ln our National Priorities Project we are examining whether our Year 7 French Art Exhibition drives language learning or detracts from it, and the lessons we can learn for our wider curriculum from answering questions around accuracy, communication, creativity and self-expression.
In previous posts on the argument that language learning should be a process of careful repetition and practice of controlled and sequenced grammar patterns, I have tried to argue that even on its own terms, freer self expression has a useful role to play. And that errors are revealing of the true state of pupils' emerging grammatical understanding. In the last post, I concluded that there is no definitive answer and that we should enjoy exploring how these arguments play out in the complex and dynamic reality of the classroom. That felt like a great place to end the post. But I have another example that I wanted to include which would have upset that carefully balanced even-handed conclusion.
So in this post I am going to air some frustrations with the idea that we should be cautious about asking pupils to express themselves because it supposedly just inevitably leads them into error.
Here's a piece of work from Year 9. It's in test conditions, and is the result of discussions with the class (full detail here) about exactly this topic of whether to stick to French you know is accurate or whether to try to express yourself:
You can see some of the things that we have been talking about. Errors which could reveal confusion in concepts, such as the accents on "méré". But which in fact reveal that one element of learning is a kind of picture or feel for a word rather than analytically thinking through its construction. This is also seen in how they sketch out spellings for "aujourd'hui" at the top, searching for the spelling that "looks right." These are features of someone who is trying to get a feel for the language, ownership of the language, a love of the language. This is what leads this pupil to squirrel away little idiomatic expressions like "c'est simple comme bonjour" that they have learned on their own initiative and to try them out for their own amusement.
But back to our question of whether asking pupils to write more freely is inducing error. There's a mistake in there which is very revealing. This pupil knows how to say "I want". This pupil knows how to say "my friend". This pupil knows how to say "to be rich". They have put it all together to say, "I want my friend to be rich". But of course, that's a mistake. In French you can't say "I want my friend". You need the subjunctive. "I want that my friend be rich."
Out of all of the French in this piece of work, this sentence would be one where the pupil was most confident that they knew all the words. It's built entirely mechanically from French they have been taught. Each chunk is accurate. There is no way they could have known that French has an entirely different way of saying "I want - my friend - to be rich".
What does this say for our argument about whether asking pupils to express themselves pushes them into error?
They don't need pushing. The ways in which French diverges from English are unknown to them and can be found even in the most apparently mechanical building of sentences from French they know.
I am happy for this post to be less carefully balanced than previous ones, so I am going to throw in a few more bold statements while I am at it.
The drive to say things using language you know is not something you want to squash.
The selection and sequencing of language which is a feature of the "keep it mechanical" approach is all about the powerful language which can be recombined. This emphasis on recombinable language is great, but it naturally goes with the idea of pupils creating meaning from these recombinable elements. And will inevitably lead to error as they meet the limits of their language knowledge.
And while I am making bold statements...
The idea that pupils must not ever see la poulet in case it becomes permanent, comes from the same people who tell us that poulet isn't worth teaching because it won't be seen often enough to be learned. These two strictures seem incompatible.
In case you have forgotten where these arguments come from, here's a slide from an ofsted webinar on how the curriculum should be designed.
The idea is that language teaching should heavily focus on the explicit and direct teaching of the language itself, boiled down to the essentials and avoiding rich and complex contexts, with no incidental knowledge, ensuring pupils are 100% secure and accurate before moving on. This clashes with the ideas behind our Year 7 French Art Exhibition that we are interrogating in our National Priorities Project. I hope you will allow me this one intemperate post and maybe understand a little more context as to where the central questions of this Project are coming from.
Next Post: Rewriting the Year 7 Art Exhibition booklet in the light of these considerations.
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