In our National Priorities Project, we are looking at our curriculum through the lens of our Year 7 French Art Exhibition. What lessons can we learn from the work on the Exhibition for the relationship between communication and grammar, self-expression and accuracy, nitty gritty language learning and Interculturality? And how do these reflections cast light on the rest of our curriculum?
One of the points of interrogation for the Art Exhibition project is error. Does asking pupils to write more freely to describe their artwork for the exhibition lead them to make errors, and is this inherently problematic for language learning?
In my last post I showed examples of pupils' work for the exhibition. I argued that asking pupils to write more freely didn't create the errors. It revealed them. Pupils who could complete a mechanical grammatical exercise accurately, made mistakes when describing their own picture. These mistakes revealed underlying confusion in their emerging grasp of grammatical patterns. The task didn't create the errors. It revealed something important about their learning. What the exhibition project was delivering was an opportunity for teachers to see into how pupils' knowledge was forming. And an opportunity for pupils to test out how well their knowledge could be articulated into a working system. Even on their own terms, for someone primarily concerned with pupils developing coherent and accurate language, the Exhibition project was playing an important role in revealing pupils' underlying conceptualisation of the grammar.
How are these arguments born out elsewhere in our curriculum? How does our attitude to errors affect teaching and learning?
Here's an example from another Year 7 topic.
The pupil is trying to write up his opinions on different foods. You can see firstly that it is full of errors when it comes to words like le, la, les, du, de la, des, de. And secondly that the pupil is aware of these errors. He has commented that he was so worried about these words, that he hardly wrote anything.
In my experience, this attitude from a pupil is actually quite rare. Many pupils will happily pick any of the alternatives for "the" and use them seemingly without caring. When they are trying to convey a message about what they like and don't like, the gender of the word for "the" is not a salient feature for them. Both in terms of conveying their opinion and in transfering meaning from English, gender has no important role.
Its role for a learner of the language is one of indicating intellectual diligence rather than communication of primary meaning. Sometimes I wish pupils had the internal mechanism that I have that makes me physically wince when I see incorrect gender. Something in my education meant that when I went to France I would rather ask for two of something in a shop than risk getting the gender wrong. Expensive and calorie rich, but at least I didn't let myself down with errors of gender.
Do I really want my pupils to think like this? I would say the answer is Yes. But not at the expense of being confident in trying to say what they want to say.
You can see at the bottom of the error-strewn piece of work above, he then went on to write a "With Help" version. Which looked like this:
A much better piece of work. Firstly the articles are largely accurate. Secondly, without the obstacle of worrrying about the accuracy of gender, it shows what the pupil is capable of saying in French. I wish he'd been able to go for it in the first place.
We are told to be worried that allowing pupils to write more freely leads to error. We can see here that the opposite argument also applies: worrying about error inhibits pupils writing more freely. I am not going to argue that one of these positions is right and one is wrong. We have to be aware of both and how they play out in the reality of the classroom. In fact we can see in this case an example of how teacher and pupil worked through the complexity of language learning, with set backs and steps forward.
I quite like the model we've seen in this post, of challenging yourself to write what you can "from your head" as specified in the title for the pupil's piece of work. And then reflecting on it and using support to check for accuracy in a second draft. It's one of the things we took from this National Priorities Project to inform our Department Inclusion Plan.
There are deeper considerations. How exactly are we expecting pupils to learn to select un, une, du, de la, des, de l', de...? Is it because there are important concepts to be grasped? If you have written des fromage, you ought to know that there's a mismatch there? Or is it by learning from musical memory? You would never say la fromage because you've always heard le fromage and it sounds right. Or should pupils always know it's OK to look up a gender of a noun, because while it's important to get it right, it shouldn't be an obstacle to saying what you want to say? Or is it just simply more important to say what you want to say regardless of getting a gender wrong, because it is no impediment to communication?
We can still have the conversation about what drives pupils to be better language learners. Is it being able to say things? Or is it being confident with the nitty gritty of grammar and not being overwhelmed by the demands of communication? But this argument shouldn't be theoretical and shouldn't imagine it is going to come up with a clear cut answer. The answer is going to be in the complex and dynamic reality of the classroom, where experience shows that all these things are in play.
Next Post: A reindeer of the ideas that suggest we have been doing things wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment