NPP 23: Pupils need to be able to imagine and believe in a version of themselves who speaks French

 

In my last two posts, I put forward a set of four principles for teaching languages. And I think they are a set, where each principle is closely linked to the others. The purpose of this post is to show why principle number 4 is not a romantic wishy washy add on, but is in fact tightly bound up with the first and perhaps most important principle. And together they add up to a manifesto for Interculturality as defined from the start of this National Priorities Project as communication, creativity and identity... as being key to the learning of the language itself. Here's the list.

1. Meaning is important from the start. Things that are meaningless are just not learned.

2. There are cognitive demands in asking pupils to use their language, interact, communicate. These need to be explicitly developed, not side-stepped.

3. Creativity can produce errors, but it doesn't create the underlying misconception. Errors reveal pupils' developing understanding and allow us to engage with it.

4. Pupils need to be able to imagine and believe in a version of themselves who speaks French.

I have written this in a rush. So let me spell out the main point of this post in case I am not clear. Principle 1 makes clear that meaning is central to things getting learned. But the creation of meaning comes with the pupil, not from the task. A mechanical exercise can have meaning. A communicative Task can be done mechanically. So we need principle 4. The pupils need to believe in themselves as emerging French speakers.

These principles seem to stand in total opposition to the version of teaching stipulated by Ofsted in their Research Review, closely linked to the ideas behind the NCEPL project and the new GCSE.

Slide from the ofsted webinar on curriculum design accompanying their Research Review.

We did not set out in opposition to the Ofsted view that the learning of the language itself is central. But we quickly realised that creating meaning is key to the learning of the content and concepts of the curriculum. Pupils can perform and seem to learn from mechanical exercises. But when we sat down as a department to work through our resources, there was strong consensus that these activities had little long term impact on learning. Learners remember chien even though after the first unit of Year 7 they never see it again. Where as they confuse un and une, je and j'ai even though those words appear in every lesson they ever have. A learner who says things that they want to communicate is creating something more memorable than a learner who is just rehearsing an accurate sentence. And not just because the personal engagement makes it more memorable later on. What is happening at the time is different. Someone mechanically constructing a sentence from some French selected by the teacher to rehearse vocabulary and grammar is doing something fundamentally different to what someone thinking of what they want to say and working out how to say it in French is doing.

And this is the key to how principle 1 needs principle 4. Because where a task sits on the continuum between mechanical and communicative, doesn't depend on the task. It depends on the learner. When I change un chien into le chien, I am aware of changing the meaning. A learner doing the exercise in a lesson is changing the letters u and n into the letters l and e. Nothing could be more meaningless. At the other end of the continuum, a learner writing about what job they would like to do in the future, can choose between trying to give a genuine personal answer, or giving an answer concocted out of the French they know the teacher wants to see, with no basis in reality.

If the learner can change the most communicative of Tasks into a mechanical exercise, then our first principle, asserting the importance of creating meaning in order for learning to stick, will become too slippery. We need to engineer the desire to communicate, not just into the task, but into the pupils' attitudes.

This is why the fourth principle is necessary:

Pupils need to be able to imagine and believe in a version of themselves who speaks French.

When we ask Year 8 pupils to write about their town and their school, they can produce paragraphs using opinions and justification and conjunctions to link it all up. In order to practise the language the teacher wants to see. When we ask Year 8 pupils to write to a pupil in a French school, everything changes. Things get much more complicated, and more challenging. But all of a sudden, pupils are engaged in the responsibility of creating meaning.

The process of writing is no longer just assembling correct sentences. Pupils have to express themselves. Not only does this make the experience more memorable, but the process of writing now requires them to articulate all of their knowledge of the language, to confront the limits of their knowledge, and to find ways to make it work.

Principles two and three are now also in play. The demands of comunication are a challenge that needs to be accepted, not avoided. And in exploring the limits of their repertoire, pupils will make errors which reveal what they need to learn next.

If we accept that in order for learning to be memorable, it has to have meaning... [and not just meaning as in chien means dog; meaning as in wanting to say something] ... then we have to develop our pupils' need, ability and desire to create meaning, able to imagine and believe in an Intercultural version of themselves.