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.
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| 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.
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