Part 2 of A Spanner in the Works. The AQA guidance on marking the Conversation.

 This is going to make a lot more sense if you have read Part 1 of how AQA have thrown a Spanner in the Works for how my department teach the Conversation part of the Speaking Exam.

A huge amount of thinking, collaboration and planning has gone into teaching this new GCSE, and in particular, the new Speaking Exam. Our KS3 is designed to teach pupils how to use a growing repertoire of language across topics, with an emphasis on not just learning more language, but on learning how to use it. Pupils work on thinking up what to say, how to make it personal, coherent, interesting and developed.

We start Year 10 with Module 0, showing them how their KS3 French already enables them to tackle the role play, unexpected questions and some conversation questions. In Year 10, we build up language, carefully transferring it across topics, and making sure pupils see how they can deploy it in the exam. I feel we are doing our best to put in place best practice, in dialogue with the ideas behind the new GCSE.

Last year we had the opportunity for Year 10 to do a Speaking Exam. Rather than an exam, it was more of a run-through, to familiarise them and us with the elements and demands of the exam. They had the Role Play, Read Aloud and Photo Cards in advance, so they could turn up and do the Exam in 10 minutes without the need for invigilators or prep time.

What did we discover? Not to be afraid of the exam. The Role Play - short answers containing a verb. The Read Aloud - stunning. The Unexpected Questions - a bit of explaining that you have to guess what you think the question is, say something related, then say a couple more random things that might be related. The Photo Card - say there is or is 8 times for each picture, without risking trying to say anything else. (Post here on the negative effect of the AQA marking guidance on the Photo Card.)

That left the Conversation. We had NOT prepared answers to a list of questions. But pupils knew they would get questions that they could answer using their repertoire of opinions, reasons and tenses. They knew that we would prompt them for more using and, so, for example, why...? We didn't stick to one theme, but used it as an opportunity for them to show off their French across all different topics.

So what we discovered was that their French was up to the task. But the demands (at the end of all the other tasks) and the cognitive load of thinking up what to say and how to say it in French, was too much. After a while their answers ran out of ideas and became repetitive, or we had to switch topics to keep them going. Or we said "Well done" and stopped before the full five and a half minutes.

This then, was our focus for going into Year 11. Tweaks to the Scheme of Work. The Department Plan. Inset in September and department meetings. Individual teachers' Performance Management Targets. All in a coherent focus on managing the balance between having ideas prepared, but not memorising answers. Managing the balance between preparation of ideas, and spontaneous improvisation of the French. So that the pupils could talk for 5 minutes on just one theme (double the time compared to the previous GCSE) without having memorised answers. What is the best way to teach pupils to talk for 5 minutes? Prepared answers is not the best way. Because the more prepared the answer, the quicker it is to deliver and you end up having to learn ridiculous amounts to fill the time. Better to have a genuine conversation, with some ideas prepared, but making up the answer in response to the examiner's questions. A balance of prepared ideas, but spontaneous French.

So we do have a booklet of possible starter questions for the conversation. And pupils are challenged to answer the questions spontaneously in speech and to plan their ideas in writing. They do not memorise their answers, but they do have their ideas ready. We have been careful to mix the questions up across topics so the pupils are deploying the same repertoire irrespective of theme, and there is definitely no set list or order of questions. When we come back to practising questions, we don't let them look at their planned answers - they have to improvise a new answer based on the ideas they had come up with, just as we did with the previous GCSE. We work on creating answers in layers. So they can give an immediate response. Then back it up with reasons or if sentences or examples in past or future. They know that the teacher will prompt for this kind of extended detail with follow-up questions such as et... ?  alors...? par exemple...? Pourquoi ? The conjunctions dice game in the second half of this post has featured heavily in getting them to extend answers and respond to being pushed in different directions by the throw of the dice. We have worked hard on the different directions a story can go in, with one idea leading to another, so you don't get stuck thinking up what to say next, as in the mouse and the cookie. We have even turned the order of Year 9 units around, to start with developing ideas into stories. 

A huge collaborative and joined-up effort of the entire department, based on taking stock from the Y10 Speaking, and gearing up for the mock speaking next month.

Then AQA put out their guidance and it's hard not to feel as if the rug has been pulled out from under our feet.

It's not the 17 questions. They were always going to have to define "amount of information." Although defining it means everyone will make sure they meet it. With a planned and monitored set of questions. And because everyone meets it, the emphasis that swings the grade will fall on the other criteria: accuracy. And it's not the fact that AQA "extended answers" mean very short basic answers. Although a requirement for a set number of 3 clause accurate answers is perhaps best met through planned, prepared, rote learned answers. And it's not even the fact that redirecting prompts like and... so... for example... why?  would now invalidate the pupils' responses, by breaking up the 3 clauses.

Well, yes. It is all that. But the main thing is the removal of the timings. If you no longer have to fill 5 minutes (remember in the old GCSE, there were minimum times on each theme), then you no longer need to have a repertoire you can riff on confidently and indefinitely.

It's not hopeless. We just have to adapt. First we have to audit our questions for each theme. Are there 17 questions? If we include short prompts as further questions, can we do this without disqualifying the pupils' answer from reaching 3 clauses? How many more questions do we need so as to avoid repeating the same questions? How do we allow pupils to show what they can do in terms of inventive longer answers, but still get through 17 questions? Is the AQA exemplar answer "I go to the cinema and we watch action films. I love action films" really going to get a grade 9? If what our pupils can do is superfluous to requirements, what elements of the exam should we have been focusing on? And if the thing that is going to swing the exam is now the accuracy marks, does this mean our pupils now should learn scripted answers off by heart?

Part 1 of: A Spanner in the Works? The new AQA guidance for marking the Conversation.

I don't know where to start with this post. Or where it is going. But I think I know what the key problem is. And it's NOT the 17 questions. Do I know what to do about it? I'm working it out. But it may take more than one post...

This is going to be big. It wasn't supposed to be. It was supposed to quietly define "amount of information" in the Conversation part of the new AQA GCSE Speaking Exam. 

It was even supposed to disincentivise rote learning of scripted answers. I'm not sure how. Because even my immediate reaction to this is to check how many questions I have for each theme, and how many of them pupils would have extended answers for. And I live and breathe spontaneous answers in my teaching.

It's worth mentioning straight away that an AQA "extended answer" is not what we understand by an extended answer. For our Year 9s, working on extended answers means things like the examples below, moving from a random stream of French, to coherent answers, to past tense stories with cheats, to telling stories. These are written examples, but we spend much more time working on speaking and spontaneity, with strategies like Being Ben or telling stories round the class to develop pupils' ability to think what to say next.

No. For AQA, an extended answer looks like this:

Three clauses of particularly uninspiring language, containing an opinion and a conjugated verb. The example given for "Good Development" because it is boring seems a deliberately knowing and sarcastic inclusion. Because this is clearly a response to the initial attempt to do away with fancy pre-learned answers by the GCSE panel when they originally proposed getting rid of the Conversation completely.

Both the GCSE panel and the exam board in their different ways are trying to get rid of pre-learned scripted rote answers.

But I can't see how this is not going to mean a return to rote learned answers. The ticking off of a specified number of answers means teachers having to carefully plan and keep track. Everyone will be making sure they hit the magic number. This then means that what differentiates one pupil's performance from another will be the criteria for Accuracy. And the need to deliver a set number of highly accurate answers will lead to... rote learned answers.

Is the number of questions so prohibitively high that no-one would dream of learning that amount? 17 three clause answers for each of three themes. With lots of cross-over where a question could be used in more than one of the themes. This is prime "learn by rote" territory.

I actually don't think the 17 answers is the problem. They were always going to have to define "amount of information". And I already suspected that the reduction in topic content was going to shift the balance back to pre-learned answers.

The actual problem is the ditching of the times. Nominally, the Conversation is supposed to last between four and a half and five and a half minutes. A long time to talk on just one theme. The old GCSE Conversation was this long over two themes. So even though I knew that 3 clauses was all that was required for an "extended" answer, I had spotted that filling 5 minutes was going to need pupils to have more to say. Our pupils work on developing answers spontaneously, responding to teacher prompts such as et alors... ? par exemple... ? Pourquoi ? I will look at exactly where we are up to in terms of being able to riff on these prompts to fill 5 minutes in a later post. But all that may now have to go. Perhaps we were fooling ourselves all along that it was what was wanted.

And the five minutes also could have been a disincentive to learn and deliver pre-learned answers. A pre-learned answer, delivered fluently takes up less time than an improvised answer. Like Achilles chasing the tortoise, the more you fall back on pre-learned answers, the more you find you have to say.

So we were pleased to convince ourselves that improvised answers with the teacher intervening to prompt for more detail, was the best way to fill five minutes.

That's what's gone. It's not 5 minutes anymore. We're left with the requirement to give 17 short but accurate answers. How does this not tip the balance back towards having prepared answers?

Incidentally, this is exactly the same mistake that AQA have made with their interpretation of the specification markscheme for the photo card. With similarly negative consequences for teaching and learning, as I found in this post.

What about the idea of the examiner prompting the pupil for more detail, to push the pupils to extend and develop? Things like et alors... ? pourquoi ? par exemple...? all count as questions, so would make it easy to get to the 17 number. But what they also do is fragment the "extended answer" into single clauses. So instead of demonstrating the pupil's ability to extend spontaneously, they now disqualify the answers from counting as "extended" as each response may now fail to meet the 3 clause threshold.

I have plenty more to say about exactly where we are and what to do next. But that's enough for now. It's NOT the 17 questions. It's the ditching of the 5 minutes. That changes everything.

I know the exam board had to define "amount of information" and don't want to see rote learned answers. They will have tried out how the marking works out on sample recordings of conversation. Have they done the opposite? Have they tried out what sort of conversation you get when you specify 17 short accurate answers? I hope they are right that this means we are still better off teaching pupils to extend their answers spontaneously. I'll explore that in another post...

Recent Posts on the Way Forward for Languages.

Here's selection of recent posts on the two systemic problems facing MFL, why they are so bad, and what we could do about it.

 The impact of unfair grading:

https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2025/08/unfair-grading-and-its-impact-in.html

Could the success of the languages for all pilot offer hope for being able to offer mainstream language learning post 16? https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2025/07/hope-is-in-air.html

The two things that need sorting to allow MFL to flourish. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2025/05/can-we-sort-out-languages-in-english.html

A Level Spanish 2025. How they make the exam too hard for even the tiny minority who take it. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2025/06/really-cool-translation-challenge.html

How bad is the reformed A Level? https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-problem-with-this-level.html

And worth getting it straight from the horse's mouth. Look at the contempt for language learning in this submission from the people who "reformed" A Level: https://alevelcontent.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/alcab-rationale-for-english-essay.pdf

The ugly reason why things are so bad for MFL post 16. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2023/10/colonial-curriculum.html

One easy thing to put right: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2025/01/one-thing-that-costs-nothing-which.html

Am I about to come unstuck? - How much can you rely on a metaphor for learning?

 How much can you rely on a metaphor for learning to guide your practice? All models of learning are metaphors. Starting with the popular "storage and retrieval" model. This seems a particularly circular metaphor, based on comparing the brain to computer memory, which in turn is a metaphor based on human memory. Metaphors for the brain often go hand in hand with current technology. This post looks at how previous models included cogs, hydraulics, cables... And of course in languages we have been presented with the metaphor of pillars which I examined in this post, showing how the metaphor revealed more than I expected: carefully constructed classically impressive pillars of free-standing stand-alone grammar, vocabulary and phonics, was deliberately an act of "folly".

You will know that my favourite metaphor for language learning is the snowball.

A few years ago, the day after a light snowfall, I was walking round the school with a pupil who had been sent out of his French class, to calm things down. He was telling me he didn't mind French lessons, but he just didn't know any French he could use. We stopped and I asked him where all the snow from yesterday had gone. He said, "It all melted, Sir." I asked him, "And where's your French?"

He was quick on the uptake (he is now a vicar, after a time in the police force), and said, "Oooh. Nice metaphor, Sir." He had been there in lessons while all the French was happening, but he hadn't managed to grab hold of any, roll it into a snowball, and stop it from melting.

This is the first use of the metaphor. To warn pupils that their French will melt. That it's their responsibility to grab hold of some and make it theirs. To roll it into a ball and stop it melting. And that more and more French will stick to it.

Then there's the message to teachers. We need to spend time making sure that pupils have a core of sticky French. That they are making it theirs and not letting it melt. It's important that our curriculum is designed so that we develop this core of language, using the same language over and over. And it's important not to design a syllabus where everything is ticked off once. The metaphor tells us that an even coverage of language will melt. What we want is a snowball of language that rolls on from topic to topic, getting bigger and bigger around a sticky core.

This post examines how to design a syllabus where new language adds a layer of accretion to the snowball. It starts from how to add new language to the pupils' existing language. Not by chopping up the language into bitesize chunks of omelette and hoping the pupils can make their own omelette out of it. Mixed metaphor alert. But cooking an omelette out of raw egg is the equivalent of the snowball approach. Chopping up the cold dead omelette is the equivalent of the even coverage approach.

So far so good. But how far does the snowball approach get me with the new GCSE?

For the speaking and writing, it's fundamental to our vision. We use it explicitly in our resources to show pupils how to tackle the demands of the speaking exam, whatever the topic. 

But this new GCSE has a huge gulf between the language needed for the Speaking and Writing exams and the vocabulary list for the Listening and Reading exams. The vocabulary list is not designed to be based on the language needed for the topics or for the tasks of the exam. For example when you get to the Jobs unit, there are fewer than 10 jobs words in the list. The topic of Jobs is just another arena to meet the non topic vocabulary. It's the even coverage idea reimagined. This time it's meant to be such intense snowfall that layer upon layer of French has fallen, before the previous layer has had time to melt. It risks leaving my pupils with their pathetic snowballs they were so proud of, lost in a snowy wastes landscape that stretches off to the horizon. Or at least that's what it's starting to feel like.

But is anyone achieving this deep layer upon layer of snow? Does it mean having to do listening and reading activities from the textbook totally by the book, missing out nothing because without the intensity of repeated snowfall, melting will happen? To achieve this, we would have to abandon the lessons focused on getting pupils better at using their snowball of French, all the lessons on practising speaking, thinking what to say next, getting really good at using their snowball. Do the textbooks actually deliver the meticulous coverage and re-coverage required for this permanent even coverage not to melt?

Anyway, for me and my Year 11s, who only started Spanish in Year 10, it's too late. The snowball approach is doing its job for the speaking and writing exams. Are we scared of the vocabulary for the listening and reading exams? What I am hoping is that having such a huge snowball will take care of it. Now their snowball is so big with all the things they can say or write, surely the little rocks, bits of grass, sticks, abandoned carrots and coal from other people's melted snowpersons... it can all stick to their snowball as they roll it round and round...? Can it?

This is the idea. That by making sure the pupils have their own snowball which has got bigger and bigger, more and more Spanish will stick to it. Including words that aren't nicely adding a natural layer, but which are odd words that don't seem to stick, but get swept up along with the snow.

Can I rely on this metaphor to get me and my pupils through the exam? Or will the whole thing come unstuck?

Is chatgpt the answer to the GCSE vocabulary homework problem?

 In a previous post, I declared that I wasn't going to let the new GCSE Vocabulary List worry me. We didn't use to worry about the vocabulary list in the old GCSE. We didn't even look at it. We should just be able to get on with teaching the pupils Spanish, and they will pick up the words they need. The textbook should cover the words. And how different can it be? And maybe nearer the exam we can give pupils bits of the vocab list to learn or something.

Well. It is different. We are now doing the topic of jobs. And the old materials with vet, builder, cabin-crew, child-minder and all the other jobs, are still useful, but not for those words. There are only about 7 jobs on the vocabulary list. From memory, doctor, hairdresser, teacher, lawyer, celebrity and a couple of others. So when we look at texts in the jobs unit in the book, we are not looking at the jobs words. We are explicitly looking at how the texts on jobs are a vehicle for encountering and re-encountering non-topic vocabulary. Things like have just, started to, chose to, managed to, succeeded in.

One problem is that this no longer bears any resemblance to what the pupils are saying in their speaking and writing, where they will be talking about how they want to be a vet because I would love to work with animals and if I can earn lots of money, I would like to travel the world and see wild animals in different countries... The texts in the book are not modelling the sort of language pupils are looking to use. And the language in the Listening and Reading exam is radically different from the sort of language pupils are learning to use in order to do the tasks required in the Speaking and Listening exam. 

This problem of the split between the language needed for the Listening / Reading compared to the language needed for the Speaking / Writing, was one of the main issues with the old GCSE which I wrote about here. This new GCSE has really pushed the wedge further. And at the moment, I feel confident teaching pupils for the Speaking and Writing exam. But I have no idea if I am covering what they need for the Listening and Reading exams.

Time to really get to grips with that Vocabulary List.

The problem is, if we are not talking about topics and topic words, how do we break up the vocabulary list for pupils to revise week by week?

Can chatgpt be the saviour here? If we give it words from the list, can I give it simple administrative jobs to do? Things like tidy up the formatting or categorise them? Can it do more sophisticated jobs like create short phrases that would be more memorable than a list of single words?

AQA already supply a spreadsheet of the words so you can sort for nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. It has a Spanish and English column. But for verbs, the English column is a mess. It gives different forms of the word: eat, eating, to eat which are superfluous. For example if I were to paste this into a Quizlet set, it would make the tasks undoable, with the pupils having to type in all 3 forms verbatim. Can chatgpt tidy this up?

Then what if I only want verbs for the topic of Jobs and Education. But as we saw, also including any non topic verbs that could be used in this context. So what I actually want is all the verbs on the list, minus the ones that obviously belong to another topic. Can chatgpt do this?

What about nouns? Maybe nouns are easier to learn from a list than verbs. What if I gave chatgpt all the nouns and asked it to sort them into topics. Being very strict with it and saying to make sure to include as many as possible in topics, and to give me a list of all the words it hadn't managed to put in a topic. Then I could ask it to put each word into a short phrase, ready to make into Quizlet cards in Spanish and English. Could chatgpt do this?

How did it do?

First of all, I noticed that it has developed the annoying habit of asking ridiculous questions to check how you want it to proceed. I strongly suspect this is a deliberate tactic to use up your limit of free questions on the more powerful version.

Then, yes, it can tidy up a list. It can categorise words by topic. It can create short phrases for each word.

BUT...

But when it had finished, I spot checked its list against the original list of words I had given it. The words on my list that I checked, had not made it onto the final chatgpt list. And there were words on the chatgpt list that were not on the original AQA list. And, yes, I was clear with it to not add words or remove words. But to no avail. It can't stick to that kind of instruction. Its job and purpose is to make stuff up.

I did give the list of verbs to pupils. For them to tick off the ones they knew, so I could gauge the size of the task ahead of us. And I asked them to highlight ones they thought would be particularly tricky, and to practise conjugating them in sentences to deploy. But they noticed the phrases in English and Spanish had words missing or were odd. And I had to admit I had used chatgpt. Their reaction was one of horror. AI really does not have a good reputation with young people. 

Famously, when it comes to schools and teachers, even "good enough" is not good enough. AI is definitely NOT good enough to do even simple administrative jobs in support of teachers. So why would anyone suggest we use it?

Look on my works, ye mighty...

 Pillars. The ubiquitous metaphor of the last few years in Language Learning. Supplanting the four "skills" of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing, it announces Grammar, Vocabulary and Phonics as central to language teaching and learning.

The days of thinking that a good language lesson would automatically be made up of a little bit of listening, a bit of speaking, a bit of reading, and finally maybe time for a little bit of writing, are long gone. With the presumption that it would somehow add up to language learning if left to ferment for long enough. And that pupils would naturally lap up speaking and listening but need more time to stomach the written form of the language. 

This was left behind in the 90s or perhaps the early 2000s, when it evolved into the idea of developing the skills explicitly rather than by osmosis. With as much overlap between speaking and writing as possible. And using reading and listening to model what pupils would speak and write. So whole lessons would be devoted to developing writing or working on the fluency of speaking. It brought with it the realisation that working on what to say, how to develop it and keep it coherent, was fundamental to the development of the "skills" and for language learning.

This is what was to be swept away by the new metaphor of the three pillars. The word "skills" was replaced by "modalities" to reflect the idea that they were just different ways in which the language could be met or or practised. With the knowledge of the language central, not the development of pupils' ability to deploy it.

The new paradigm was firmly centred on knowledge of the language.

How powerful is the metaphor of the pillars itself in driving this shift in thinking? What does it reveal?

Firstly, it is very deliberate that they are separate pillars.

The logic of the grammatical progression should depend on the logical step by step building up of the grammatical system. Not at the mercy of the requirements of a certain topic or transactional situation. It is a stand alone pillar, carefully built up to be free-standing.

The vocabulary pillar again, would not depend on topics. It would be carefully designed on its own terms, selected from the corpus of high frequency words. Not the words needed to talk about a certain topic or conduct a given task. With the same words being carefully built up in repeating patterns so that they are met again and again. A free standing pillar with its own carefully constructed logic.

And the same for phonics. Supposedly a third independent pillar with the key sound-spelling features met in a planned and ordered way. Even if this pillar is a bit shorter and stumpier than the other two.

So very deliberately pillars. Not just a decorative image - as stipulated by cognitive science. A visual has to be a useful diagram, not a distraction.

Some of us didn't immediately realise this.

The ALL Language World 2025 conference, with its theme of a "rich tapestry", had people talking about weaving skills and topics through the pillars. Or twisting them into a thread. One does not weave pillars. Or twist them. Pillars are pillars. Strong, linear, well-constructed, free-standing, and unencumbered.

Learning in languages was to be unencumbered by anything incidental which might destabilise the pillars or anything rich or complex which might compromise their classical simplicity.

What you can do with pillars, eventually, is put on a roof. A lintel sits across the pillars, connecting them, and giving stability and turning them into a building both decorative and useful.

So why is this not part of the metaphor? Again, it is deliberate. The Ofsted research review was written in the philosophy of "novice" and "expert". According to this idea (common to Ofsted thinking about all subjects, not just languages), the carefully selected block by block knowledge had to be in place first. Just the pillars. Too soon for a roof.

Novice pupils (up to and including all but the very highest grades at GCSE), were not ready or able to use the knowledge for communication or comprehension. Only in order to meet, practise and be tested on the knowledge for its own sake. The pillars might in theory at some stage support a portico. But this was not the concern of the pillar builders.

To all intents and purposes, it was a beautiful classical-inspired unfinished building. Full of abstract cultural importance and intellectual value to be admired. Not so much a ruin, as a folly.

Linguistics in Year 7

 I have been meaning for a while to write a post on the idea of Linguistics in schools and its relation to language teaching. Or more precisely, to explore how encountering a new language brings our pupils up against important concepts in understanding what language is, and how it works. 

For many of our pupils, language and words are transparent, almost invisible tools. They use language without thinking about it, for the purposes of interaction and communication. The idea that language can be studied is new to them.

I have had pupils on trips to France say things like, "French people are so clever and so stupid. So clever because they can speak French. But so stupid because, well, why don't they just say it in English?" Or, "I know why you always get off the bus and go and talk to the people first. It's so you can tell them to all speak French because we're here now." For many of them, English is all they have ever known. And just as a fish doesn't realise it's in water until it's taken out, our pupils aren't aware of their own language until they start to learn another.

Here's a selected few of the typical encounters and lightbulb moments in Year 7 French. Some of these are inevitable milestones, some are interesting asides, and some are my own personal favourites...

Je m'appelle... Straightaway, it's the important realisation that French is a language, not a code. It's not just English transposed. So instead of saying "I am called...", you say, "I call myself..." In terms of remembering the exact grammar of reflexive verbs and radical changing verbs, it's too soon to exploit the verb s'appeler any further. But this is a big first realisation - that different languages say things in a different way.

J'ai un chien. This is continued when we get on to nouns. It's a huge and unnerving realisation that your pet isn't, in fact, a dog. "Dog" is an arbitrary name given to the animal in one language. But it's nothing to do with the essence of the beast. We have to correct the Primary SATs mantra that, "A noun is a person, place or thing" to "A noun is the word given to a person, place or thing." And we can point out that "nom" in French means name as well as noun. This is important when we come to gender, and the idea that "a noun has gender" means the word has gender, not the thing.

"Dog" is a nice example too, because we can comment on how chien is related to the word "canine" and German Hund is the same as "hound", but nobody knows where the word "dog" comes from. So not only are we introducing the idea that words are related, evolve, have origins, but also that there are people whose job it is to find this out. Or in the case of "dog", to fail to find this out. There is work still to be done, if the idea tempts them!

Then there's "guinea pig" (in French, Indian pig) which brings up the idea of needing new words for new things and not being totally sure what to call them or where they are from. Which we will meet again with potato and tomato and chocolate and avocado...

When we learn j'ai un chien qui s'appelle..., the pupils are focused on the nouns for pets. But I have to talk to them about the fact that for the next 5 years, pets are not exactly going to feature heavily. But the other words in that sentence are going to be important. J'ai is interesting because we look at how it's a contraction of je + ai. This seems directly analogous to I've = I have, and we may use this parallel to help teach it. But one of the differences is that I have and I've are both correct. Whereas in French,  je ai is incorrect. This can be a route into talking about how the spoken language is the "real" language. It is determined by what people actually say, through a process of evolution and survival of the most efficient. Whereas the written form is secondary and has arbitrary invented rules. 

This conversation may seem unnecessary, but it is inevitable sooner or later given the decayed nature of spoken French compared with the futile attempts of the guardians of the written form to maintain or even recreate archaic forms. If it doesn't come up  now, it will come up when we meet words like forêt. The French long ago (but post 1066?) stopped pronouncing the s in forest. And then also started to omit it in the written form. Until someone complained. And they decided as a compromise to invent the circumflex accent... 

So far, we have learned to say what our dog's name is. But we've learned about the nature of language, the divorce between names and the essence of things, the evolution and relationships between languages, the notion of arbitrary language and of self-declared authority as arbiter, and that all of this can be studied.

J'ai une petite souris blanche. Learning un chien and une souris, as we have seen, was an important step in learning that grammatical gender is not always the same as biological gender. In fact, it's the noun that has gender, not the thing. But what is gender for? The first thing to point out is that when pupils are "confused" by this, what they really mean is, "I'm not familiar with this concept because my language doesn't have it." So there are 2 things to do. One is to show what its role is in other languages. The other is to show why English can manage without. Because we already established that languages go through a natural process of evolution and efficiency. So features will always have a purpose.

We show how gender acts as glue to hold words in a sentence together. We can do this visually, but essentially, the feminine word souris is stuck to the words une and petite and blanche so that the sentence doesn't fall apart. If the words are the building blocks of the sentence, having some kind of glue is a natural thing to want to have. So why doesn't English have this glue? Because have English in we word very order rigid. And if we don't stick to that very rigid word order, the sentence doesn't work. It's as if in English we pile up our words very carefully so they don't all fall down. But we have to be very careful because glue have our doesn't language any. What's the example? A new red shiny fast French train? A fast new shiny French red train?

The house of Fraser. Possessives in French. You have to say la maison de ma tante. This is a great chance to introduce the idea that English = Latin + German(ic). So we can mention 1066 again. But also the idea that often English has 2 ways of saying something. So you can say cleverer or more clever. The first is the Germanic way. The second is the French way. You can say go in or enter. And Frasers Haus is literally the German for Fraser's House. Whereas in French, you have to say... House of Fraser.

In the previous examples, learning a language meant coming up against important ideas from linguistics. In this one, hopefully the knowledge of linguistics helps them remember to get the French right. But the idea that English comes from somewhere, is unsettling. What seemed natural, pure, the default, the original language of Hollywood, Shakespeare and the Bible, turns out to be a melting pot of language spaghetti. Or linguine.

If you want, you can take a diversion into how the letter s in English has taken on so many roles acquired from different languages. Possessives. Plurals. Third person verb endings. Contractions. No wonder it sometimes needs an apostrophe to help out and show how many Frasers the house belongs to. Quite an eye-opener after a diet of SPAG bollocknaise in Year 6. Sorry. Pasta jokes again! Quite a can of vermicelli.

Pain au chocolat. This one is a pain. And I don't mean the word "pain". Or the word "chocolat", although it's always good to throw in a little about Nahuatl. But I mainly save that for when they start Spanish. No. It's the au.

What do we do about a word meaning at the or to the in the expression glace à la fraise or pain au chocolat? It's time to come back to the nature of language. French has not evolved to be mapped onto English. (Which as we saw at the very beginning of the post, can be the default understanding of someone who hasn't yet studied a language.) Words in French do not correspond directly to words in English. (Even though the two languages are closely related.) French corresponds (I could qualify this but we've had enough brackets already) to the World. And English also corresponds to the World. So if there is such a thing as a potato, then French may well have a word for it. And English may well have a word for it. The link isn't language-to-language. It's language-to-thing-to-other-language. But what about less concrete words. Words that don't correspond to a real thing in the outside world? Words whose role is to connect other words in a sentence? This is where a visual depiction on the board with some arrows helps. But basically, if a word is entirely internal to the language, then it is not directly connected to things outside the language. So it can do what it likes. If French people want to say, "bread at the chocolate" and that sounds weird to us, then that's because it's a different language.

Which brings us back to where we started. Learning a different language inevitably means learning what things are different, what things are coincidentally the same, what things are linked or have evolved. It brings us up against the nature of language as something arbitrary and natural, but also with conventions and rules. We start to meet some examples of how languages can be structured in different ways, including things we weren't aware of in our own language. We come up against these ideas in very real ways, on a daily basis - I have only given 5 of the most basic here. And with this, comes the idea that language is something that people study: Linguistics.

I do have to say, I'm not a huge fan of suggesting that we need linguistics or literature or politics or history or culture or Culture or essays, in order for language learning to be considered valid. All of them are bound up in it and can be interesting. But it is a peculiarly British thing to consider that they are necessary for language learning to be valued. The worst manifestation of this is what happens post-16, where we have no mainstream language-learning pathway. Our obsession with intellectual heft has left us with only A Level, which is delightful for the happy few, but hardly a mainstream pursuit.

Unfair grading and its impact in Languages

 Imagine you are selling petrol for £1.40 a litre, and the other garages down the street all sell it for £1.30. Should you be surprised or confused that your garage is less popular than the others? That's what's happening in Modern Languages at GCSE.

That could be the post, right there, with no further explanation needed. It's obviously going to have an effect. But what exactly are the mechanisms involved? Why are lower grades given out in languages? And how does it filter through to pupils' decisions?

If anyone suggests that it's because teaching and learning in languages is worse than in other subjects, you can tell them straight away that that is false. No such calibration has been made. In fact, grades are not calibrated one subject to another. That's the problem. Ofqual have looked at grading in languages and confirmed that it is unfair. But their legal brief is to keep it that way. Because the calibration that is made, is to perpetuate grading within the subject year on year.

This was most famously set up in advance when we moved to a new GCSE in 2018. The unfair grading of the old GCSE was carefully and deliberately transferred across to the new GCSE. So pupils taking the new course and the new exam, even though it was proposed to be a better course and a better exam, had no chance of showing they could get better grades.

And where under the old A-G grading system, the difference between languages and other subjects had been around half a grade, with the new 9-1 grading, the difference in the key area of grades 4 and above, was now stretched to a whole grade, because of the way the old grades were mapped onto the new ones.

How do pupils find out about this to inform their options choices? One way is through the outcomes of older pupils, friends, siblings. On average, they will have been given a grade lower in a language than in their other subjects. This will not have gone unnoticed. This will come back to bite us later.

It puts teachers in an invidious situation. We could explain that this has nothing to do with the pupils and the standard they personally have achieved. We could explain that where a grade 6 is given out in another subject, you can expect to be given a 5 in languages. This would be like having a huge sign announcing our petrol at £1.40. We can't stand up in assembly and say, "If you pick a language, you'll get a lower grade, but it's just how the grades are given out." You don't get customers by saying "Buy our petrol. It's 7.69%  more than everywhere else."

So we keep quiet and pretend taking an MFL in GCSE isn't going to cost you. We cover up the sign with the prices on and put up some posters stressing the high value of our petrol.

But...

Pupils are given targets. Sometimes from Year 7. Sometimes in Year 9 when they are thinking about their options. Maybe throughout KS3 and KS4 these targets are used to report on whether the pupils are "on track" or not with their learning. And these targets will be lower in Languages than in other subjects.

Why? Because the targets accurately reflect the fact that lower grades are given out in languages. They are a statistical calculation of what a pupil who got those SATs results typically goes on to get at GCSE. And in languages, for grades 4 and above, this would be a grade lower.

So pupils come to us with their lower targets and they ask, "Why is my target lower for French?" What do we say? We do NOT, as we have already seen with our petrol price analogy, tell them that it is a true reflection of the fact that lower grades on average are given out in languages. If you can't see why we don't tell them that, don't go into the petrol retail business.

We have to be quite clever and say, "Don't worry about the targets. It's based on your maths and English results in the SATs in Year 6. It's nothing to do with how good you are at languages. And the target doesn't mean you can't get a higher grade." And quite rightly the pupil can immediately see that their maths and English grade years ago, cannot possibly be relevant to their language GCSE result.

Except of course, the target IS relevant. It is a true reflection, not of the pupils' ability in languages, but of the fact that lower grades are given out. It's a confidence trick that we just played. We told the pupils that it couldn't be relevant. When in fact it's giving them very accurate and important information. So although nothing we said was untrue, and we said it because we think choosing a language is worthwhile, we did commit an act of deception.

Then of course, on average, that pupil goes on to get... a grade lower in French than in their other subjects. The word "on average" makes things worse. Because if a pupil does manage to get the same grade, it means another pupil is getting 2 grades lower. And if a pupil (maybe a native speaker) gets a higher grade in languages than in their other subjects, then somewhere another pupil has to be getting 3 or more grades lower. But let's stick to the "average" picture of it being a grade lower. For every single pupil for grade 4 and above. That doesn't go unnoticed.

Which is where it comes back to bite us. The deception is revealed. We said the target grade wasn't a reflection of their ability or their learning in languages. We said it wouldn't limit their grade. But on average it very noticeably does. We hid the sign with the price on. We let them fill up the tank. And then at the checkout, we hit them with £1.40 a litre when they could have got £1.30 everywhere else.

What conclusions do they draw? If they swallowed the message that the target was meaningless, then their lower grade must mean: they are bad at languages, languages is hard, the teaching wasn't good enough. And yes, this is the reputation that we have. What is the only way out? To admit that we deceived them? That we twisted our words to make it sound as if the target wasn't indicative of anything?

Of course we did it with the best of intentions. Because we thought studying a language was something they "should" be doing. Or because we are under pressure because our results look bad and our numbers are falling, so frankly, we'll say anything. Except the truth, of course. Because if we did that we would have no customers. And there's a slow degradation that comes with having to live a life of deception.

Right. You probably need an antidote. Try this post from yesterday on a New Hope!

Need to check the facts? FFT datalab is a great place to start for the details of unfair grading. This page takes you through recent unfair grading.

This graph on this page shows how above a grade 3, the gap with history widens to a whole grade.

Or this page to see how many decades back this goes and how it is an unfortunate historical anomaly, not a calculated calibration.

Here's a post on my blog on the targets pupils are given, showing how stark the unfair grading is and how the gap widens at grade 4 and above.

NB in 2025 and 2026 there is no SATs baseline. So the targets your pupils have are homemade. So they may not accurately include the grading of languages.

Hope is in the air

 Languages is in the news again. With an exciting plethora of projects and proposals that could take us forward. Here's one that has just quietly been getting on with it. Have you heard of the Languages for All initiative in Hounslow with Royal Holloway University? It has doubled the number of students taking A Level languages in local schools.

It's a project that is deeply rooted in seeking to understand what the issues are and what can be done about them. 

Firstly, it has used the oomph that a University can have, to send a strong marketing message to pupils about languages. In Year 11 it has personally invited pupils into the University to see an international environment, meet language students, try language lessons, and attend talks about employment, ambition and aspiration. This is maintained throughout the students' experience, with a high standard of communication and material, further visits to the University, and further contact with older students.

Secondly, it has looked to solve the problems caused by fragmentation of the Further Education sector, where it has become unviable to run A Level for small groups. The University has become involved in delivering teaching, including online, and supplying student mentors. And it has coordinated provision by schools, with lead schools providing the teaching, again with an online option where timetables or geography are an obstacle. There has been a real effort to make the project feel like a community, where students are studying together even when they are apart.

Thirdly, the project continues to focus on the relevance and usefulness of languages, with visits to the University, to employers, and a residential trip abroad.

It has been a huge success, but with a strong element of self-evaluation and reflection. It aims to continue to learn and grow. One thing that stands out is that it is value-led. This is a collaborative project from a University determined to be rooted in the community but with a global outlook. I hope it goes from strength to strength.

It's interesting that it's had this success with A Level. It gives me hope that we might achieve something similar for mainstream language learning post-16. A Level is lovely for the minority who want to do specialist academic study of a language, with literature and essays and linguistics and politics and grammar. For those who want that, it can be an amazing experience.

But it's not a mainstream language learning offer. At the moment, the options for language learning post 16 are A Level or nothing. And "nothing" is more popular than A Level. This project gives me hope that Universities might support us in establishing language learning for the mainstream, not just the specialists. This article quotes a British Academy report calling for much wider language learning, not just in specialist philology degrees. Neil Kenny has called for what he calls "alternatives to A Level" (and I would call "mainstream language learning pathways") in this opinion piece. I don't think it would have to be a Level 3 qualification as I explain here. Especially if a language to 18 could become an entitlement for all.

The Languages for All initiative gives me hope that we could find Universities ready to collaborate with schools to:

Strongly market the value of languages for University life and study. Telling pupils that going to university means joining an international organisation, including the possibility of studying abroad, using languages for research, engaging with other students from across the globe, taking a language course while at University, and that a language is a key aspect that will be looked at for applications and admissions. Universities could send a strong message to sixth form and college students that evidence of studying a language post 16 is something they value and look for.

Co-ordinate collaboration between colleges. Students will come into a college or sixth form with different levels of experience in different languages, and with interests in a wider choice of languages. A high quality provision that meets all needs will exceed the capabilities of any one centre. This will need very skillful handling in a landscape of fragmentation and competition. In fact, we would have to beware that actual collaboration between centres could lead to falling standards due to a weakening of competition. (Yes, I'm joking. But actually that ridiculous idea is the basis of our entire system.)

Create resources and deliver input. If Universities have open access online material for their own Institution Wide Language Centres, they could open these resources to sixth form students. Or if Universities were to commission or create language learning materials for sixth form students, they could also make these available to their own students. These could be developed in co-operation with commercial companies. Live online sessions or face to face sessions or visits to the University would help with outreach and with attracting potential applicants to the University. There could also be scope for the University to accredit and celebrate the learning.

It sounds like a lot to ask. But wouldn't it be magical if learning a language was something normal that students continued to do post-16? And look at the success of the Languages for All project. Isn't this exactly the role a University could and should set out to play?

A new GCSE intended to improve the way we teach. And the new Photo Card task.

 In the 1990s, teaching languages sometimes seemed to be about teaching pupils a collection of things they could say. And the exam reflected this. The speaking exam had transactional role plays, phrasebook style. And personal questions, again to be answered off pat with a whole sentence response to a question, inserting some personal detail into a formulaic response. Writing was a collection of a few sentences as a postcard home giving a few details.

In the 2000s, coursework gave the scaffolding of being able to use your resources, but introduced much higher demands in terms of constructing your own answers, based on opinions, reasons, and examples in past and future.

In the 2010s, the disastrous Controlled Assessment GCSE, with the markscheme's emphasis on amount of information and variety of language, led to rote learning of fancy answers to be delivered off pat multiple times until you "got the grade you deserved" in order to avoid your teachers' school being taken over by an Academy Chain that would absolutely make sure you did.

From 2018 to 2025, we had a GCSE where the number of topics meant it was just about possible you could learn answers by rote, but it wasn't actively incentivised. In terms of speaking and writing, it was a huge relief after the disastrous Controlled Assessment years.

So clearly we have seen changes to language teaching in response to different GCSE formulae. And now we have a new GCSE that was explicitly introduced to push us to teach "better". I wonder how it's going?

To simplify things, I would say the main thrust of the new GCSE was to make sure that pupils were responding to unknown questions and prompts, to make sure they were being tested on their ability to apply their knowledge and understanding of the language, rather than memorised answers.

I am all in favour of spontaneous improvised answers which show off your ability to deploy a core repertoire across topics.

My pupils basically start Spanish in Year 10. This really focuses us on the accumulation of a repertoire that we can deploy and how we transfer this from topic to topic. I recently wrote a post on how this also was being transferred to the Photo Card task in the speaking exam. How, with some tweaks, the body of knowledge they have acquired for the Conversation topics, can be deployed to talk about what people are doing in the photo.

At the end of that post, I also hinted at the suspicion that this is NOT going to be what is incentivised by the markscheme. Since then, I have watched the AQA guidance webinars and spoken to colleagues and to AQA. And my suspicions were correct.

The photo card is going to be marked for amount of clear information. And the amount is defined as 9 pieces of information for Foundation Tier and 15 pieces of information at Higher Tier, in order to access full marks. And what will determine whether those 9 or 15 pieces of information get full marks or not, is the clarity.

It's been explained to me that this is to be thought of as a task for the lower end of the grade range, similar to the photo task on the writing exam.

I can think of it this way. But only to avoid actual thinking. As in thinking, "The task was always accessible at a low level. But this is limiting it to a low level." Dumbing down. You may say that this sounds great. Let's not make everything too hard. But there are two serious downsides to this that I will demonstrate. Firstly that it turns into a task where a bad answer gets more marks than an attempt at a good one. And secondly, that this was a GCSE designed to make us teach better. But this task encourages us to teach worse.

My Year 10 class are currently preparing for a run through of the Speaking Exam where we allow them to prepare the tasks in advance. This is in order for them to have a successful run through of the exam, before their Mock hits them in Year 11.

Two pupils in my class had completely opposite responses to the card and my explanation of the markscheme.

One pupil quietly called me over and with a slightly disbelieving glint in his eye, showed me what he had written:

In the first photo, there are three people. There is a man. There is another man. There is a woman. In the second photo, there are four people. There are two women. There are two men. There is a man with a woman. There is another woman with a man.

Nine pieces of information, clearly expressed. Full marks. And which he could use, with slight variation, for any of the cards.

The other pupil took a completely different approach. Here's a snapshot:

He has tried to do what the task asks, and describe the photo. He's tried to show off his vocabulary, including some of the non topic words such as always or never. 

In the photo there is a street where there are always people. There are trees. There's never any free tables.

His sentences are based around there is, but he's tried to make it personal, detailed and meaningful. And there are mistakes. In particular, he's picked the wrong word for free. Which would affect... clarity. Resulting in a lower mark than the other pupil.

Thing is, I'm not necessarily saying in the exam that I think his answer should score full marks. It's not about the exam yet. It's about teaching. This is a pupil who wants to express himself. This is a pupil who is giving me something to work with. This is a pupil who will learn from this attempt. This is a pupil who could go on from this to something really nice.

But guess what. He won't be doing any of that. The most he will be doing is: There is a street. There are some people. There are some trees. There are some tables.

This exam is incentivising me NOT to teach this pupil how to write the things he wants. It is incentivising me to STOP him doing it. This exam is incentivising me to do bad things. We have been here before, and I don't like it.

Oracy across the curriculum

 

Here are some thoughts on Oracy. It's not about MFL. I may write something in the future on Oracy in MFL. But that would be something much bigger and more complex than whole school Oracy. It’s not a definitive, organised, thorough, well-structured formal piece of writing. It’s some first thoughts that may trigger more thoughts, including contrary arguments. That’s one of the things Oracy is about…

The Oracy Education Commission defined Oracy as, “Articulating ideas, developing understanding, and engaging with others through speaking, listening and communication.”

Oracy is closely related to Literacy. In fact they are probably twins, even if Literacy fancies itself as the older sibling. While there may be some sibling rivalry between Literacy and Oracy, there are strong bonds and shared energies. The current National Curriculum may have reinforced Literacy’s position, with a focus on narrowly traditional learning, “standard” English, SPAG, and the downgrading of the speaking and listening component of GCSE English. The Oracy push could be seen as being in order to balance this out. It will be important in all these potential clashes, not to sacrifice one element over another. A successful approach will recognise that all these aspects can fit into developing pupils’ language, ideas and communication.

On precisely this point, the strengths that a school has in Literacy are often rooted in Oracy. To give one example, our pupils’ love of reading is rooted in a love of story telling. And where pupils are not in love with the mechanics of reading, it is through story telling that we can engage them.

In the days of “Specialist Status”, where schools were designated as (for example) Science or Arts or Language Colleges, sometimes this could unfortunately privilege one subject over others. In our school, we had a unique specialist status. It was badged as “Humanities”, but it was essentially Art, Drama, Literacy. Which worked very successfully across all subjects. What subject doesn’t ask pupils to engage with expressing themselves through images, speech, writing? I would suggest that the very real strengths of this are very much still alive in our ethos today.

The Oracy Education Commission divide Oracy into three separate but overlapping areas:

Learning to Talk.

Learning through Talk.

Learning about Talk.

In the spirit of Oracy being about developing personal expression, rather than following formulaic strictures, I am going to start with the second: Learning through Talk.

Learning through Talk.

I am lucky that my school has always found a middle way, staying up to date but resisting fads. So we aren’t a school where teachers follow a script or where pupils are required to recall verbatim whole sentence answers in choral repetition or in response to questions. On the other hand, we have a maths department who are willing to experiment with chanting when it makes sense. And who focus explicitly on pupils being able to use the vocabulary and language of maths. This is the balance that an Oracy approach wants to develop.

From an Oracy perspective, rote responses and even the demand that pupils give whole sentence verbatim answers has a veneer of articulacy, but is actually the complete opposite. Oracy is about how pupils put thoughts and concepts into their own words. This is part of the process of them developing greater articulacy. But it’s also a vital glimpse into their emerging grasp and conceptualisation of ideas.

Questioning is a huge part of this. Partly the mechanics of how to engage with all pupils through the nature and pitching of questions and selecting who is called upon to answer. But the fundamental thing is that the teacher is interested in the pupils’ answers. And interested in pupils’ thinking. A wrong answer or a partial answer can reveal pupils’ thinking. And that is what we have to engage with.

Do our pupils see it this way? Or do they think that a teacher asks a question to see if the pupil knows the correct answer? In a French lesson, when one of my pupils volunteers, “I don’t know the answer but…” and tells me the things they think are going to be important, then I think we’re getting it right. They have the confidence to participate despite not being sure of the answer. And those things the pupil contributed will take us collectively towards the right answer and greater understanding.

In a science lesson, teachers know that telling the pupils “An object remains at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force” and getting them to memorise it, does not mean they have learned Newton’s First Law of Motion. They anticipate that actually, pupils may say that things move if you push them and if you stop pushing them, they stop moving. It’s the science teacher’s job to engage with that thinking and explore it further, to show pupils that there’s a better way of thinking about it. Oracy is engaging with ideas through listening and communication.

One of the controversial sides of Oracy is the question of register of language. Some of this falls into the topic of “Learning to Talk” and even “Learning about Talk”. But in subjects like History or Geography, it is deeply embedded in Learning through Talk. In a History lesson, the teacher often talks through events as if they were a story, making the pupils think about the motives and even feelings of historical or political figures and the situation they are in. There is a constant back and forth between the concision and precision of subject terminology, and using plain speaking for clarity and engagement. In geography, we see the same alternation between expressing ideas in familiar language such as “water the crops” and the technical vocabulary, “irrigation”. This is deliberately and carefully managed by the teacher. Oracy covers both of these aspects: expressing ideas in pupils’ own language, and extending their vocabulary into technical terms. And managing the transition so that what we are hearing is pupils’ developing expression of their conceptualisation, not rote learned barely understood answers.

In these examples we see the close links between Oracy and Literacy. Oracy is a powerful building block in approaching writing. Thrashing out ideas, rehearsing language, developing expression.

At my school, we have addressed aspects such as disciplinary literacy, metalanguage and metacognition through developments in Teaching and Learning, Literacy, and Laboratory Schools. They are all actually probably even more fundamental to Oracy. And I would add Pupil Voice to that list. When we survey or interview pupils, we are looking for their feedback, but we are also engaging them in a process of becoming more articulate in what they say and how they think about their learning. In French we can see a slow shift from thinking of language as a collection of things you can say, to focusing more on transferable concepts. So in Year 7, pupils will typically comment on topics such as “I can say what pets I have”, but by Year 9 they may have become more focused on knowledge they can apply, such as, “I can use my knowledge of phonics to pronounce unknown words.”

This development of pupils’ ability to express their ideas about their learning is also linked to citizenship. The subject Citizenship, of course, but also their active role as citizens. These issues belong in “Learning to Talk”, but it’s worth mentioning the importance of pupils being able to express themselves, explore ideas, listen to others, disagree agreeably. With particular concern for pupils who may have difficulties in this or be vulnerable because of their lack of confidence in rejecting ideas or asserting themselves. The Oracy Education Commission emphasise the importance of this in a world full of polarisiation, disinformation, manipulation and… AI.

There is also a hint of conflict between Oracy and Literacy. Do we give them equal respect? Do pupils consider speaking and listening to be “work” in the same way as reading and writing? Do we encourage pupils to copy a date and a title as soon as they start the lesson, as if a lesson is always going to be something that happens on paper?

What are the mechanics of speaking and listening that as a school we want to see in place? Teaching French, sometimes I wonder if pupils take a lesson seriously if we never put pen to paper. On the other hand, seeing pupils in a drama lesson, even when they have been moved last minute into a geography classroom, sitting in groups, taking charge of their interaction independently, restores my confidence! What are the ground rules, and what is pupils’ understanding of what a lesson is, what learning is, in different subjects?

 

Learning to Talk

 Learning to Talk, we have seen, involves two potentially conflicting approaches. Pupils learning to express themselves in their own voice. Pupils learning to express themselves “better”. We need to not worry about these being in conflict. They may be different. But they are different parts of the same thing: Oracy.

It is important for learning that we listen to pupils expressing ideas in their own language. Because this is the window we have onto their thinking. But it is also important for the sake of creativity, identity, confidence, plurality of cultures, and having a voice.

Learning to Talk includes dialogic teaching in the classroom. But it also can include debating, presenting, acting, performance, recitation, rhetoric, argument, persuasion, poetry, song, culture… In all of these, there will be interesting and complex interplay between pupils’ own voices, and hearing a variety of voices, including more formal modes of expression.

From Learning through Talk, I think we have seen that we should bear in mind that Oracy focuses us on the whole process leading up to a performance or presentation, not just the event itself. This is a learning process that in itself involves listening and communication, exploration and progress.

I can immediately think of strengths in Drama and Music, English, Citizenship and RE, the pastoral programme and other subjects, where we have huge strengths in Learning to Talk.

Learning about Talk

We have touched upon one of the major aspects the Oracy Education Commission are concerned about in Learning about Talk. That is, the idea that some talk is “better” than other talk. We all know powerful speakers who have their own voice and who don’t speak in “standard” English. And at the same time, we have all been told that it’s important for pupils to learn to speak “properly”. Learning about Talk equips pupils to understand these clashing social and political ideas. And maybe equips them to see language as a tool that they can learn to use in different ways. Learning about Talk also includes showing pupils examples of how language is used in the world outside school and reflecting on how what they learn in school will enable them to thrive as citizens.

That seems a good a place as any to stop.

 

Keeping Marking Simple in the Face of Complexity

 Year 7 have been writing about food they like and don't like. This is another classic example of where the teacher's focus and the pupils' focus are miles apart. Making marking the work almost impossible.

Remember when we were teaching pets and I told the class that we won't be doing chien, tortue, chat, oiseau for the next 5 years. But un / une and j'ai / je n'ai pas de are going to be important for ever? Well. Pupils still remember chien, tortue, chat and still mangle un, une, j'ai, je n'ai pas de. Is this bad? Should I cover their work in red ink, issue corrections, use codes in the margin to indicate spelling or gender infractions, and give a mark out of 10 for (in)accuracy?

No. I don't worry about this. It's interesting and important to notice. But clearly it is an absolutely natural feature in how language learning works. And I definitely do not want to end up with pupils who are not focused on meaning and on saying things they want to say.

This particular writing assessment at the end of the unit on Food and Drink, is haunted by this piece of work:

This is from three years ago (post on it here). You can see that the pupil has written almost nothing. And his comment underneath is that, "I was so worried about the / some, I didn't write a lot." And indeed almost every word for the (le, la, les) and some (du, de la, de l', des) is wrong. It's painful. But the real point is that it turned into an obstacle.

It made me think about exactly what are we testing in this assessment. I definitely want pupils to be using opinions: j'aime, je n'aime pas, j'adore... and some connectives: et, mais, parce que, par exemple... I want them to remember the words for foods. I think that's not problematic.

But the main things I want to see are not exactly language related. I want to see: 

• Pupils enjoying expressing themselves. 
• Pupils starting to link, contrast and develop ideas. 
• Pupils working increasingly independently, using resources only when needed.

So these are the features we mark for.

You can see the pupil's comment and the tick box at the bottom are focused on the level of support they needed. Or in this case, didn't need. And my comment is focused on how they are starting to link ideas.

You can also see that the le, la, les, du, de la, des is hit and miss. There are a couple of points here. Firstly, if I am saying to them that for the next five years, we are not going to be writing about food, just as we are not going to be writing about pets, then how much time do I want to be putting into demanding they know if beurre is masculine or feminine? Not much. So this piece of writing is interesting in that it shows whether or not the le / la is being picked up by ear as we see some of these words. Or are there patterns absorbed unconsciously so that, for example, it's rare for a pupil to say le pizza or la chocolat. Is that because they've heard it so many times? Or because there's a pattern?

You might say that there's a question of understanding being revealed. Yes. A pupil who puts le fraises or jai'me shows that they are not constructing their French from logical grammatical thought. But that understanding isn't going to be put right by some red ink. Suddenly and magically made a priority. In fact if we talked about le and les, then it may well turn out there is no misunderstanding. It is simply that they are not constructing the sentence from atomised grammatical elements. They are saying/writing chunks of French that come to them naturally to express something they want to say. If that's what's happening when learners use their language, then I would be a fool to pretend that their French is coming from a faulty grammatical assembly line that I need to fix, and to discard their writing as a flawed product that has to be recalled because some of the pieces aren't correctly assembled.

I can address le / les and j'aime, but this is going to be a long process, not a quick fix.

What if a pupil, like the example at the top of this post, was focused on the le, la, les to such an extent that they couldn't write. Well, first of all: well done that pupil for caring about the accuracy. If you really care that much, then you may well be the one who does learn it. In fact, here is what he wrote when I let him use his booklet to check the genders:

So that was my plan for this year. I would encourage all pupils to write as much as they could without using their booklets for support. And if any pupil asked about le / la, I would tell them I would let them check at the end before handing it in. To write without the booklet, putting what felt right, and then checking at the end.

How many pupils out of two classes asked me what they should do about getting gender right? One. One pupil in his first sentence said, "Sir, I don't know if it's le or la." None of the others were bothered.

Even more interestingly... As they finished, I said to them all, "Well done if you've done it without using your booklet. Now I do want you all to check one thing. Every time you have written le or la or les, I want you to use your booklet and check you put the right one."

What do you think happened?

You can see in their comments at the bottom, it clearly says, "I didn't use my booklet except when Sir told me to check le and la." Now look at le and la in their writing. Even when they check, it's not working. This isn't something we deal with by using red ink. It's a long and slow learning process of adjusting focus and attention, without making it an obstacle to self expression.

That would be a good place to stop. But I have one more to show you because it brings home the complexity of marking accuracy versus expression.

Here we have a pupil who wants to express himself, develop and link ideas and challenge himself to work independently. From an accuracy point of view, he has made some terrible mistakes. He has written je boisson eau minerale and je manger la pizza. Am I going to pull this apart for being terrible grammar and give him a low mark?

Of course not. Seen in the wider context of his language-learning trajectory, this is perfect. Firstly he is exploring the limitations of his language. Using the word for "a drink" to try to say "I drink". So this is someone engaged with expressing himself in the language. As exemplified by how his paragraphs are the most coherent and logical, with things like, "For breakfast I would like to eat a pain au chocolat but normally I eat omelets because I love eggs". And secondly, he is anticipating exactly the grammar we will be looking at next. How verbs end in er in the infinitive and how you change the ending when you conjugate the verb.

The comments on the work need to reflect an appreciation of his glorious effort and carefully manage his understanding that when you try a tricky skateboard move, you are more likely to fall off than if you keep it simple. 

So how do I mark the writing?

Firstly, clear criteria:

• Challenge yourself to use the booklet as little as possible.
• Express yourself and your opinions.
• Show off as much of the French you know as possible.
• Think about how ideas link.

Secondly, engage the pupils in commenting on these aspects. This is not for show or in a funny coloured ink. It's genuinely targeted reflection and part of a long term process of becoming aware of priorities. It's an opportunity to shape their thinking and encourage them to take control and be positive about their language-learning. And it is high quality information that allows me to understand how they wrote the piece and what their thoughts are.

Thirdly, my comments engage with theirs and engage with longer term learning, not just this piece. But my comments on the page (in my horrible handwriting) are not as important as what I say and do in the classroom as a result of reading their work. The main recipient of feedback from the pupils' assessed work is not the pupil. It's the teacher. You can see from this post how much it gives me to reflect on. Imagine if I wrote all this in red ink at the end of the pupils' work!

Fourthly. And definitely in last place. I have to record something in my markbook. It needs to be a shorthand for some of what has been discussed here. It needs to contain information on where the pupil is on their trajectory, allowing me to track individual progress in independence, coherent expression, and accuracy. But of course that doesn't work. Because the pupil who copies from the booklet will be more accurate than the pupil who takes risks and turns boisson into a verb.

What we do currently is record the level of independence. As you can see in the tick box at the end of the page, we are looking to record if pupils are:

• Writing by copying from eg a writing frame in the booklet.
• Writing their own sentences but reliant on finding things in the booklet.
• Writing independently but reliant on having prelearned, memorised material.
• Writing independently.

The idea is that all pupils produce writing of similar quality, reflected in our KPI exemplars. And we record whether they achieved this spontaneously, by memorisation or by using the booklet.

We do need to tweak this. Because pupils DO produce work of differing quality. Especially as almost all pupils challenge themselves to write spontaneously without using their booklet, or only checking at the end. We're going to be talking about this at the next department meeting. I am a fan of simplicity. So I don't think it's going to be useful to attempt to encode all the many possible variations of different combinations of expression, coherence, risk taking, accuracy and all the play-offs between them. I don't want to preempt what the department decide. But I am leaning towards keeping our current method of noting the level of independence, plus a simple + = - code to indicate how successful it was. Because this "marking" part of the whole writing and feedback and engaging with learning process really is the least important.

Really cool translation challenge.

 I've been working on a really cool translation challenge for the last 3 days. And I've nearly cracked the first 5 words. You'll love it. It's a linguist's dream. I could write a whole paper on just the first 5 words.

Here it is. Translate into Spanish, accurately and completely: "Boys will always be boys."

Of course, "Los niños siempre serán niños" won't do. It's an English idiomatic expression that doesn't translate into Spanish. Because it has to be specifically boys. Not all "children" of both genders.

I have been through all the words I know for child, to see if any of them specifically refer only to male children especially in the plural. Niños, chicos, muchachos, mozos, mocosos, nenes, chavales, escuincles...

And all my words for male to see if they could apply to children. Varón, macho, hombre, señor, caballero, güey, vato...

I have to admit I cheated. For this kind of untranslatable expression, I like to use linguee. It collects examples of where (hopefully) real people have attempted to translate things on the internet. Here's what it said for "Boys will be boys."

It showed straight away that I was right to be cautious. People generally avoid using "children will be children". And I absolutely love, "Los machitos serán machitos." For a day or so I thought that was perfect. And I liked the way that los machitos seems deliberately despectivo. But then I started to worry that although in the context of the text, the writer is being critical of machitos, the original sayer of the saying, is not.

I also don't like the "always". It's not part of the expression. It's been put in as an extra, and feels as if it has the value of "of course" or "as we know" or "as the saying goes." And it creates another problem alongside the future tense. "Children will always be children" sounds as if it's saying they won't grow up.

This is all delicious and thoughts about it kept coming to me. This morning I had a feeling that the English modal "will" isn't entirely functioning as the future. It's more in the true sense of "will" meaning "want" or "insist on". We see this in "Will you marry me?" which translates into Spanish as "Do you want..." And "I will" as "Sí quiero".

So my current favourite, while it doesn't solve all the problems, and means I have to let go of my old favourite machitos, is: Así se comportan los niños. With a siempre to fit in somewhere. And I am pretty sure I want it in present tense, not future tense.

Of course this isn't a fun intellectual challenge. This is the opening of the AQA A Level Spanish translation. And I have NO idea what they will have as an acceptable translation on the markscheme. Especially as, to give us an extra kick in the teeth, later in the translation they want you to render the word "children" to encompass both genders. I imagine the markscheme will accept, "Los niños serán niños" just to spite the candidates who recognised this doesn't work. 

I doubt, "Así siempre se comportan los niños" would get the marks. Unless they've read this post.

They will end up accepting a lot of literal translations that gloss over the difficulties or efforts to make a good job. And penalise you for putting in an extraneous los or missing out a de.

I have read the JCQ rules and there's nothing in there about not talking about the exam after it's been sat. Students are definitely talking about it on student forums. Teachers are cautious because the exam board like to keep it secure for next year's mock. But the thought of this being next year's mock makes me feel even more sick on top of the thought of it being this year's actual exam.

What are they trying to do with an exam like this? 

The way the markscheme works, with the text divided up into roughly 4 word chunks worth a mark each, means that if you have something wrong somewhere in that chunk, you get no marks. I can easily see valiant attempts at wrangling with this translation coming out with 0 marks overall. Easily.

This 5 word opening puzzle wasn't even necessarily the worst part of the translation. At least the problems were blatantly obvious, even if the solutions have given me something to think about for a couple of days.

I don't think there's any harm in discussing the first 5 words, as it's already known on social media and student forums as the "boys will be boys" translation. And I've also see "Big boys don't cry" discussed by native speakers saying that the Spanish expression doesn't have the word "big".

Too many of the things in this translation depend on feel for the language rather than testing any knowledge or rule appropriate for this level. Avoiding too many details, I think there are real difficulties in picking the right word for things like, heard, anything, language, was part of, environment. And decisions as to whether to include an article which again, depend on "feel" for the language rather than testing knowledge of a rule.

There's a vicious negative antecedent which isn't a use of the subjunctive usually required at this level. And a nasty imperative with indirect object pronoun. But while unnecessarily hard, these aren't pushing into native speaker territory in the same way as handling nuances of idiomatic connotation and collocation. I personally can enjoy this translation as a challenge to my "feeling" for Spanish, having read vast amounts of literature and having lived in a Spanish-speaking country for four years. That's not what we should be testing at A Level.

I know the point of being "the nice man who teaches languages" is to be honest and fair and not angrily hurt people's feelings. And to remember that in the precarious situation of languages, we are all in the same boat together. But I really don't know what possessed the exam board to think this translation was in any way suitable for English pupils who have studied Spanish in school. A hugely damaging and irresponsible mistake.

Generally I always think the exam boards do a good job and have huge expertise in making the specifications imposed on us work. Or work as best they can given the hand they are dealt. As I spell out in a recent post, the current A Level is awful, but not because of the exam boards.

But this translation was a mistake. All around the country, students who did well in Spanish at GCSE, eagerly picked A Level, stuck with it despite the ridiculous expectations, only to be faced with this at the end of all their hard work. And we wonder why only 2 students per high school pick A Level Spanish. Or actually, thank goodness it's only 2. Who would wish this on anybody?

For me, this translation is a huge kick in the teeth. For the students, they may not even have realised how impossible it was and the kick in the teeth won't come until August. On one level I am intellectually in awe of how such an incredible translation was put together. But that of course is utterly insignificant faced with how sick I feel that this was done to our students.

There will come a point where in all honesty, we won't be able to justify letting pupils take this. Already I would never actively encourage anyone. And I know cases of languages teachers and college heads making sure their own children don't. I don't know how long I can carry on pretending to the pupils that it's a viable option. It's heartbreaking.