them to locate in the Spanish text.

I also use this same technique for words which they don't already know. So if I give them in English: standing / took off / carried / dead person, then they can find them in the text. These words are not easy cognates that will jump out at them. They will have to read the sentences carefully, and identify unknown words. Then they have to interrogate the meaning of all the words in the sentence and any clues contained in the grammatical form of the word, to decide if they have found the word they are looking for. And if memory is the residue of thought, then having to think about a word will also assist in learning it.

Grammar. I will want pupils to find and categorise the verbs, according to person (I, he/she, we and they), and tense (what happened and what was happening).

These tasks are a preliminary to reading the text closely. But so far, rather than reading the text word-by-word and getting stuck, we have asked pupils to read through the text multiple times paying attention to specific words and grammar. In fact, while they do this, most pupils are doing more than jabbing at individual words like a heron, and are putting together meaning around the words. But we will want to go beyond this, to a close understanding of exactly what it says.

Will I do comprehension questions? Maybe not. Comprehension questions may turn out to allow answers based on a gist reading rather than the detail of the words. If you want, you can use the questions themselves to spoon-feed much of the text to the pupils as in this post. In a course book, this is a useful way of making the text accessible. But in a class with a teacher, you can get the pupils to work much harder in engaging with the language of the text.

But I might do AQA style comprehension questions. I've written about this in previous posts to show how what you think is a correct answer does not score marks in the exam board markscheme. So I give pupils the question and an answer that doesn't quite get the mark. For example: What did she go to? And the "wrong" answer: A wedding in Mexico. Pupils have to read carefully and give the complete answer: A friend's cousin's wedding in a town in Mexico.

This kind of answer that AQA seem to want, is closer to a word-by-word translation than a comprehension question. And I may well ask the class to translate the text. Often this would be another lesson. So they have remembered much of the meaning, and vocabulary, but need to look closely at the text for exact grammatical detail.

I like to come back to texts in future lessons. So again, they might meet the same text a couple of weeks later, but this time as a listening with me reading the text aloud. I would be careful to set questions that require careful listening to the language, not based on general memory of the gist of the content. Or in another lesson we could try to reconstruct the text in Spanish, not aiming for a translation, but to write in our own Spanish an account of what happens in a Mexican wedding.

This use of texts as framework for speaking and writing will be picked up on in a future post in this series, looking at a different aspect of texts: Modelling the language we want pupils to be producing.

The new textbooks are treading an interesting line. Their texts claim to be full of interesting cultural learning, at the same time as recycling vocabulary in different contexts, carefully sequencing grammar, and developing the skills of using language that pupils will need in the exam. How much of this is built into the books as a course? And how much of it is down to how the teacher uses the texts?

Part Two - Text Book? Course Book? Texts as model answers is now available for you to read.