Reflecting with Pupils on Beliefs about Language Learning. Is there a right answer?

 In a recent post, I shared some work my Year 9s wrote in their writing assessment after the first half term's work.

I enjoyed the confidence and individuality with which they expressed themselves in French, taking risks and saying things they wanted to say.

Then on the INSET day in January, we were lucky enough to have a day with David Didau, doing whole school training on teaching and learning. He gave a very strong message that we should not be allowing (let alone encouraging) pupils to create work that contained mistakes. If we did this, we were going too fast too soon. We should be spending our time at sentence level until pupils were perfect. If we allowed pupils to work beyond the level of carefully practised accuracy, we would be compounding error and poor performance. And he was talking about pupils writing in English, let alone in a new language!

This made me think of examples like this.

Was I right to encourage the pupil to be proud of what they could do with their French? You can see there are errors in spelling, gender, verb endings and vocabulary. Was my focus on creativity, coherence in developing ideas, and personal expression the wrong focus? Did the very demands of creativity and thinking up what to say distract pupils from the important task of forming accurate sentences? Did allowing pupils to express themselves inevitably invite them to try to say things that were bound to be wrong? What should I do?

I decided that our next unit (Jobs and Future Plans) did lend itself to less free-flowing imaginative writing, and could be an opportunity to accommodate more of a focus on accuracy. I made this an explicit discussion point with the class, so they could reflect on the balance of expression versus accuracy in their work.

After an initial piece of work in their booklets, I shared the work of four pupils on the board.

"Evelyn" had written something that was highly accurate, by concentrating on putting together a paragraph built out of the French she was learning. 

Not one word of it was true. It was simply an exercise (on this occasion) of using the language for the sake of practising the language she had learned. David Didau would have loved it. And it also fits with the fashionable idea of language learning as carefully constructed vocabulary and grammar exercises, where showing you know what something "means" is more important than having something meaningful to communicate. We appreciated Evelyn's accuracy and her approach to the work, making something tasty out of the ingredients she had.

Then we looked at a different approach.

"Henry" does not start with his ingredients and see what he can make out of them. Henry starts with things he wants to say. His personal dreams, his current obsessions, and things he thinks are important. He tries to say them using French he knows, but saying what he wants to say is more important to him than building perfect sentences.

Then we have "Dylan". Here is Dylan's previous piece of writing from the Going to the Beach unit.

And here is what he wrote about Jobs:

You can see his total disregard for caring about accuracy. His focus is entirely on saying things he wants to say for his own amusement. Usually about crabs.

Now Kirsty. Kirsty also sets out to write what she wants to say. She often goes beyond the French we have learned in this and in other topics. She often makes mistakes because she is pushing at the boundaries of her knowledge.

As a class we discussed these 4 examples (and others). We discussed it from the point of view of doing well in an exam. And from the point of view of being a language-learner. I think that at this point we arrived at some sort of consensus that the key was self-awareness and deliberate decisions around taking risk. Which is born out in some of the comments you can already see on the pupils' work.

We decided to tweak the parameters of the task. Each pupil would write a paragraph in test conditions, using only French they knew. It wouldn't be about them, personally. It would be about "Being a teacher" and it specified that they should use the opinions, reasons, conjunctions and future expressions we have been working on. And it should aim to be a "Perfect Paragraph."

Let's see what we got...

Here's Kirsty.

It's a more boring version of what she was trying to write. It still goes beyond what others in the class know and can do. And yes, it is more accurate than her work usually is.

Here's Ruby's Perfect Paragraph alongside her Going to the Beach paragraph so you can appreciate the difference.

And here's Dylan's Perfect Paragraph. Disciplined and sticking strictly to showing he can accurately use the French we've learned in this unit.

Yes. I know. But it is noticeably more accurate!

When it got to the writing assessment, what should I do? Should I tell them it is being marked for accuracy, an exercise in showing they had memorised the language for this unit? Or is it being marked for showing me they can express themselves and develop an idea coherently?

I left it up to them. I told them I already had the evidence of what their work looked like so far with both focusses. And now I wanted to see how what we discussed came through in their own individual work and in their awareness as a language learner.

Who do you want to see first? Here's Jess who wrote the Crossy Roady piece at the top of this post:

Here's Henry.

Here's Ruby:

And I suppose you want to see Dylan. Here's Dylan.

Have they got more accurate? Has there been a retreat from wild and reckless indulgence? Have they become more restrained and boring? Is their way of working individual and innate, or does it vary depending on the task? Is there a best balance between accuracy and expression? And does it all depend if we are talking about testing knowledge or if we are talking about language learning?

And we will look at Kirsty's. But I'm leaving that to the end because I think I have made my mind up about the apparent exam success/language learning dichotomy. First, here's something I noticed on a pupil's feedback section on his listening and reading test. In the "What was the best lesson" box on the right, I had lots of interesting answers. The speed dating lesson, the novel we've dipped into, watching Ma Vie de Courgette at the end of term, playing the Red Herring detective mystery on computers... But this pupil picked out the "Perfect" paragraph with clearly defined parameters. Now I need to go back and ask them why. Was it the clarity, reducing the cognitive load of having to think what to say? Was it the successful focus on accuracy? Is it a permanent thing we shoud do? Or was it a one-off timely intervention for that exact stage of their learning?

And here's Kirsty.

You will have seen that even in the "Perfect Paragraphs", perfection cannot be guaranteed. There is no way that a Year 9 pupil is going to be able to predict that in French you can't use "je veux" and "être riche" to say "I want my friend to be rich." There will always be ways in which French doesn't work in the same way as English. We can see here that a focus on merrily saying things the pupils wants to say, does lead to some distraction away from focus on accuracy of things she is supposed to know. But I am sure from a language-learning perspective, Kirsty's work is excellent.

I don't want to say that there's anything wrong with the approach pupils like Evelyn or Ruby can adopt when they need to, writing carefully accurate pieces that put paragraphs together from French they know, finding ways to use it to develop an idea coherently.

So I don't think there's any one right answer about language learning. But I do think there is a wrong one...

Of the pupils whose work we have looked at (I have others!), who is the pupil who is hoovering up most French? The pupil who has a grasp of all the French we have ever learned and can turn it inside out to say things she wants to say. The pupil who at the merest sniff of something new, can squirrel it away and add it to her repertoire. The pupil who found she couldn't say "would be" so has gone out of her way independently to find out how to say it. And then use it. The pupil who is prepared to make mistakes because she knows that's what happens when you push at the expanding boundaries of what you know and can do. The drive to express yourself is clearly central to language learning. And I cannot go along with the idea that we should stamp it out until pupils have flawlessly mastered the basics.