NPP 24: Interculturality. From questions to principles. The story so far.

 I am going to see if I can sum up everything on our National Priorities Project so far in one post so you don't have to read all 23 posts! (Although please feel free: Start here or click on links to individual posts as you go...)

Across the country there are NCLE projects on the National Priority of "Interculturality". Our project takes a very particular view. Of course Interculturality is important on its own terms. But is it directly important for the language learning itself? This is our central focus.

Then there's our definition of Interculturality for the purpose of our project. We wanted to look at it specifically in terms of the pupils' interculturality. Rather than a window on an exotic foreign world, we wanted to look at how learning a language can allow our pupils to step out of a sliding door into a multillingual world where they belong.

So we started with the question of whether Interculturality engages with the cogs of language learning, or whether it is "nice to have" but tangential.

We were even prepared to ask the question of whether it could be harmful. We applied this question to our Year 7 French Art Exhibition where every pupil creates an artwork, learns to describe it in French, and their work goes on display to the public. We asked ourselves could the demands of creativity lead to error, or to learning "one off" language that is never needed again, or overwhelm pupils?

We sat down as a department and considered these possibilities and gave them serious consideration. To sum up, we decided that the dangers were over-stated. There is a cognitive load to creativity and communication. But this means we explicitly develop it rather than abandon it. Self expression can lead to errors appearing. But it doesn't create the underlying misconception; it reveals the evolving state of the pupil's language and allows us to engage with it. And while it can lead to some redundant language, these are the items that are particularly attractive to the pupils that fit into the core repertoire and allow them to use it to say things that they want to say.

We then used these insights as a lens to sharpen our vision of our whole curriculum.

We first looked at Inclusion. We had been tasked with identifying "the instructional core" and removing other extraneous content that could be distracting or overwhelming. What our conclusions around the French Exhibition allowed us to see, was that we didn't want to identify communication and interaction as barriers to be removed so that learners could concentrate on grammar and vocabulary. The cognitive load of communication and interaction were part of what we were explicitly teaching pupils to develop. And in fact it's in developing expression that you get the multiple iterations needed for learning to stick.

Then we tackled the whole of our KS3 curriculum and resources. As a department we went through our booklets page by page and discussed how each resource balanced the demands of learning the language itself and the development of pupils' ability to use their language. We felt that transactional Role Plays, although they could seem phrase book style or tangential to the growing core repertoire of grammar and vocabulary, had an importance to the pupils and their engagement that we didn't want to cut. This felt similar to the importance of personal items of vocabulary in the French Art Exhibition unit. It also applied to other topics in Year 8 and Year 9 where pupils learned to talk about their own lives or narrate stories. Allowing their own personal and creative choices of vocabulary seemed important even if this was incidental - you will remember that Ofsted in their webinars on curriculum design were very clear that everything had to be tightly selected and sequenced with no time wasted on words that wouldn't be seen again.

As we did this, a further insight emerged: it became overwhelmingly clear that mechanical grammar exercises were the least successful. Pupils completed the work but it didn't stick. The exercises had "meaning" in the sense that pupils knew chien meant dog, but were mechanical vocabulary and grammar drills where the pupil was creating language, but not engaged in creating meaning.

As a result, we re-wrote the booklets for our entire curriculum. We tried to keep the explicit development of coherent expression and communication as a vehicle for multiple encounters with language. And we tried to inject meaningful communication into grammar exercises, while still maintaining a step by step approach.

Looking back at what we had discussed, we came up with four principles that were working for us. They worked in designing the curriculum, in creating resources, and in making the resources work for all pupils in the classroom. Here are the first three.

• Communication is important from the start. Things have to be meaningful to stick.
• There are cogitive demands to communicating. Thinking up what to say, making it coherent using language you have, managing the interaction. This needs to be explicitly developed, not avoided.
• Errors are not created by communication. Communication can reveal the limits of pupils' knowledge of the target language and allows us to engage with it.

And there was a fourth principle. Which emerged from our "feeling" that creativity in the French Exhibition was important, that transactional role plays had a place, that writing to a French pen friend was important. But which at first was just a feeling rather than seeming linked to the learning of the grammar and vocabulary of the language itself. Here it is:

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

Then it slowly dawned on me. You may have got there already of course. But I eventually realised that this Intercultural principle is directly linked to the first principle. For learning to stick, it has to be meaningful. But when we tried to engineer the tasks in our booklet to be less mechanical and more meaningful, we were only addressing half the picture. It doesn't actually depend on the task. It depends on the pupil. A pupil can engage with the meaning underlying a mechanical task. Or a pupil can approach a meaningful task in a mechanical way. So we need to develop the pupil's ability to imagine and believe in a version of themselves who speaks French. Because it's the pupil who brings meaning to the learning.

Which brings us slap bang right back to our starting definition of Interculturality where language learning represents a sliding door through which our pupils can step into a multilingual world where they belong. Except now, rather than being tangential, this is central to effective learning of the language itself.

What has this meant? This means we are confident in the importance of our Year 7 French Exhibition and things like the transactional role plays in the Food unit. It means in Year 8 we are reintroducing sending letters to pupils in a French school. It means in Year 9, we are going to boost the importance of creating children's books for primary schools without worrying about "what if Ofsted come in" when we are doing something that isn't grammar and vocabulary. Because we now understand that expression, creativity and imagination are central to making language learning meaningful. And being meaningful is essential for making learning stick.

And next? I think next we will have to think about the prominence of Francophone culture in our curriculum. If the key is pupils' imagination of themselves in a multilingual world...