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.