Nitty Gritty Teaching

 Time to reflect on some of the things we put in place in the light of the Ofsted "Research Review". One idea was that we had been pulling the wrong levers in order to engage young people with learning languages. We always thought that communication, meaning, interesting content, culture and authentic material would engage. Whereas grammar and accuracy would confuse, frustrate and demotivate.

We were asked to think about this the other way round.

What if our focus on communication and culture put cognitive demands on pupils that pushed language learning further out of reach? What if authentic texts were full of little words and grammar that we told the pupils to gloss over in search of meaning from context, leaving pupils frustrated and confused that no-one ever told them what all the little words meant? What if we taught them whole phrases without telling them what the individual words meant and how the grammar worked? Was this the true obstacle to making language-learning accessible?

One thing we brought in was our Fluent in 5 lesson starters. At first to recycle language from previous units, but then increasingly in order to focus on the little words that we might skip over.

The lesson starters were a first step to all teachers tweaking the focus away from the "big words" of topic content, to the "little words" that make sentences work in all topics.

So this is where I find myself with Year 7. All year we have come at it from both angles. We learned "je n'ai pas de" by looking at how Mr Apostrophe ate the e of je and ne. But we also chanted it to a video of a steam train puffing up a hill:  "je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de."

And now we are doing rooms in the house. They have learned the rooms using dual coding. They learned the furniture by watching a house tour video in French. And we are focusing on recycling all the words we have done in Year 7 like il y a, j'ai, nous avons, est... All seems to be going well.

Then I got to this exercise in the booklet:

You can see what it is trying to do. It is giving the pupils the "big words" and asking them to focus on the "little words."

Of course it didn't work. Firstly, most pupils just read the English sentences and put in the words they thought made most sense: a bed, my desk... Not a problem. We often talk about the idea of getting things wrong and then sorting it out, and how powerful this is in learning. Because you remember your mistakes. And because you focused on the detail.

So next step was to ask the pupils to circle in the French the exact words that were meant to go in the gaps. They could do this. We checked the difference between un/une/le/la/des. Here we started to find the problem. The pupils who knew it, knew it perfectly and easily. The pupils who didn't know it, knew the concept and knew they were supposed to know it. But they just didn't care. They were not interested.

I'm not sure what to say to them about it. When I was learning French, getting un/une right mattered so much that when I went to France on my own, I ordered two of everything I bought, rather than get it wrong. Or I avoided saying things. I'm not entirely sure that was a good thing. With my own pupils, I have seen that the time masculine/feminine really starts to matter is when the exchange pupils are here, and all of a sudden it's important to get the gender right when telling a boy what you think of him!

Here's the next exercise in the booklet:

Pupils can see it is to help them describe their house. They can see that it's helping reinforce different verb constructions so their sentences aren't repeating il y a all the time. They can see it's testing if they can spell the words they have learned or if not, to know to check the spelling.

Do they see it as an invitation to express themselves and talk about a real or imaginary house? 

Or do they see it as a grammatical exercise checking if they correctly use le/la/les/un/une/des?

How can we balance these two? Pupils tend to see it as an invitation to communicate. To think about their house, think of the French words, and build the sentence. And I don't think we would want it to be the other way round. A pupil who isn't fussed about what they are saying, but knows they have to get un/une/le/la correct. I don't seem to have a lot of those pupils in my class. And I think that's probably alright. As a teacher, I need to make sure they know how to use the right articles. And I will slowly try to encourage them to see the importance of using the right one. I don't want to make it something that becomes an obstacle, where a pupil panics so much about picking the article, that they lose their focus on communicating. But there seems very little risk of this. The pupils who get it have no problem with it. And the other pupils just aren't bothered.

I'm not sure where this leaves the idea that we were frustrating pupils by not focusing enough on these words. It's not turning out to be a magic bullet. And the answer seems to lie in the middle ground between the two extremes. Which sums up most educational debates!