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:
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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...
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