In language teaching, we seem to be struggling with two different meanings of the word "meaning".
On the one hand we have "I know that tortue means tortoise". Where pupils are tested on their knowledge of the meaning of words. It's an approach that believes in regularly testing pupils' ability to parse sentences containing known words and known grammar, to cement memorisation and conceptualisation. The language is selected (by frequency of vocabulary) and sequenced (to exemplify step-by-step grammar concepts), so that the pupil's knowledge is built and reinforced.
On the other hand, we have the idea that language should be for pupils to express themselves and understand each other, to create and take part in communicating "meaning". This reminds me of the Spanish and French word for "to mean" - querer decir / vouloir dire - to want to say something.
Does it matter in language learning that our pupils learn to use their language to say things they want to say? Does it matter that what they read or hear has something to say, rather than just to practise and test their knowledge of language features?
We see this in GCSE and A Level listening and reading papers. What masquerades as a comprehension question often turns out to be asking pupils to show they can parse certain language features, even when they are not relevant to the purported question. At GCSE, we have seen questions like these. Things like "He didn't get on with his teachers" (which accurately characterises the understanding of the relationship) being marked as wrong. Because it didn't accurately parse the word "badly". Or at A Level, this question about what someone did one day. Answering the question (she went to see the castellers, she took a photo, she posted it online) is not rewarded. Because it doesn't show knowledge of the grammatical features it was appetising to her, she decided to... And these are not random rogue questions. This is a feature of how the examiners see meaning as simple demonstration of knowledge of the "meaning" of words and grammar.
It is also in Ofsted's guidance on curriculum design for languages. They insist that language be introduced in a strict sequence, based on exemplifying concepts, not based on teaching pupils to say things. The example they give is to teach pupils to talk about red dogs and red tortoises, and to avoid teaching green dogs and green tortoises until a future step. Because the adjective rouge is invariable for gender. Whereas vert would require knowledge of adjectival agreement if applied to a tortoise. All of which ignores the fact that if you are going to teach pets, pupils will want to talk about a range of pets in authentic colours. At this stage, pupils are making links from the language to the real world, rather than links and patterns internal to the language. This kind of real meaning is important to learners. And you wouldn't want to lose that!
But is it important to learning? Maybe that kind of meaning, with lots of pupils all trying to say random different things they aren't ready for yet, leads to them being given a collection of one-off things to say, that don't stay in long term memory and don't add up to coherent conceptualisation of the grammar of the language.
Here's an example that happened with my Spanish class last year. So they were the last class to take the old style GCSE. Back in Year 10, we had done some work on Shopping. Improvising answers in speaking, then writing them up. Most pupils did something that rehearsed the repertoire of opinions, reasons, tenses with a bit of conflict, conversation and disappointment thrown in.
But one pupil came up with this:
You can see it does contain the elements of the repertoire we practise using across topics. It has opinions, with reasons, direct speech, an element of conflict of opinions, use of imperfect and preterite ending in disappointment. You can see the underlying structures of the model aquarium story, both in terms of the repertoire of language and in how they are deployed.
But this pupil's answer was different to many others in the class. Because they were telling a true story. And a painfully personal one, with genuine and lasting disappointment.
Does this make any difference in terms of language learning? I am tempted to throw my hands up in the air and raise my eyebrows. Because of course we want to be equipping pupils to say things they actually want to say. Not teaching it as some kind of sudoku where they concoct answers to successfully fit all the pieces into a pattern to show they can solve the puzzle. But even just in terms of long term memory and internalisation of language, does this pupil's work show something important?
Well. Here's what happened in Year 11. As we prepared for the exam, I did not let them look at their work from Year 10. They should have not only internalised the language, but also have been able to still deploy it.
The pupils who had cobbled together an answer to show they could use the language features, were basically starting from scratch. They had no memory of the work that they had done in Year 10.
Whereas the pupil who had written the story based on a true story that mattered to them personally, wrote this.
They were able to quickly and fluently reproduce several of their answers from Year 10 because what they had written was memorable. But if you look closely, it's not at all a case of word-by-word memorisation. It's actually a different version of the same story. And I am pretty sure if I listen back to their recorded GCSE speaking exam, they came up with another spontaneous version on the day of the exam.
Where does this leave the current GCSE speaking exam? AQA's marking of the Conversation by counting conjugated verbs seems to have gone entirely towards the parsing of language features, rather than the creation of meaning. As we see in this post, candidates who want to say things in genuine response to the examiner's question, do worse than pupils who trot out a list of three essentially meaningless verbs.
All my instincts and experience, such as the example of the pupil in this post, are telling me that this is bad for language learning.
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