When everything you've told pupils about the new GCSE comes true!

 This week, everything I have been telling pupils about the new GCSE came true. And in quietly spectacular fashion.

I suppose that means I'll have to tell you what it is that I've been telling them and what happened in this week's lessons. But I promise you there is a point and it's got positive news about the textbooks and positive advice for the new GCSE. So here goes as quickly as I can to get to the point...

Some context on how I am teaching the course. I am using the new textbook. I am not a big user of textbooks generally. For the outgoing GCSE I used the textbook for the first couple of units and then stopped. But for the new GCSE, if I make my own resources then how will I know if I am covering the words on the GCSE vocabulary list?

I am not doing the topics in the order of the textbook. Firstly because I want to build a strong core repertoire of language on the easy to expand topics such as Holidays, School, Free Time. These topics lend themselves to developing spontaneous answers giving opinions, reasons, detail of past experiences and plans for the future. This can then be transferred from one topic to the next. Secondly because my Year 10 are essentially beginners and I want to keep the backbone of my teaching intact because I know it works.

What messages have I given pupils about the new GCSE? By using the old textbook and the new textbook, I have shown them that we don't have to learn sets of topic words. Hotel, guest house, cruise, youth hostel, campsite in the old textbook, compared to hotel, campsite in the new one. With even words like ducha for "shower" not on the list. Instead what matters is what you can DO with your language to develop what you can say about a hotel or a campsite, using your core repertoire. And as teachers we all know that albergue juvenil was never going to be seen again in the course and all the effort you put in to explaining what it is without making it sound weird was going to be wasted.

Instead, the message is to watch out for the non topic high frequency words. Here are the words my pupils extracted from the texts (in the new textbook and from the old) on the topics of holiday accommodation and transport:

Words like quite, first, too, never, always, however, learn, together, fear, noise, broken. The words that can fit into every topic. We've written them strategically inside the cover of their exercise book. The pupils said, "If this is just from one topic, we're going to run out of room." And my message was, "No. These words will be the same in every topic." A bit of an ostrich to fortune, but as we shall see, the point of this post is that things are turning out uncannily as I promised them.

And if you look carefully, another type of word is also on this page. Huelga meaning strike and obras in this case meaning roadworks. The opposite sort of word. The words that fit in no topics at all. But which are on the GCSE list because they feature in the EU parliamentary debates used as the source of the list. Pupils know to keep hold of these words. And I told them that if the textbook was well written we would meet them again. These words are easy to skip over if you are following a topic vocabulary based approach.

So this week, we moved on to the topic of School. So we've gone from Module 2 in the textbook to Module 5. And when I say "moved topic", my message to pupils is that they can instantly transfer their Holidays language to the School topic. Here's the first lesson back after half term. Bear in mind these are beginners (they did Spanish in Year 9 one lesson a week after school). This is them writing on School before we've started the topic.

You can see the repertoire from talking about going to a theme park or an aquarium (I like, because I can, but if, X doesn't like, what was happening, speech, what happened...) transferred instantly to the new "topic." And you can see one of them has deliberately used fear from their non topic vocabulary page. The message is getting through.

But things got even better.

This is a text from Module 5 of the new textbook.

New Pearson GCSE Spanish textbook AQA version

First of all I focused on the "School" vocabulary. Particularly words you would recognise if you saw them writtten down but which sound different. For example religión, educación, justo. Hidden cognates such as esfuerzo, aprobar. And potential false friends like asignatura and in the second text on the page buenas notas and suspender. I did this as a dictation, dictating single words and then teaching the meaning. (The next lesson we came back to these "school" words and used dual coding to make sure we knew them.)

Then I read the text through aloud without the pupils seeing it. And they ticked off the "school" words on their dictated list as they heard them.

So what are the other words the text is made up of? Our core repertoire words feature strongly: tenemos que, me encanta, a __ le gusta, porque... And what else? The words from the list on the yellow inside cover of our book. However, always... And in the second text on the page: Ya no tengo miedo cuando tengo que actuar en una obra de teatro. With our word for fear and... you will not believe it! Our word for roadworks, cropping up as the word for a play in the sense of a work of theatre.

Pearson Spanish GCSE textbook AQA version.

Of course, spotting this word in the text also led to recalling where we met it, and the word for strike got recalled as being the other obscure word we'd met it with. So even though strike wasn't in the text, we've effectively met it again.

So my pupils can turn to page 111 of the textbook. And find that once we've learned a handful of "School" words, their core repertoire plus their high frequency words are the key to this new GCSE. And even their red list of high alert obscure and random words is revisited! This spectacularly delivered all the points I have been trying to make about learning for this new GCSE!

In one respect we got very very lucky. I had not designed it so that the words I picked out of the old and new textbooks would all reappear on page 111. And the authors of the textbook had not imagined that I would jump from Holidays to School. But it's feeling very positive for how we are approaching the GCSE and for how the textbook has been written. It made the pupils realise they are accumulating language that will be met again and again, transferred across topics. And it made me feel I can trust that the textbook will serve us well. Thank you! It's looking good!