Enjoying Reading Fiction in French

 I have written several posts on Listening, including listening for entertainment, but relatively few posts on Reading. I have written here about non fiction authentic texts, but today's post is going to be about reading fiction. For me, learning French in the olden days, reading was the key to having access to the language. My exposure to French was through taking Dumas novels out of the school library and reading them for pleasure.

In this post, I am going to focus on Reading in the KS3 classroom, but I want to make one point about my reading when I was a pupil, so indulge me for a minute. Apart from the novels in the school library, I went on to buy many books in French second hand. All of them would have penciled in translations of words the owner had looked up in the dictionary. This never went beyond the first two pages. After that, I don't think they had read any further. Sometimes these were books with uncut pages, and they remained uncut until I had to cut them. I always tell my students not to look up every word on the first page. When I read Le Comte de Monte Cristo, it took me 20 or 30 pages to work out what was going on. And when I did work it out, I didn't have to go back to page 1 and re-read. It all just fell into place. I recently doubted how much I understood when I was reading in French aged 16, so I re-read Les Trois Mousquetaires and reading it again, I had exactly the same pictures in my head as I remember from the first time.

I am not going to be writing about sending your pupils home with classic novels to struggle throught without a dictionary. But I am going to talk about not getting bogged down translating every word.

Neither do I want to befuddle pupils with incomprehensible texts or pretend they are reading when they are not. One way to do this is to give them a translation of the text and work with parallel texts. I have hinted at this before in ideas for cover lessons. We seem to be hard-wired to want to use texts to test pupils' comprehension. Using parallel texts takes this out of the equation. They have access to what it means. Now we can get on with enjoying reading it in French. 

Perhaps as a model, we need to think more of how we would approach working with a song. When we use songs in lessons, we put enjoyment of the music, the rhythm, the video, the physical quality of the sound of the words before testing meaning. We will look for words that pupils understand. We will look for repeated structures that unlock the meaning. We will use it as an opportunity for pupils to learn beautiful phrases that will stay with them for a lifetime. We hope they will make an emotional connection with the song, the singer, the French-speaking world. It can be the same for reading fiction.

By now you are impatient for an example. My biggest example today is a book translated from English into French. Sorry if that loses some cultural dimensions. But it's such a good example and it works so  well. It is the Tom Gates books by Liz Pichon. It does count as an authentic text. It's sold for French teenagers to read. And reading books in translation is part of the culture of the non English-speaking world. Liz Pichon also gets involved in the translation of her books, for example in translating the names of people and places, so if she does an author visit to your school, you can ask her about languages and French in particular.

But the reason I use this, is the way Liz Pichon sets out the books. She intersperses text and image. This helps with reading in the French, but even more importantly, it means the texts in French and English are exactly parallel. The layout on the page is identical and the pictures give immediate landmarks to help navigate the page.

So what do we do with the texts? I don't have class sets. If I was spending that amount of money, I would want something that was an originally French-speaking book, not a translation. I use it early on in Year 7. With photocopies of the limited number of pages we are allowed to make. On A3 with a double page of French and a double page of English, so the English half can be folded away if we just want to look at the French.

Here are some suggested activities that are ways of enjoying reading the text without being tested or getting bogged down:

Read the French while listening to your teacher reading it aloud. Enjoy the sound of the French and being able to pick out some words. Talk to your teacher about what words you recognised and what you think it is about.

Read the English and enjoy realising what some of the French was about. Now read the French again and see if it makes any more sense. Practise reading the French aloud to practise your phonics.

Read the French and hunt for some words your teacher asks you to find. These will be well-chosen to be new words but ones that are deducible from what you remember from the English translation and other words in the sentence.

Pick out words in the English that you wonder what the French would be (caramel wafer?). And find them in the French text. Enjoy learning interesting words. Pick out interesting looking words in the French, (roulez-boulez?!) and find what they mean in English. Enjoy saying them. Keep a list of great words.

Find the words in English that go with the pictures. Find the same words in the French. Work with a partner. One of you looks at the English, one looks at the French. One reads aloud in one language. The other follows the text in the other language. When you think they are about to get to a picture, shout, "Snap."

Work with a partner. You start reading the text in French, stopping in random places. Your partner is looking at the English and listening to you reading in French. When you stop they have to say what the last thing you said was in English. Or your partner reads aloud in English while you follow the French. When they stop you have to say what comes next in French. This will involve some amount of dealing with different ways of saying things in the two languages, including word order!

Use the parallel texts to focus on high frequency "little" words that can get ignored. Or even verb endings. Ask your teacher questions about differences between the French and the English.

Use the text as a model to write about you and your school, including Liz Pichon style pictures integrated into the text. Or re-write some of your normal classroom writing in this style with pictures and some words you have picked up.

And Always Always: Go back and read the text through, normal speed in French. While listening to your teacher read it aloud. Again and again.

This doesn't have to be done in one lesson! In fact it is best done over a longer period of time. And over that period of time, keep going back to pupils reading the page at normal speed. What they understand because they remember what it says and what they understand because they are reading the French will slowly merge.

I mentioned in this post on Story Books, that I am buying a class set of Tomek by Jean-Claude Mourlevat to use with Year 8. I will be using similar approaches. Most importantly alternating reading the book together and pupils re-reading it for themselves. Without ever getting stuck on translating every word.

I will keep you posted!

In fact, you can now click here to find out more about how Tomek is working out as a class novel.

Flip Flap Fishes and Fish Out of Water

 Time for a bit of light relief. Following on from the success of a post on MegaMutantPenguinSkiDeath, here are two more activities with exciting names to try at your peril. Flip Flap Fishes is a lesson I have done once. And only once. It's THAT sort of lesson. And Fish Out of Water is a no-prep activity I do fairly regularly. So take a deep breath, and here goes...

Flip Flap Fishes is an activity I did once with a group of Year 9 pupils when we used to teach in "sets". It was a small group and it was the summer of Year 9, and not many of them were carrying on with French at GCSE...

For this lesson, you need to clear the desks out of the way. You need some largish pieces of sturdy cardboard. And you need the fishes. You can see some of the fishes in the picture. They are words or chunks printed on A4 paper. About 30 different ones. If you really want to, you can download them from the Association for Language Learning Grammar Wiki. There were infinitives, opinion words and other verbs that are followed by the infinitive, conjunctions and details of where, when and who with.

It was a similar style activity to the compulsory hands on after school French sessions, demonstrating that writing sentences in French isn't magic, but a practical process of assembly following the instructions. And not because I ever thought that there is such a thing as a "Kinetic Learner", but because it is OK for lessons to have variety and a bit of craziness.

Ready? Split the (small) class into 3 or 4 teams and give them a corner as a base. One person from each team has the cardboard. Throw all the fishes into the middle of the floor. The 4 people with the cardboard had to quickly use their cardboard to fan (no scooping) as many fishes to their team as they could. The team had to work to assemble them into sentences. Once all the fish were swooshed, there was a phase of negotiation and swapping of fish, with some hard bargains driven. Then we stuck the sentences up on the board and judged and scored them for length, coherence, and sophistication.

Things like: J’aime faire les magasins à Norwich le week-end avec mes amis mais je préfère aller à la pêche si je peux avec mon père parce que j’adore le tennis.

We repeated this so each member of the team had a go at fish swooshing. At the end of the lesson, another variation was to put sellotape on one pupil's shoes (one from each team) and they had to stomp around and collect as many fish as possible on their shoe. Again to make sentences out of. Beware - some sellotape can take the surface off some shoes. And also once you've taken the fish off the board, remove any blutac before they go back on the carpet. It makes a mess and it stops them being swooshed!

As you can see, a memorable lesson. And I know it's out of fashion to have memorable lessons because they remember the swooshing not the French. But this was French they knew. It was the incentive to put it into sentences and negotiate the words you needed for a more coherent one (see example above - tennis?) that mattered.

Now for the other one. I can never remember what I call this. Sometimes it's Drown the Class. But I think I've settled on Fish Out of Water. It causes less kerfuffle. It's for when pupils are seeing a large list of words for the first time. A vocabulary list, a knowledge organiser, or the unit vocabulary page from a text book. Maybe clothes terms, or for food, or for sport... I tend to go for a large number of words or chunks (30 to 60?) that pupils then learn over a longer period of time. Including words that are not required, but which individual pupils can pick up if they like them.

It's evolved from another activity which I will describe first. First I ask them to go through the list and tick off any words they already know or can guess. And then they get a partner to test them on those words, and just those words, that they say they recognise. I demonstrate the next activity with a pupil. We set a timer for a minute. In that minute, I call out words from the list (in Spanish) and the pupil has to find them as quickly as they can and give me the meaning in English. If they know, it's quicker to just tell me. If they don't know, they hunt through the list. And I count how many they find in one minute. Then they do this in pairs. It's done in synch, as I'm timing them for a minute each. It does rely on them having the understanding of the sound-spelling link to be able to say new words correctly.

So where do the fish come in? It's the same activity, with me saying the word in the target language, and the pupil racing to find it on the list and tell me the meaning. (And then with a partner.) But this time, once I have said the word, the pupil has to repeat it over and over, without stopping for breath, until they find the word and can tell me the meaning. Does it help? Or is it just a bit of silliness? Well, no-one's drowned yet. And it's familiarising the pupils with the list so they can find words in a hurry. It's practising pronunciation and incentivising remembering the new words.

It is similar to Oxford-Cambridge which I will throw in here for free. It's done in threes. The middle pupil is Jeremy. The other two pupils are known by their surname + Oxford, and their surname + Cambridge respectively. All 3 have the sheet of words in front of them. Jeremy says a word. The two pupils hunt for it (or may already know it) and "buzz". Jeremy decides who buzzed first, saying surname + university for that pupil. They then have to instantly answer. Jeremy keeps score.

After these activities, we move to more normal self quizzing or getting partners to test each other. As part of a long process of seeing the words in sentences, reading, listening, speaking, writing like a normal lesson!

What next for Languages?

 I don't know if I am breaking some kind of purdah, but I thought I would attempt some crystal ball gazing as to what might happen next for Language Teaching, as a result of the stimulating discussions and huge debate provoked by the recent proposed GCSE consultation.

The "Quick Fix" Option

This option is the easiest to implement. It's the easiest for exam boards and for teachers. The panel showed that they clearly understood the issues of the current GCSE and things that teachers would like to see changed: The difficulty of the Listening Exam. The rubrics, especially in Writing and the Role Play. Some of the nonsense around Topics. 

So. Change the requirement for the Role Play rubrics to be in the Target Language. It's currently a cryptic interpretation game, that takes up too much teaching time and is unfair in the exam. The insistence that the cues be in the Target Language (but without giving away any of the words pupils might need), mean that they are impenetrable nonsense. Change it.

Change the questions or the mark schemes on the Listening so it tests comprehension. If the answer is "use the same plate" and a pupil puts "use one plate" then they have understood. OK, so they haven't literally translated the word "same", but they have shown they understood what is going on. Change it.

Clarify the guidelines around the conversation topics. You don't have to have questions on "What did you recycle last week?" The environment, ethical shopping, the homeless. These subtopics might suit questions like, "Is it important to..." but not "Do you like..." or "What did you do at the weekend..." The questions (to meet the success criteria) on opinions, reasons, narration of events in the past, can range across the subtopics of the Themes. Edexcel would have to change more here than AQA. But if it's accepted as silly nonsense, then change it.

The "Ugly Dog Statue" Option

In a book of 1970s after dinner speeches I had in the 1970s, there was the story of a firm of architects who always seemed to get their projects approved. When they submitted their plans they always added a pair of obnoxiously ugly dog statues to the façade of the building. The planners then insisted the dogs were removed, and allowed the rest of the project to pass. Regardless of any other defects the building might have had.

Here, the ugly dog statues are the Vocabulary situation. Everyone has focused on the fact that building the GCSE around the list of most commonly used words in native-speaker corpora, seems to be a non-starter. Teaching high frequency words may well be important. But that isn't what is proposed. What is proposed is to restrict learners to that set of words. Learning other words is described as "demotivating" and "unhelpful." I outlined some of the apparent absurdities of this in a post for the MEITS project. 

It would be possible to tweak the proposals for vocabulary. To still keep the focus on a smaller set of high frequency words that are genuinely the most useful for comprehension irrespective of topic. And to remove the restriction on what pupils can learn to say in the expressive productive skills.

This would remove the feature that caused most uproar. But of course it would leave the basic problem of the lack of communication, conversation, spontaneous speaking. And leave us with the mentality of testing memorisation of language, rather than what pupils can do with that language.

The "Learn from the Experience" Option

The response to the proposals has revealed the strength of consensus across sectors and amongst teachers with different priorities and approaches. MFL has emerged as a positive, supportive and vibrant community. Confident in their ability to teach pupils to make progress, aware of the history and continuing evolution of pedagogy, and secure in their values around communication and culture.

Proposals which not only ignore the sector, but which are fully intended to steam-roller them in a certain direction, cannot ever be the way to proceed.

Since the end of the "Learn Fancy Answers By Rote" GCSE, teachers in England and Wales have had to equip pupils with a repertoire of language that means they can respond to unplanned questions in Speaking and Writing. Spontaneous developed answers are returning, based on internalised building blocks. The building blocks of language tend to start with chunks of powerful re-combinable language that can be used for pupils to express themselves on any topic. But also include the manipulation and inflection of language. The key thing is that learning to use the repertoire of language is not delayed. It keeps pace with the learning of the language. It is a key driver, both motivationally and cognitively, of how new language is integrated with what pupils know and can do.

You can imagine the consensus of opinion you would hear from music teachers if it was proposed that instead of being required to play their instrument in the exam, pupils would be asked questions to test their knowledge of how to play the instrument. Well, that's the consensus from language teachers around the importance of learning to use the language. It's not just important in itself. It's not just very important to pupils. It also has an important role in the language-learning process. Learning to use the language is what firms up pupils' conscious and unconscious systematisation of the language. Finding out how it works and fits together.

Calls for change from teachers centre around the Topic content, with many teachers keen to see a boosting of the cultural element. This is variously presented as motivating, educational, socially inclusive and of practical use. It also takes the next step in how our teaching of the language can evolve. Without losing the sense of a developing repertoire, it pushes us along the next step towards talking more about other people. Using the 3rd person, or contrasting it with the 1st person plural. To talk about what happens in other countries and what we might do here. There is plenty to explore here, together with the language teaching community.

So which will it be? The panel are experienced and wise, juggling educational and political priorities and narratives. Maybe they will be able to come up with another option, and surprise us with an elegant solution that takes the sector with them, moving teaching and learning forward to new successes.

Scribble Talk and MegaMutantPenguinSkiDeath

 Less of the small p politics and more of the Practical  activities today. Scribble Talk and MegaMutantPenguinSkiDeath. Which can be re-versioned as the Softy Save a Seal game.

For this you will probably need a what I don't call Sentence Builder (been watching too much Miranda). The sort of Keep Talking sheet described in a previous post, that lets you go way beyond a sentence.

Your pupils might have done the connectives dice activity, to practise keeping talking, prompted by and, but, because, especially if, so, for example on the throw of the dice.

And you are ready for Scribble Talk.

Pupils work in pairs. One draws a box on a piece of rough paper. The other partner is going to talk, using their Keep Talking sheet if necessary, or trying to use it less and less. The other partner scribbles in the box as shown, as their partner talks. It is a way of timing how long they can talk for. If you just set a timer for 3 minutes, you have no idea how much of that time they were actually talking for! When the pupil talks, their partner scribbles. If they pause or hesitate or stop, then their partner stops scribbling. Pupils are developing their ability to extend their answers more and more coherently and spontaneously.

Then, if you are worried that they are relying too much on repeating the most well-worn expressions, j'aime... parce que je peux... mais je n'aime pas.... parce que je dois..., then you can ask them to play MegaMutantPenguinSkiDeath.

The dynamic is the same. One pupil speaking, giving an extended answer, keeping going using and, but, because etc. The other pupil instead of scribbling this time, draws a picture of a skiing penguin on one side of the small piece of rough paper. On the other side, they write a secret keyword from the Keep Talking Sheet that their partner had been neglecting. Maybe j'allais or j'ai dit or j'aurais préféré... Their partner has to keep talking, making sentences and extending them as before. And when they say the keyword on the back of the sheet, the penguin skis into a tree and they can swap roles. (And use a red pen to dispatch the penguin.)

Link to Post on Zero Prep Writing Activity

 I am aware I posted a link on twitter for a Zero Preparation Writing Activity, without giving the specific link to the post. Here it is! https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/06/a-nice-zero-prep-writing-activity.html

Consensus, Sharing, Vision in the MFL community

 This post is about the extraordinary consensus in practice that is a current strength of MFL teaching in the UK (and beyond). It is also about the proposals for a new GCSE, and how they relate to that consensus. And I'm not talking here about the consensus in articles from linguists and professors in response to the GCSE proposals. I am talking about what is happening every day in schools and classrooms and in the MFL community.

Everywhere you look, there is sharing and discussion. Everywhere you look, MFL is being taught through scaffolding that puts language together from building blocks. Pupils meet those same chunks of language in Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. With a real focus on developing what they can do with the language, in order to express themselves with ever-greater fluency, independence, coherence and sophistication.

The language is carefully chosen to be powerful and re-useable across contexts. Planning of recycling of language is thorough and rigorous. Sometimes in deliberate interleaving of topics, And sometimes by making sure language isn't attached to just one topic, creating a repertoire that is developed and redeployed. Language is first met in building blocks, working on fluency and automaticity, before moving on to inflection and manipulation.

Modelling and scaffolding are carefully used to allow pupils to use the language and to challenge them to use it more and more independently of support. Grammar is carefully introduced to add to the repertoire, extending range and sophistication, but integrated in with the language pupils are already getting better and better at using.

Here are some great examples: Elena Diaz, Sisa Silvia and Esmeralda Salgado are all absolutely brilliant, not just on great classroom activities, but on the all-important overall vision of how pupils make progress. Everything is joined up, nothing is left behind. The language aims to deliver good grades at GCSE. But as the GCSE requires fluency and coherence in giving opinions, justifying them, talking about past and future, developing answers in anecdotes and narration, then this points pupils' trajectory in a certain direction, but a viable and worthwhile one. And for example in Esmeralda's curriculum, this is integrated with work on culture and real communication with Spanish-speaking pupils.

I don't think this is just a self- affirming echo-bubble. I am aware of many others who come at this from so many different view points and who have different priorities to me. But the consensus around nurturing pupils' repertoire shows its strength precisely because it is there across such a wide spectrum.

I don't want to label people's practice in a reductive way, so I will sketch out the picture without pinning any particular person to any particular opinion. But just to rashly characterise a few perspectives:

People who follow the MFL version of the Knowledge Curriculum. This is based on retrieval and automaticity. They have worked incredibly hard on thorough planning of progression and spacing. Often they have created and shared booklets developed together as a whole department or across departments in a trust. Maybe they are looking at integrating materials from the NCELP schemes of work. Their pupils memorise and internalise the language and have a growing body of language they can deploy. 

People with a focus on Communication, either in structured tasks or in the natural interaction of the classroom. Challenging pupils to be communicative and creative means that they have to equip their pupils with the structures to express themselves more and more independently. The introduction of structures keeps pace with what pupils can do, constantly adding to their developing repertoire.

People who use Sentence Builders or follow the full EPI or MARS EARS approach created and popularised by Dr Gianfranco Conti. Input and output is based on developing automaticity of chunks before moving on to manipulation of inflected endings.

People who use stories, or CLIL or culture as the central point of their teaching and a jumping off point for language that can be recycled and adapted.

Primary teachers who are blending the use of imagination and stories with a sentence builder style approach to give pupils the most powerful chunks of re-combinable language.

That's the sense of some of the passions and hard work going on and being generously shared. At the end of the post I attempt a list of examples of blogs, drives and wakelets to illustrate the scale and big-heartedness of the MFL world.

Such a wide variety, yet at the same time a broad consensus. And a total transformation, for example in Writing in the GCSE exam, where pupils now spontaneously write well-developed answers in response to an unknown question. And where spontaneous speaking is now at least as viable an option as rote learning. And where, when there is rote learning, it is based on familiarity with structures that are known and internalised by the pupil.

Looking at the AQA Examiner's Report for 2019 Spanish, it is clear that in the Writing paper, pupils are able to respond to unforseen questions, developing coherent answers from language at their disposal. This includes specific mention of open ended tasks. Annoyingly, the report does still talk about silly expressions like me chifla / me mola or replacing porque  with visto que / dado que / ya que, as a hangover from their old love of "variety" over a core repertoire. And in the Speaking, it makes clear that there are still some schools where pupils have learned complete rote answers or teachers ask the same questions. But this is to the detriment of the pupils' performance in the exam. Where pupils were able to give and justify opinions and give details in past and future, responding to questions on the spot, they were more successful. This is the best evidence we have yet (see below - Ofsted?) on the transformation since the demise of the old Controlled Assessment GCSE.

The thing that stands out as an outlier from this positivity, confidence and consensus is the 2016 "Review". It seemed odd in 2016 and was largely ignored by teachers and academics, confused by its narrow focus and views that seemed based on the personal perspectives of the authors. Since 2016 (David Cameron was still Prime Minister, Leicester were Champions) the landscape has utterly changed. We have moved on from the terrible "Learn Fancy Answers By Rote" GCSE. And the consensus around chunks and scaffolding has swept the country.

The new GCSE proposals seem to ignore the idea of building fluency and automaticity in using chunks. Preferring instead a foundation of grammatical knowledge and manipulation of inflections. This is a very different view of how pupils learn grammar. And it is based on a further difference in the view of the importance of the role of communication and self-expression. Developing the ability to use the language is important in itself, and very important to pupils. But it's also an important part in cementing the pupil's conscious and unconscious conceptualisation of the language, exploring how it works and fits together. I've written about my own views on this here. But in this post, I want to concentrate on the mismatch between the proposals and the consensus in the MFL teaching community.

Sometime soon, there will be a more up to date look at the MFL teaching landscape, from Ofsted. The period since 2016 has seen huge changes. Inspections have been interrupted, but an up to date report from Ofsted could recognise some of the transformation that has been happening since 2016.

Unless, that is, if the Ofsted report is going to be through the same lens of "phonics, grammar and vocabulary" as the 2016 Review. The teaser videos from HMI Michael Wardle are alarming. They are even more uncompromising than the new GCSE proposals in spelling out that putting in place the foundations of phonics, grammar and vocabulary comes BEFORE communication. With communication and culture as a distant future goal. Are we to be stuck in 2016 for ever?

As promised, and in no particular order, here are a few examples. Apologies to everyone I've missed. As my point is that there is a whole community of people generously sharing and comparing, then inevitably there are too many for one short list!

https://www.languagesresources.co.uk/

http://whatjanelearntnext.blogspot.com/

https://senorcordero.wordpress.com/

https://transformmfl.wordpress.com/

https://gianfrancoconti.com/

https://www.morganmfl.com/

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kXZSrZYOMAHxhPV3Tk49czKbAj0_k81Y

https://changing-phase.blogspot.com/

https://jamesstubbs.wordpress.com/

https://michellecairnsmfl.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/459/

https://teacherjenniferd84.wordpress.com/

https://mflteacher.webnode.co.uk/

Nice ideas for Cover Lessons

 If we need work for a lesson where the teacher is unexpectedly absent, we need some fail-safe work that is going to be useful and worthwhile for the pupils, but which doesn't require specialist knowledge or input from the supply teacher or cover supervisor who will be taking the lesson, as part of a day that probably ranges from science, to Spanish, to drama, to French, to music... We owe it to them to make the languages lesson the easiest and most rewarding part of their day.

And even if it's a planned absence, and you leave work that you know fits in perfectly with what the pupils are working on, you can still come back to find they have roamed the school searching for the dictionaries, and claimed not to be able to tackle your carefully planned work.

So here are some ideas for work for lessons (cover, pupils absent, isolated or excluded) that contain all the language needed within the task itself.

The first is adapted from a drag and drop foolproof computer-based lesson:

It is not a tangled translation. It's just tangled texts. All the language is given. So all pupils have to do is copy out separate English and French paragraphs. (In my screen shot, the spell checker is trying to help by underlining what it thinks are the non English words.) It is not a task that pupils can panic over or claim to be unable to do. And it does involve enough thought to be worthwhile, while also modelling the sort of paragraphs we want them to be able to make out of the language they know. The next task in the lesson can ask them to compile a glossary of words in the parallel paragraphs. Then you can set as a further task, to do a translation, based on the words they have already met on the page. No need to go hunting for dictionaries. No excuses for not getting it done!

Here's another task that provides all the French needed. It gives pupils the correct version. Then they have to identify which of the three options below is exactly the same as the correct one. Clare Seccombe writes here about whether or not it's a good idea to show pupils "wrong" French. I certainly have no qualms about this activity. It's designed to draw attention to the correct version!

Then the next task to follow this one is very similar but in paragraphs. The first one here (below) gives the correct and incorrect version  for pupils to find the mistakes. And then a similar paragraph with the same mistakes to find and correct.

This coffee splat task doesn't hand the pupils all the words in quite the same way as the tasks above. But it gives them enough so that they don't seem to panic and are happy to get on with it. I did have one class who were convinced it had really coffee (or was it poo?) and refused to touch it. So much for fail-safe!

Another task that does give pupils all the words they need, is a task based on parallel texts in English and the target language. Here they have exactly the same text in French and in English. They have to locate the underlined words in the other language and highlight them. Again, they can then compile a glossary of these words and use them in further tasks such as translation or putting the spaces back into sentences.

If we are going to give pupils texts where all the words are supplied, then we can give them more ambitious texts and ask them to match words, or match paragraphs, or fill in gaps. This one seems to do all of those. It's a snippet from an A3 sheet of 6 stories of careless Canadian criminals. The stories in English on one page. And in French on the other, opposite. 

First they have to read and match up the French version to the English version correctly. Then they have to fill in some gaps by finding the exact information in the other language. Then there are some underlined words for them to find in the other language. Some cover supervisors like these because they can leave the pupils to get on with it. Others like it because they can read through and enjoy the stories with the pupils.

With a focus on accuracy, modelling, reading for meaning, learning new words, these tasks are a worthwhile lesson, while at the same time containing all the language pupils are going to need, without going off on a wild dictionary hunt!

Here's a link so you can download some when you need!

A nice zero prep writing activity

 This is an activity I love to use, sometimes in an emergency (take one look at the pupils and decide they aren't up for what I'd planned) or sometimes because it's a great lesson. It can fit in early in the pupils' progression, to practise and start to memorise language, or it can work later on in the sequence as you work on modelling how to make a great answer out of the language pupils have. It can be done with different levels of support, and can be taken on in different directions.

The simplest variety is I write a text on the board in Spanish. The pupils translate it in their books into English. (At this point, scoot round the class and find the one person who is copying the Spanish instead of translating!) Then when they have done that, I rub it off the board and ask them to translate it back into Spanish in their books.

The advantage is, that they have only just seen the Spanish, so as well as working it out or using their Keep Talking sheets, they can try to remember what they just saw. Sometimes I do ineffective erasing, so that the faded ghost of the text is still on the board for them to have a glimpse of the original Spanish version.

In my old school (pre 2006!) I had a whiteboard with a pull down projector screen over it, that I could use to hide the text. If we got to the point where the pupils wanted to look at the original, we could do pens down and I would briefly let the screen back up for those who wanted to have a look. They would challenge themselves to do it with as few looks as possible. 

This also works if you have some pupils who finish translating into English quickly and can make a start on translating it into Spanish. You don't have to rub it off the board yet. Get them to start on the Spanish and tell them they can look at the board if they want, but they should keep a tally of how many times they need to look. And to try and do it with as few "looks" as possible.

The example above (sorry about the dead dog) is another solution to the speed of finishing problem. Some may finish all 3 paragraphs into English while others have only finished two or even one. This is fine. Stop the translation into English now, remove it from the board, and ask all pupils to translate what they have done so far into Spanish. That way the speedy pupils have a lot to get through. And the pupils who have taken longer, have the correct amount for them to translate into Spanish in the time remaining.

The example above is quite complicated. You can do much simpler versions. And we originally constructed it as a class on the board as a model answer, working through with pupils what logically came next in the story and how to correctly form the tenses (for example). Then they were able to successfully translate it into English, having just participated in writing it in the first place. And then turning it back into Spanish in their books replicated the modelling on the board I did with them to start off with.

When I project it rather than rub it out (or used to hide it with my pull down screen), at the end I can reveal the text and ask them to correct their version. I tell them I am not interested in anyone saying they have no mistakes. I want to have a class who can find mistakes. It is also possible to do this as a listening, with me reading the correct version as a last chance for pupils to make any changes as I read it.

And then I ask them to close their books and tell a partner the story. Not word for word, but their version of it.

So a great lesson, modelling language, modelling how to use it as a story. With lots of support and challenge. And no preparation.

Thinking about Learning Styles

 In a recent post, I looked at what we "believe" about language-learning. Probably, this should really have been about what we think (an ongoing process of intellectual evaluation linked to evolving experience) rather than what we believe.

In this post, I am going to look at the controversial topic of Learning Styles and VAK. Seeing as the title of this blog is The Nice Man, I will try to narrate my experience and thoughts, honestly and without seeking to offend. It may or may not turn into a rant.

In the early 2000s, we used to have a drop down day for "University of the First Age." Pupils and staff got T-shirts and maybe even a water bottle. During the day, pupils learned how to use mnemonics to remember the numbers 1 to 10 in Japanese. They had some talks on "the brain". And I was always assigned to "Multiple Intelligences."

Because it was the most interesting and useful. Obviously I didn't want to be doing the numbers 1  to 10. Not on a drop down day. And the brain one, run by the Head of Science, was deeply problematic. "You only use 10% of your brain." I tried to have a conversation as to whether this was meant as a metaphor, but he wasn't interested in that conversation, so I kept clear. Which left Multiple Intelligences.

And it was OK. It was basically an examination of what we mean by "intelligent." And a valuing of a range of abilities we all have. And stating that there's more to life and to learning than being good at reading and writing. In a classroom with a different dynamic and a chance to focus on the nature of learning.

And in my teaching, it may have helped me think that perhaps a lot of my lessons were similar, perhaps wordy, and lacking in variety. Both in terms of activities, but also resources and input. You can see a post all about what my lessons were like in the early 2000s here.

After a couple of years, the quiz at the end of the Multiple Intelligences session became more and more of a focus. Along the lines of "What sort of learner are you?" I always skipped it, because I couldn't reconcile the idea of Multiple Intelligences all in play at different levels, with the idea of being a particular "type" of learner. They seemed to be in direct contradiction. Then it was brought in to tutor time and was meant to be some kind of basis for teaching and learning in the school.

As a chance for learners to reflect on their experience and their perceived strengths and weaknesses, it was a nice quiz. If it made them feel they were being listened to, given a chance to reflect and take charge of their learning, then that's not a bad thing. Or as a bit of pseudo science to make everyone feel as if they know what they are doing, then there would be at least a placebo effect. And in our school, that was as far as it went.

I know that in other schools and in Initial Teacher Training it went further. I've already said that I couldn't understand how Multiple Intelligences turned into a Single Preferred Learning Style. It seemed the exact opposite. But worse, if a pupil self-diagnosed as having a weakness, for example, in Reading... then why would your response be to deliberately neglect Reading? To help them "learn" by sidestepping the areas they said they most needed to develop?

The answer to that question is linked to the current 2020s fad for "Knowledge". If you believe that there is "important knowledge" that pupils have to learn/memorise, then it makes sense to do that in whatever way works best, swerving perceived obstacles. I am going to stop here and think. One day I will be brave enough to post about "The Knowledge Curriculum" and how close it is to the previous fads many of its devotees now sneer at. I'll just end with the point I started with. Please, let's make sure these are things we actively think about and continue to question.

What do you believe?

 I thought about this as a reflection on being Head of Department, but I'm sure it doesn't just apply to that. Please note, this is a low-stakes quiz. Not a test.  And whether there are "right" and "wrong" answers is up to you (see the final question).

Maybe we could set it out as a flow chart, or as one of those quizzes that tells you what sort of Head of Department you are. But for now, it's just a bunch of questions. And of course, other options are possible, other combinations are possible. It just makes it harder for the flow chart to pin a label on you...

What do you believe about Grammar?

a. It is best taught in a logical set order, starting from simplest, but teaching full paradigms, fitting topics to the grammar, with a focus on accuracy.

b. It is important but it's not what your course is ordered around from the pupils' point of view. Topics require certain grammar points, although they can often be learned at first as fixed expressions. The complexity is gradually increased, but full paradigms aren't always needed. Grammatical accuracy is part of general accuracy of spelling and recall of structures.

c. Your course has a grammatical core, but it's based on what structures are most powerful in terms of what pupils can do with them. They are structures which can be re-combined to create the pupils' own sentences and they can transfer across topics. Some of the first ones you introduce might be "complex". You won't introduce full paradigms if they aren't necessary for what you want pupils to do.

d. You have a very clear grammatical progression, which is introduced through and integrated into real classroom communication.

e. Your course is built around stories, interesting input, interaction and natural acquisition. Grammatical understanding comes much later and emerges naturally.

What do you believe about Topics?

a. Pupils learn to talk about themselves and their world.

b. Pupils learn about the target language world, culture and Culture.

c. Pupils learn to communicate in practical situations.

d. Stories, clil, projects, real communication with schools abroad.

e. The course isn't organised around topics. Because that's not what they are learning.

What do you believe about Reading and Listening?

a. It is mainly to rehearse and practise the structures that you want pupils to be able to say and write. It is integrated into the lesson developing key structures.

b. Lots of comprehension practice and exam technique, linked to vocabulary, grammar and reading/listening skills. You try to do a little each lesson.

c. Lots of working on strategies to develop pupils' processing skills. Holding language in their head, parsing sentences, accurate phonics, making sense. You might do whole lessons on developing it.

d. Authentic materials, for enjoyment, information and culture.

What do you believe about Communication?

a. Pupils' work is made up of expressions they can recall in order to express themselves. They have set expressions they can use in the classroom. Expressing themselves more freely would produce errors.

b. Pupils' work is to show they can use the grammar and vocabulary they have been learning. They will be able to express themselves once they have learned enough grammar and vocabulary.

c. Pupils can communicate right from the start, including short responses, partial and non verbal responses. It doesn't have to be accurate - they are finding ways to express themselves.

d. Pupils spend a lot of time using the language they are learning, exploring what they can do with it with more and more freedom.

What do you believe about Testing and Assessment?

a. Self testing, low stakes testing and recall activities are key in getting pupils to memorise new language and retain language they already know. If you give pupils a list of 15 words to learn, then the minimum acceptable result is 15/15. With accurate spelling and pronunciation. Tests should test what pupils have been taught.

b. The tasks pupils do should not test specific language points. It's important that they are tasks that require pupils to draw on the entirety of the language they have learned up to this point. This is what makes their evolving language gel and systematise. It lets them work out how it all fits together. Exploring the limits of what they can do is a powerful driver to learn more.

c. Assessments should test what pupils can do with the language they have been learning. Their ability to use it to communicate and develop answers.

d. Assessments are for the teacher and learner to understand how the learning process is progressing.

e. In an assessment, you expect the same standard of work from all pupils. What varies is the level of support individual pupils need in order to achieve that standard.

What do you believe about your Beliefs?

a. You are the Head of Department and it's your job to set a strong vision. Your beliefs are not beliefs, they are evidence-based.

b. Once teachers are in their own classroom, they do their own thing well (or your thing badly). As a department you will determine your team vision. And diversity is a strength not a weakness.

c. It's when you try things you don't "believe in" that you really learn something new.

d. These things aren't important. We just get on with teaching.

So! This is where I ought to be supplying the "key". Can you pin a label on yourself? Can you pin a label on me? Are you clear on what you believe, or are you only too aware of the competing pressures? Let me know in the comments or in a tweet.

A Very Cheeky Activity

 This activity can be sold to pupils as "What to do if you don't know what the key word in the question is." I wouldn't encourage pupils to pick a 90 word or 150 word writing task if they don't know what one of the bullet points is, but it's reassuring (at the early stages) to think that you are equipped to deal with even that situation.

We imagine a question with a made up word in. And then we create our best answer. Here it is the verb "siblear". A made up word, based on the name of one of the pupils in the class. For the purposes of this post, we could call him or her "Sibbles".

Cuando vas a la playa, ¿te gusta siblear?  - When you go to the beach, do you like to sibble?

Of course, we are not going to say we like to "siblear" because we don't know what it means. And that could be embarrassing. So we say we don't like it much. And if we don't like it much, then we can say what we prefer to do. Then we can say under what circumstances we might have to do it. Then we say what we were doing, what someone suggested, what we preferred, what we ended up doing and what we would have preferred to do.

And we have a lovely answer, with great Spanish, convincing personal detail, humour, confilict and resolution.

Of course, I have had pupils in the speaking exam who needed the confidence to give an answer to a question they didn't quite understand. Like the candidate who was asked their opinion of la corrida de toros and who probably wouldn't have said, "It's fun for all the family" if they had known it was bullfighting. But this isn't really about that. It is really about creating a model answer.

Writing the paragraph summarising it above, I couldn't help thinking about the story, "If you give a mouse a cookie..." (If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. If you give a mouse a glass of milk, he's going to...) Because once you've said what you don't like, you ARE going to say what you prefer. And once you've said what you prefer, you ARE going to use an if sentence to explore under what circumstances you can/can't do it. And once you've used one if sentence, you ARE going to use another one to explore the opposite alternative. And (going back to the start) once you've given your opinion, you ARE going to give someone else's opinion. And once you've established a conflict of opinions, you ARE going to give a specific example, saying what you wanted to do. And if you use direct speech to say what someone else says they want to do, you ARE going to say what you said in reply. And you will say what happened as an upshot. And if this is mildly disappointing, you will say what you would have preferred to have done.

And then your answer has written itself. Almost as soon as you have finished saying that you don't like something, the rest of the answer just unwinds in front of you. Like the elephant in the block of marble waiting for the sculptor to reveal it, your answer was there all along waiting for you to say it.

That's the power of this activity. It's not really about a nonsense answer in an emergency. It's about having an eye to create something logical, coherent, a work of beauty from the materials at your disposal.

Writing in Colours

 If you can afford coloured pens (and stop the rest of the department using them for colouring in), then writing in colours can be a great way to get pupils to develop their writing.

Writing in colours, writing big, or writing on unfamiliar surfaces, seems to change their approach to writing. In an exercise book, a blank page can stay blank. "I didn't know what to put." Or "I wanted to say X, but I didn't know it in French." Using coloured pens can get over the issue of the blank page, or of writing being intimidating, or writing being just for the teacher to assess.

Love the Colour Coded Key!

Here pupils are using different colours for different chunks that make up a sentence. Changing pens helps slow writing down, make It more of an enjoyable attractive experience, drawing attention to the product not just "getting it done." It also draws attention to the process. Building paragraphs from opinions, verbs that take the infinitive, infinitives, connectives. It draws attention to the building blocks and the process of assembling them. It makes writing in French more of a hands on, nuts and bolts activity. For this to work, you need to have the writing scaffold printed in colour. Or consistently use the same colours for the same components as pupils learn them.

Also for a similar stage of pupils' writing, is Ski Slope writing. Pupils draw a diagonal ski slope line from the top left to the bottom right of a double page. They write a sentence from the margin to the slope. When they have done a sentence, either they, or a very speedy teacher, can draw a skiing penguin or a ski jump, or a polar bear, or an eskimo on the slope at the end of their sentence. If that makes no sense, then have a look at the picture.

The pupil's next sentence will have to be slightly longer to reach the ski slope. And so on... And by the end of the activity, they have to have a sentence that is going to go right across the double page.

Once pupils are good at writing longer sentences, linking their ideas with and, but, so, because, especially if, for example... you can try branching tree writing. This gets them exploring different directions they can take an idea. You can do this in their books or on A3.  I like to do it on cheap rolls of backing wallpaper. The picture shows how they make sentences which extend and branch off at different points. These make for great temporary displays. Especially if your Year 11s come in and say, "We did that when we were in Year 8!" It's one of those lessons they remember, and they remember how it opened up possibilities for how you can develop an idea using the language you know.

These activities work around the boundary between randomly assembling language, curating the coherence of the language, exploring what you can do with your language, and starting to express yourself with the language. I have mentioned this in several posts, for example here in a Year 8 lesson.

This mechanical versus ephemeral boundary can still come in even at A Level. For essay planning,
where pupils need to get their ideas into shape, we use Writing on the Tables. Just doing the outline or the plan or the draft on the table changes the dynamic. It makes it freer, more experimental. It can just be at the planning stage, sketching out the shape of an essay in boxes, or starting to write it. Sometimes I operate a production line, writing the first and last line of every paragraph. And then with students moving round from one table to another, to write the next part of someone else's essay, filling in examples and arguments to fit.

Tips: Black and purple don't always wash off tables and can get on people's clothes. If you throw away a dead pen, always keep the lid - you will need it. And don't let the rest of the department use the pens for colouring in. They are much too valuable for doing writing with!

A Lesson from 2002

 Ever wondered what teaching languages was like 20 years ago?

Every so often, like the sword of Gryffindor, or a slightly unpredictable Halley's comet, an old CD Rom appears in our house. Often disappearing again ("I remember I put it in a safe place") before a computer capable of playing it can be found. It is the old Open University MFL PGCE materials. On it is video of me teaching in 2002.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Ann Swarbrick brought an OU/BBC film crew for a "model lesson". It was with a Year 8 class, in their second year of Spanish.

OU resource showing a mock-up of what ended up on the board

The first thing on the video, is me constructing a complicated branching out tree on the board. Pupils tell me a sentence in Spanish, starting from I like holidays... They can start their own new branch, or can use an existing branch and take it off in a different direction. I still do something similar to this as a writing activity, with pupils writing in coloured pens on rolls of cheap backing wallpaper.

Adding pupils' contributions
to the sentence tree

The photo is a still from the video, and the picture above is the OU's mock-up of what ended up on the board. You can see the OU have kept the "dance totally naked" that one pupil came up with. In fact what he said was, "Me gustan las vacaciones con amigos porque puedo hacer algo, por ejemplo puedo bailar completamente desnudo alrededor de una fogata con una cabra." Which brought the activity to an early end. It was cut from the video on the CD Rom, but I know that Ann Swarbrick enjoyed showing it at conferences. (No google translate in 2002. This was chunks that he knew or had asked for in previous lessons.) 

Anyway, that brought this stage of the lesson to a hasty close. 

Then we went on to the connectives dice activity described in the second half of this post. We worked on developing an answer, using dice to force us to extend using and, but, so, because, especially, for example according to the throw of the dice. This was modelled by one pupil for the class, and then they worked in pairs to practise. I was struck, watching this again, by the way I insisted they bring in some coherence (despite the random element) by picking just 3 or 4 infinitives to use. I thought I had only started to do this recently, as a tactic to make answers focus on developing specific ideas.

OHP Acetate

Then we moved on to another dice game, again very similar to one described in this recent post. It's written on an acetate and projected on the OverHeadProjector. Pupils worked in pairs, rolling the dice to create sentences, evaluating if what they were saying was logical and coherent, or not. It uses can / have to + infinitive in the same way I do now. It's interesting to see this early example. And to see my Spanish was still quite Mexican with things like quedar/quedarse. (You can hear this in the accent on the video too.)

We then played a football game on the board. The class were in two teams, alternating to extend an answer by following on from the previous pupil, using connectives to take the ball off the other team. Impossible to explain, but I remember I used to do it a lot.

The medium-term planned outcome was a piece of writing, but most of the lesson was about speaking and extending answers orally. It had the same balance between random and coherent that I use with my current Year 8 classes. The random element means that thinking about what to say doesn't stand in the way of producing lots of fluent language. The coherence and organisation comes next.

The pupils had a high level of using their Spanish in the activities, using the resources to give extended answers about Holidays. But they also interacted in Spanish with me throughout, even when we got on to discussing the success criteria for the piece of writing they were going to do. I had forgotten how good they were at communicating.

This was in the days of the written Coursework GCSE. This meant extending answers and developing ideas was a new priority. These pupils went on to get caught up in the uncertainty of whether they had to take a language for GCSE or not. And also got mixed up in a grading fiasco associated with the changing nature of the cohort being entered. I might tell that story in another post one day...

Nice Practical Ideas

 If you are just here for nice practical ideas, and don't want to read thoughts on the curriculum (fascinating I'm sure but for another time maybe), then here are links to the posts with lesson ideas.
Reading newspaper articles at KS4: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/reading-authentic-texts.html…
Dice activities for extending speaking and writing: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/nice-with-dice.html…
Structured low prep activities for A Level speaking: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/a-level-speaking-ideas.html…
Drag and drop tasks in Word:
https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/creating-foolproof-tasks-for-computer.html…
Feedback: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/05/thoughts-on-assessment-and-feedback.html…
Vocabulary teaching strategy: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-great-way-to-learn-vocabulary.html…
A low prep listening idea:
https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-nice-idea-for-listening-skills.html