Cheating Translation - a neat trick

 I am very much enjoying working through the new GCSE textbook as I plan for the new GCSE starting in September. They have achieved a good balance between progression and accumulating language, and sharp focus on developing pupils' exam skills in a cultural and motivating context. It's a great fit for the overall vision we have in our school of how we want the course to work for our pupils. I have been creating a booklet to go with Module 1 to really draw this out and get us off to a great start.

In this post I am going to show you one clever way to make use of the texts and activities in the book: Cheating Translation.

Put simply, Cheating Translation is where you have a series of texts for pupils to translate - some from English into French, and some from French into English. And what you do, is you hide the language pupils need for one translation, inside one of the other texts. So they can do most of the translation using language they know, but if they are stuck, they know they can hunt for the words in the other texts on the page.

Here's an example from our Year 8 Unit 1 booklet.

You can see that text B helps pupils with text A. And text A helps pupils with text B. This is great for a cover lesson where you need a worthwhile activity that works smoothly for the cover teacher.

So how does this work to make using the new GCSE textbook go smoothly?

This is from the Module 1 Booklet I have written to go with the new textbook.

You can see from the list that there is an awful lot going on on this page. Irregular verbs, plus jouer à, jouer de, faire du sport, j'aime le sport and important time words. All of these things must not just be seen but actually learned. With attention drawn to them and planning for how they will be met again and again, and added to the repertoire of French which pupils can use confidently and accurately.

Here's the first text on the page:

Pearson AQA GCSE French

This "Manon" text is in fact one of four in the first exercise. And what the book does is ask the pupils to look at all 4 texts and match them to the pictures. This is a perfectly logical way in. The pupils have a first read through of the text, picking out the vocabulary for the activities (cooking, cycling etc) and matching them to the pictures. It's a natural and important way to approach the text. But it works entirely by asking them to find obvious known language or cognates, and ignores entirely the features of the text which are actually useful.

Of course there are follow up tasks. Firstly to translate the sentences in blue which contain the irregular verbs. And then secondly to find mentions of other people in the texts. Although this will need teacher input to steer pupils away from just listing her brother, her friends and actually focus on nous and the verb endings.

The various other features such as jouer de, faire du, are picked up in grammar boxes on the page, but I want to get as much as possible out of the text itself.

Let's look at just the Manon text again:

It's fabulous. It's just what's needed as pupils move from KS3 to GCSE. They are already brilliant at saying what they like to do and why, adding if sentences and linking it up. They are poor at adding convincing detail, nuance and they are only just starting to work out how to move from talking about themselves to talking about other people, either as a conflict of opinions or as working together.

I want to get at the move between je... mon frère... nous... on... And I want the nuance words like tout and plusieurs, the time words like après and normalement, and the handling other people words like ensemble.

We know in an AQA markscheme for the reading exam a candidate who writes "They cycle a long way with their brother" might get 0 marks if AQA insist it has to contain the words several and together. We know they do that in the current GCSE. And in the new GCSE with its increased focus on high frequency vocabulary, they are just as likely to work this way. And in planning our teaching for the new GCSE, I am also determined to keep the focus on these non topic words which can appear in any text. And which also make the difference, in pupils' own speaking and writing, between a good candidate and an outstanding one. Ultimately these are the words which allow pupils to frame narrative, move coherently from one idea to another, and to develop longer, detailed answers.

So where does Cheating Translation come in?

Have a look at this translation text and compare it to the Manon text.

It is designed so that pupils can translate almost all of it from their repertoire of French. But it is deliberately a mirror of the text they are going to meet when they get to the Manon text in the book. So when they meet a word they don't know, they can find it in the Manon text.

It is doing two things, both as important as each other. In doing the tennis/football translation, it is showing them how to extend and give detail/nuance to an answer they can already produce. They see that the words in bold type naturally fit well into their repertoire and enhance their expression.

And secondly it means that the first time they encounter the Manon text, it's not as a problem or a threat or a challenge. It's as a useful helping hand. It gives them the words they need. Instead of tackling the text as a skimming for known words exercise, it takes them straight in to looking for unknown words. And very useful unknown words!

But that's not even half of how Cheating Translation works! Next you can do this!

They move from translating my mirrored text into French, using the Manon text for help, to translating the Manon text into English, using my mirrored text for help if needed. And then they shut the textbook and translate it back into French. You can choose whether to do this as a sequence of translations in one lesson, or if you want to spread it out over several lessons to boost the requirement for pupils to retain and retrieve what they learned in the previous lesson.

So instead of fishing around in the Manon text for known words and then new grammar, they are straight in to working with every word in the sentence, for comprehension and for extending their own repertoire of French. The support is there to make them successful, the challenge is there, and the vision of how it all builds their learning is definitely there.

This idea of rewriting texts from the textbook on different topics is something I am going to continue. Either as here to anticipate texts, or to deliberately revisit them in new contexts later. As well as revisiting being important for retaining vocabulary, you can see from this example that it's even more important for switching the focus to the non topic words and for how they are integrated into the pupils' repertoire, ready to be deployed.

New GCSE Module 0 Booklet

 I have created a booklet for our Year 10s called Module 0. Why Module 0? Because it's for before they start the textbook. And because the 0 is the shape of the snowball of French I want them to have so it doesn't melt and so more French sticks to it. And because a 0 Module approach is lurking behind this GCSE, where as much as possible we are not sticking to one topic at a time and then moving on.

And I've put all that in the booklet for the pupils too. Here's a slide from the powerpoint that introduces it:

The first thing we do is to ask pupils to analyse their own snowball from KS3 with this double page activity. They place the French they know and always use at the core, working outwards to French they don't know yet. In 2005 I wrote that this is all the grammar that you need for GCSE - what matters is how well you use it. And nothing has changed!

Then we go straight in with 3 key aspects in turn. The Role Play, the Unexpected Questions, and The Conversation.

For The Role Play, I have picked out from the Sample Assessment Materials all the Role Plays that I think pupils can do successfully using their snowball of French and the vocabulary they have learned in KS3. The questions are in English and they can write down their answers. They should write short answers in a sentence. The answers aren't about their own lives; they are role playing a conversation between two imaginary people.

This will give the pupils and the teachers the opportunity to see how well KS3 has prepared them for GCSE, and any gaps that will need to be filled. It tackles exam technique from the start of the course, and immediately demonstrates the power of the snowball of French.

The messages I hope to come out of this are:

• You are already well on the way to GCSE French.
• You have to think about how to use French you know, to give a correct answer.
• You may want to say other things. We have 2 more years to work on that.
• There may be things you can't do. In particular asking questions or describing. We will work on that.
• Many of the topics are familiar, but there are more topics that we will cover.

Then we look at the Unexpected Questions. There are four of these and for AQA they all follow the Read Aloud task. This is a big step up from the Role Play questions, firstly because you don't see these questions written down. They are fired at you by the examiner. And secondly because unlike the Role Play, you are expected to give some development of your answers.

The first thing we do is to say you may NOT fully understand the question. We know this from the current GCSE where the Role Play contains one unexpected question. The stress and confusion of the exam situation means very few pupils process the question fully. I must remember that I have an excellent example of this to share with you once we are out of the exam purdah period. So the first thing in the booklet is how to deal with this emergency situation:

Imagine this is what it feels like in the exam. Can you still give an answer and hope it gets some credit? This is exactly what happens with the current GCSE unexpected question. For the new GCSE, this is only the starting point, because we are really going to be working on this!

Next we do some work on Question and Command words. So the pupils are seeing the questions written down, and can also plan their developed answers in writing. The Box the question word relates to a whole school policy of BUG where pupils Box, Underline and Go over elements of an exam rubric. 

The point in Module 0 is for the pupils to see that they do have the French to do the task. So they do see the questions printed in the booklet:

The booklet then asks the pupils to work with a partner, reading questions to each other. Can they get the topic of the question? Can they get the exact question? Can they give an answer? Can they develop the answer? Again, they have questions from the Sample Assessment Material, so they can see they are using GCSE questions already.

This is just a taster, as responding to unexpected questions is going to be a major focus in every Module we do. The key messages are:

• Don't panic, pick up as much as you can of the question and always give an answer.
• Thinking up what to say is often as hard as knowing the French. How do you extend an answer to "Where is your school?" especially when you are both sitting in it!
• Use French you know in order to answer the question, then use your snowball to give further follow up details even if this takes you away from the original question.
• Throughout your GCSE course, starting right now, make the most of opportunities to practise speaking. It's not the French. It's how good you are at using it.
• Do something with scaffolding one lesson, but come back in future lessons and see if you can still do it without the scaffolding.

Then we tackle the Conversation.

The conversation has changed in some respects from the current GCSE. There is no longer any mention of the word narrate. And the exemplification of "extended answers" given in the AQA materials is just 3 clauses. But the pupils will have to talk for up to five and a half minutes on just one theme, which is much longer than for the current GCSE. And the AQA notes do recommend that teachers use follow up prompts such as Why? And? For example? So I will carry on teaching pupils to develop their answers and respond to prompts for more details.

The first thing is a model answer done as a listening (or a reading if needed).

The pupils listen and tick when they hear each of the elements of the answer:

Then they listen again and take notes on what is said for each element. Then they write up their version of the answer in French.

This answer models:

• How to use their snowball of French to create an extended and coherent answer which meets exam criteria and shows off the range of their language.
• How one thing always needs to another in a logical development.
• How to have a formula or trigger that helps you decide what to say next - thinking up what to say is harder than coming up with the French.

Then they transfer this across to other topics, either in writing and then in speaking:

This has taken the pupils way beyond what is tackled in Module 1 of the textbook, but this isn't about progression in French. The pupils' snowball from KS3 already contains all the French they need for the Conversation. The message to pupils here is that it's about having 2 years to get good at using their French.

The rest of the booklet contains a selection of Keep Talking sheets, to transfer their French across a range of topics, and to scaffold their answers. These may look like what people call Sentence Builders, but they are different in two key ways. Firstly, they are all built around the same snowball of language. And secondly, they are designed for building extended answers, not sentences. Here's one example:

One key page, which I will also be making into a poster, gives them a repertoire of activities for speaking that they can come back to throughout the GCSE course, and take ownership of making their speaking lessons purposeful and productive:

Many of these activities have their own posts on this blog, so it's worth checking them out:

Links to Speaking Activities 1. Links to Speaking Activities 2.

This is post number 200 on this blog. And I am glad that we are still talking about teaching GCSE pupils that it's not just knowing more French that matters. It's how well you can use it to express yourself and develop increasingly coherent and personal answers. That feels pretty good, I have to say!