The lost art of teaching with the whiteboard?

 I thought I had messed up with my Year 9 after school Spanish beginners. Last Monday we were doing the round the class My brother touched a starfish story. And I hadn't pitched it quite right, or they were a bit tired after school, or something else. But probably, I hadn't pitched it quite right. So this week, I made sure that the pace and challenge of the lesson evolved directly and flexibly in response to their interaction. Teaching with a whiteboard and a whiteboard pen. No plan except the unfolding logic of what the pupils need next.

So when they arrived, the story of the Brother and the Starfish was on the board. They were pleased to see it, and before the lesson started, were already telling each other what they remembered it meant.

Several things to note. Firstly, it's a nice story of going to an aquarium and dropping your phone in the touch pool. Secondly, it is designed to meet the GCSE criteria of opinions, reasons, tenses and narration. And thirdly, it is built around the powerful core language pupils are going to use across topics.

We began the lesson with reading aloud and translation, in pairs and then picking pupils to tell the class. It was good to see that something which had stretched them the week before, was now something they were enjoying working on.

Next, I removed the words and verb endings that make up their core repertoire. Just by rubbing them off the board. I have removed the words like I like, because, I can, I went and the endings for what was happening and what happened:

As a class, we went round and told the whole story. This is helped by the fact that each of the structures "belongs" to a pupil - in the original Brother touches a starfish lesson, they had it written on their desk in board pen. So if one pupil gets stuck, there is always one pupil in the class who definitely knows the structure. We did it as a class with each pupil in turn supplying their missing word. Then the pupils did it in pairs, telling the whole story. Then we did it with a class, with me deliberately NOT picking the pupil who owned each word. Here you can see us in the process of telling the story and putting the missing words back in.

Of course, now we've put the core repertoire words back in, I can now delete all the aquarium words:

In pairs, the pupils reconstructed the story and as a class we took turns to tell the whole story together.

Then I rubbed the board completely and pupils told me the story.

And before we left, we did this:

A list of infinitives for the Theme Park story. So using the same (now rubbed off) template as the aquarium story, the pupils told me a completely different story by changing the infinitives. We did this quickly at the end of the lesson with each pupil in turn deploying the structure they have "ownership" of. And next lesson, that's where we will start. Going through a similar process as in this lesson, with the new story.

Join the Dots Speaking

 Had fun (some of them rather too much fun) with Year 11 doing this easy and effective speaking activity today.

It was at the end of the lesson, and I put the words I like, I can, I have to, I want, I said, he/she said, I went... on the board. Pupils took it in turns to speak using the words. As they spoke, a pupil at the board listened out for any of the words and joined them up in the order they were used.

So in the example you can see, it was something like this (but in Spanish):

I like to to to the beach because I can swim in the sea but if I have to go with my family, I prefer to go to a café because I want to drink something. At the weekend I said, "I am going to the beach" and my dad said, "I don't want to". I decided to go on my own and I went swimming.

Then we look at the picture and try to decide what they have drawn. In this case, I'm not sure. We thought it was probably someone whose shoe laces have got tied together and has fallen over in the mud.

Then I can rub off the drawing, add more key words on the board, and ask another pupil to pick another topic to speak on.

So another pupil could say something like:

I went to McDonalds because I like to eat fast food, but if I go with my parents I have to eat a salad. I prefer to eat hamburgers. At the weekend I said, "I don't want a salad" but my dad said, "You can't eat a burger."

And we would end up with a different picture!

It can be easily adapted with different words, and pupils can work in pairs on paper instead of on the board.

It works really well. Pupils think how to make sentences while moving logically from one word to another in the order that best suits what they are saying. They get used to developing answers spontaneously, thinking what to say next that makes sense. They build answers that meet the key criteria of giving and justifying opinions, giving examples in past and future. And instead of having one fixed answer to learn by rote, they are confident making up answers on the spot from their repertoire of Spanish.

My lovely Year 11s started off picking their next word based on the logic of what they were saying. But they quickly worked out they could draw rude pictures on the board by carefully choosing what word to use next!

Disciplinary Literacy and MFL

 Disciplinary Literacy is one of the latest terms to be imported in to the school context. You can tell it belongs elsewhere because of the use of the word "discipline" in a very academic sense, not the everyday meaning it has in schools. It means the literacy of the specific school subject. And it's about time we paid attention to it rather than seeing literacy as an extension of the English department somehow foisted on the school. We have entire subjects which are teaching pupils language at least as much as content. In Geography, the subject consists of teaching pupils that their Anglo Saxon words are not good enough. They have to learn the Latinate words. So erosion not wear away. Saltation not bounce down the river. Precipitation not rain and snow. Irrigation not water the crops. I could go on about this at length but I need to get on to MFL.

So in MFL, when we are asked how we pre-teach vocabulary and whether we define the vocabulary pupils are learning, then we can smile and say yes. If we are asked how we make sure that vocabulary is recycled and not lost, and how we make that vocabulary intellectually rich and age appropriate, then we frown and say that's what we are working on. If we are asked when we deliberately programme the teaching of High Frequency Vocabulary, then we get into an argument about fishing and wrestling.

But what if we are asked how we explicitly foreground Technical Vocabulary?

Technical Vocabulary. What would it be? How important would it be? Would it be helpful to test pupils on it explicitly? I have lots of separate ideas and arguments and I need to bring them together, discuss them with everyone else in the department, and decide if we need to change what we do.

There is a social justice argument that we have wrongly neglected explicit grammar teaching. That we assumed pupils who struggle with language-learning need an approach that avoids terminology. And so we are depriving them of the clear building blocks they need. We can also say that pupils appear to love terminology. We know as soon as they put their hand up to answer a grammatical question, they are going to say, "Is it masculine/feminine?" "Is it a cognate?" "Is it a doing word?" These are the 3 most common and perhaps the only explicit grammatical concepts pupils cling on to. And invariably you know they are going to come out with the wrong one for the question you have asked.

So is it worth foregrounding the teaching of grammatical terms? Or is it secondary to an intimate knowledge of the language itself? It is possible to know the terms raven, nightingale, albatross from literature, without being able to identify one in the wild. Just as it is possible to closely observe that little bird with the loud song and sticky up tail in your garden without knowing its name. What makes more sense? To learn lots of names of abstruse (avestruz) birds in the hope one day you see one? Or to see lots of birds and learn their names?

Here are some immediate thoughts that will eventually get pulled together, I promise:

Connectives or Conjunctions?

Conjunctions is a grammatical term. Connectives is an invented term, popularised under the Labour government Literacy Hour drive. It is not a grammatical category. My first instinct is to avoid using "connectives" as non-grammatical and out of use under the current Primary SPAG regime. It includes things like relative pronouns as well as conjunctions. We will come back to this and I may have a surprise.

Modal Verbs?

If you have read any of my posts on our curriculum, you will know the emphasis we put on building pupils' repertoire of language, heavily based around verb + infinitive constructions. Some people call some of these 'Modal Verbs'. Including some teachers in the MFL department and also in some resources used by the English department. The definition they are using is un-grammatical. It's based on a confusion of two ideas. Firstly it is related partly to their function in a sentence - they are followed by an infinitive. So they include can, have to, want to. But they don't include like, love, prefer, going to. Which have exactly the same position in the sentence. Because they use a secondary definition based on a vague idea of meaning - wanting, wishing, probability. This attempt at defining Modal Verbs doesn't delineate a grammatical category. As a definition, it is gaining currency, and I have even seen it transferred into native speaker French grammar definitions. Even though French does not have modal verbs. It's something that English takes from its Germanic roots.

A modal verb is a verb which has no infinitive and is invariable for 3rd person. So can, might, will, would, could, should and must. You can't say "to can" or "he cans" for the verb which means "to be able to."

My instinct is not to use the term Modal Verbs when teaching French. And unlike on Connectives, I don't think I am going to change my mind. We shall see...

Indefinite Articles

I'll talk about Articles. But really they are a proxy for all the other grammatical terms. Definite articles, partitive articles, comparatives, superlatives, possessive pronouns, subject pronouns. Do we need pupils to know the terms? Do we need pupils to know that un/une are indefinite articles? Or 'determiners'? Or do we just need pupils to know that un/une are the French words for a? My instinct is we can give them the label to make the teaching neat and tidy, but what we want is for pupils to understand and use the words un/une correctly.

Let's start to pull some of this together.

Using the example of Indefinite Articles, I am not in favour of SPAG style learning to label things for labelling's sake. Knowing to call something an Indefinite Article is not the point. The point is being able to use the word un/une in a sentence.

Where the technical term is useful in expediting an explanation, a conceptualisation, a distinction and the ability to apply it directly to real language, then we can make use of them. And I think this will be very specific to the grammar which is being learned.

With the case of un/une, we might label this in the booklet as Indefinite Articles, but there is plenty to be dealing with (gender, pronunciation, memorising), without adding terminology to be learned.

So maybe in the case of connectives/conjunctions, I turn out to be in favour of connectives. Because conjunctions is an abstract grammatical category. Whereas connectives is a description of how certain words are deployed, and an invitation to use them in order to improve your expression.

Having a word for can/have to/want to might be useful. But I am not going to stretch to calling them "modal verbs" because French doesn't have modal verbs. In this annotation/highlighting activity (pic below), we don't have a name for them. The best I can do is "verb + infinitive". Which perhaps is enough. Especially when it comes to distinguishing between using a verb in this way, or by conjugating it.

So what terminology is useful? We've discussed this at school, and everyone I spoke to shared the idea that the important terminology is self selecting. Where we need to use it in order for pupils to understand how to deploy their language correctly, then those are the terms we need to highlight and teach explicitly. So there is no need to consider what technical language we "should" be teaching. What is required is that we look at what language we are already using. And make sure we are not assuming that pupils know it without ever explaining it.

So for us, Technical Disciplinary Language means the words we actually use to talk about language. The words we use to guide pupils through the correct selection, formation and deployment of words. 

We'll be meeting as a department this week to look at this. My candidates to get us started would be: 

verb, infinitive, conjugate, tense, person, regular, irregular, negative

noun, gender, singular, plural

ending, agreement

connective (?!)

These aren't the list of words we "should" be teaching. These are the words we use all the time, perhaps without ever pausing to think if we have checked pupils know what we are taking about.

As always, it brings us back to Scott Thornbury's analogy. It's not about chopping up the cold dead omelette of the language and trying to piece it back together. It's about how you take raw ingredients and cook them into something tasty.

Part 4. Year 9 Les Loisirs Booklet: Stories

 We left the booklet at around page 12 in Part 3. With pupils using past tense "cheats" to write their stories. And seeing model stories in French using the imperfect to set the scene and the perfect to say what happened. This post will take us through some of the pages up to the end of the booklet, with pupils making up their own stories in speaking and writing.

We've seen that all the language and the activities have to be scaffolded, so that all Year 9 groups can use them successfully. We have seen that it builds on pupils' well established repertoire of French. We have seen that all new (or nearly new) language is integrated into their existing repertoire. And we have seen that learning to deploy their language is just as important as learning the language itself.

The first thing we do is get the verbs ready that we are going to need in the rest of the booklet. This is so we can do it methodically, working through the step by step process of choosing tense, type of verb, person of the verb to arrive at the correct ending. Then when pupils need them later, they know they have them ready. This is part of the way we use Food Tech or other Technology subjects as a metaphor for language-learning. Pre-prepping some of the tricky ingredients is familiar to pupils from Food Tech, as is the idea of then assembling the dish for the customer.

Here's the page for the verbs in the Imperfect. There is a grammar explanation and an accompanying powerpoint. Then the pupils prepare the exact verbs they are going to be needing later.

Then there is a double page working on the verbs in the Perfect. The explanation and examples on the left act as a guide to assembling the verbs they are going to need on the page on the right:

The page on the right contains the verbs they will be needing later in the booklet.

The first story to assemble is the Aquarium story. You may remember that the pupils read a version of this earlier in the booklet as a model. This can support them now, but it is worded differently so they can't just copy word for word.

They retrieve their imperfect and perfect verbs from the chiller cabinet and have them ready for when they are needed. Then they translate the story into French using their core repertoire, adding the ending saying what was happening and what happened using the the verbs they had ready.

They do exactly the same process again for a story about going to a museum. And for the unpleasant experience on a roller-coaster story you will remember from Part 3. But this time, they write the story in French.

By the end of the booklet, they are invited to select their own infinitives. They process them into Imperfect or Perfect, and make up their own stories in speaking and writing:

So by the end of Year 9, the pupils are producing answers which meet the GCSE criteria of: opinions, reasons, personal detail, past and future, and narration. We work on their ability to do this with increasing coherence, accuracy, confidence, independence and spontaneity. Having the core repertoire means new language sticks, and it helps with the development of a conceptualisation of grammatical structures. Most importantly, all the language they learn is language that they use. They have it at their fingertips and they are keen to learn more.

Part 3. Booklet. Year 9. Les Loisirs

 We left Part 2, with the pupils happily riffing on any infinitives you care to give them, spontaneously developing answers with opinions, reasons and if sentences, working on making their answers coherent and realistic. And we promised a story about a terrible combination of roller-coasters, sweets and fizzy pop. We'll get there!

We are up to page 7 of the booklet. And we are going to start adding tenses to the repertoire of opinions and reasons. First of all we do this with some past tense cheats.

We are still on the topic of La Plage, and the pupils have the next iteration of the Beach Keep Talking Sheet. This time with I was going to, I said, He/She said, the weather was..., and I decided to... As you can see from the little anecdote above, these cheats can be very effective in developing answers into little stories.

Pupils work using this template, modifying the story using different infinitives:

Again, some of the work is listening to the teacher, spotting the changes in the text. Then the pupils produce their own answers, maybe starting slow, carefully and in writing. But the aim is for them to be able to riff on any infinitives they are given, using their template to create spontaneous answers.

We are going to move on from the "cheats" to using verbs in the imperfect and the perfect. The imperfect doesn't work on its own. Just as I was going to... is followed by but I decided to..., so any verb in the imperfect (I was swimming...) is followed up with but something happened.

Pupils have seen the imperfect separately for describing what somone was wearing. And the perfect for saying what they did at the weekend or in the holidays. But here they are being used together to create narrative. So we work on spotting one from the other, and then have lots of examples where pupils are reading or listening to stories modelling how they are used:

Pupils work on identifying the verbs and identifying the meaning, before substituting other verbs into the story. At this stage, they are given the verbs conjugated in the infinitive and in the two past tenses, so they are selecting the correct form to replace the verb in the original story.

And now we are ready for some more stories. At this stage they are models given to them in French so they can concentrate on meaning, on the form, and on how the models are constructed.

First this one:

And then the famous roller-coaster story:

In Part 4 we will move onto pupils manipulating the tenses and creating their own stories...

Part 2. Year 9 Les Loisirs Booklet

 Instead of moving on (yet) to how the booklet introduces tenses, I want to spend a bit more time on one of the activities from the previous post from the early pages in the booklet.

Pupils look at this version of the Going to the Beach Keep Talking Sheet. It's on its way to building up to the full version, but without any reference to past events at this stage.

For the first activity, the pupils are concentrating on the middle column - activites / verbs in the infinitive. The teacher is going to read out 3 texts. For each one, the pupils listen for any of the activities mentioned and circle them in the middle column of their Keep Talking sheet.

Here's the first text to be read out:

You can see it has four infinitives: walk, look for shells, explore, return home.

The second text only has one infinitve: to play with a ball!

You can see that apart from the choice of infinitive, it is deploying very much the same repertoire of opinions, reasons and if sentences as text 1.

Text three has 8 activities:

Go to the beach, swim in the sea, make sand castles, draw elephants in the sand, go into town, drink something in a café, take photos, see my friends.

Once the pupils have done these as a listening, they turn to the page with the texts and again identify the activities/infinitives in the text. Then as a class they discuss what they think of the 3 different texts. Some of their ideas will be related to the content: whether they can identify with the person's experience. Of course, what I really want is a discussion about the writing: The last one has lots of detail and nice ideas; the second one is too repetitive; the first one is a bit boring; the second one shows what you can do with only one infinitive if you are stuck; the last one turns into a bit of a random list.

There is a "right" answer. The right answer is to carefully choose a limited number of infinitives which go well together to make a coherent paragraph. Like Text 1.

This kind of focus is key to how we teach languages. Our mantra is that it's NOT always about learning more and more French. It is vital to work on how well you can USE the French that you have. There's a strong literacy/oracy imperative here - working on pupils' ability to develop ideas. And it's also central to language-learning. It gives the rationale for re-working the same language. It means everything pupils learn is added to their repertoire with anything new fitting in, and with nothing getting left behind. And it helps create that idea that they have a growing body of language that they can deploy.

So here's the next activity:

Pupils write 3 texts of their own. One with a carefully selected number of infinitives. One with just one infinitive. One with a random list of infinitives. In each case they recycle the same repertoire of language. And what they are working on is thinking ahead, choosing ideas that link well, and developing the coherence of their writing.

This gives us a glimpse into what's to come in the second half of the booklet when we start to introduce tenses. If you have these infinitives, can you see how the answer is going to develop?

go to a theme park    go on the roller-coasters    eat sweets    drink fizzy pop    vomit

From focusing on the coherence of answers based on opinions, reasons and if sentences, we are going to move into story telling in a combination of tenses...

Year 9 Loisirs Booklet Part 1. Coherence and Stories.

 I have been writing the booklet for the final Unit of Year 9 on Les Loisirs. Overall it's going back to a familiar topic from Year 8 so pupils can deploy their repertoire with fluency and independence. And with a lot more detail. It works on the kind of mini narrative that works so well at GCSE, based on opinions, reasons, if sentences, speech, what was happening, what happened next.

We start with stories about going to the beach, building them up slowly, then transfer the same template to stories about sport, shopping, going to the cinema, skateboarding...

Here is the Key Performance Exemplar for the end of the Unit:

Of course, for Year 9, the booklet has to be carefully scaffolded to make sure all pupils can access it with confidence. And also to make sure that speaking activities with large Year 9 groups happen successfully.

I have taken the usual "Going to the Beach" keep talking sheet and cut it down to introduce it in easy steps. It gradually builds up to its full version through the booklet, adding tenses and narrative by the end of the Unit.

The first activities use listening and speaking, carefully scaffolded with the keep talking grid. It starts with a variation on ski slope writing, here done as a translation. Look closely and you can see that while each sentence offers some scaffolding for the next, there is variation as well as extension.

The ski slope writing is to get pupils familiar with finding what they need on the Keep Talking Sheet and to let the new content integrate with their prior knowledge. It leads directly on to a speaking activity. First as a class, then in pairs.

The picture below is from a powerpoint where the story appears a sentence at a time, and then disappears. With each sentence, the pupils have to remember the story in French from the beginning. Here you can see that the first chunk, "I like to go to the beach" has disappeared completely. The second chunk, "because I can go for a walk" is faintly visible. And the new chunk, "but I don't like to swim" is still visible. This works as a challenge on the board, with pupils enjoying having a go, remembering or making up what they though it said. It recycles familiar language, practising building it into the beginnings of a story.

The ski slope translation and the disappearing story both lead in to the pair work activity. One partner gives a short starter sentence in French. For example, I like to go to the beach. The other partner can add to it or change it: I love to go to the beach because I can swim. They continue, taking turns to add or change the sentence: I love to go to the beach but I don't like to swim.

When we move to the next version of the Keep Talking Sheet, with more infinitives and adding talking about the weather, we continue the idea of changing a model sentence. This again starts off as a written task so pupils can find the words they need. Before turning into a task where pupils read their new versions aloud and other pupils have to listen carefully for what has been changed:

This tangled translation (below) is done as a speaking activity. First in English, then in French. Partly to practise recall of the language, but mainly as another opportunity to model how to deploy their French to make a coherent answer which is going to turn into a story:

And this next activity is all about thinking about how to best use the French in order to make something that is coherent.

The teacher reads each of the 3 texts while the pupils are looking at the Keep Talking sheet. The pupils are asked to circle all the infinitives (in the middle column of the sheet) that they hear in each one. They then turn to this page and highlight them in the text. The 3 texts have a similar template in terms of opinions, reason and if sentences. But they are very different in how they handle the content. One of them takes just one infinitive and talks at length but repetitively about playing with a ball. Another has many different infinitives which ends up sounding like an incoherent list of activities. The other has a judiciously chosen set of infinitives which make a coherent story. The class can discuss how well they think each approach works. Then, as you can see in Ex 4, they are given 3 sets of infinitives to create their own 3 versions to try out.

We are only up to page 6 of a 28 page booklet. But you can see the principles emerging:

Using the language of the pupils' core repertoire in a new context.

Integrating Speaking and Listening with Reading and Writing with careful modelling and scaffolding.

Pupils can use the Keep Talking sheet but are challenged to do more and more without it.

Focus on how to create answers with increasing coherence has taken over from a focus on the language.

In a future post we will see another principle:

New language (tenses) is added to the existing repertoire. 

With the focus continuing to be on how to deploy it in order to add to what pupils can say. Not for the sake of the language point.

Here's a glimpse of what is to come once we move away from talking about going to the beach:

Task Based Learning in the School Context

 There is a lot of detail around what makes up full-on Task Based Learning, which I am going to avoid. I want to focus on what makes it important to me as a languages teacher in the school context.

The main point of Task based Learning is... Tasks.

And the point of a Task is that it is carried out with the focus on completing the Task. The focus is the completion of the Task, not on the language that is used. The pupils are communicating (or comprehending) in order to perform the task; not in order to use certain specified language structures.

It stands in contrast to an Exercise. In an Exercise, the pupil practises using certain language structures that have been being learned. You could see Task Based Learning as being the antidote to Presentation, Practice, Production. In the Presentation and Practice stages, it is clear that it is specific language structures that are being rehearsed. But even in the Production stage, the teacher will design the task (small t) such that those structures can be deployed. The teacher has specified the language to be used, practised it, and now they want to see the pupils using it more independently in a more open context.

This is what we do all the time in school. We ask pupils to practise over and over, challenging themselves to be more fluent, independent, spontaneous, expressive. And this works very well.

The risk is that pupils are able only to use the structures they have been working on most recently. And instead of communicating, they end up playing the game of saying things just to show off an expression or a tense. It's a good fit for exam criteria. Exam criteria can be deconstructed to determine the key language pupils need (vocabulary, tenses, idioms...). And the practice makes perfect paradigm is geared up to creating accurate work that gets the grade.

But at some level, I have the nagging idea that we aren't just teaching pupils to get a grade. We are teaching them the language. That they should be able to try to say things because they want to say them. Not just to tick off criteria in an exam. Very idealistic and sentimental, I know. But there's more to it. I think it is fundamental to learning that the pupil has a evolving body of language, a core, an interlanguage. I want them to be aware of the language as a whole. So they can call on everything they have ever learned. So they can make connections, links, patterns, rules.

We've all seen pupils who can't do words like a or the or is. And therefore can't say the simplest things. Because they've not made the language their own. They are reliant on the stages of Presentation, Practice, Production to be able to Perform and move on. And we've seen those pupils on the Spanish Exchange who CAN deploy their language in new situations. Who can say things they've not been taught, but find ways to communicate it all the same. With a focus on communicating successfully. From the building blocks of language that they have a grasp of. And these are the pupils who then acquire more and more language. It brings me back to the perennial snowball metaphor. They haven't let their language melt. They've gathered it into a snowball, made it theirs, and now more snow sticks to it.

This is what a Task does. It requires pupils to communicate, selecting and combining language from their whole repertoire, understanding how it works. Or exploring how it works. Finding ways to make it fit together. The immediate focus is getting the message across. But the effect of doing so is to explore the possibilities and limitations of the language at your disposal.

This can happen in anything from chit-chat (Did you watch the match? Where did you get your bag?) to written work (Tell me about your Town. Would you like to go to School in Spain?). The key is how we share with pupils the idea that they are learning to communicate and that the language they are learning is ALL the language, not just what we need for this exercise.

The tasks we set our pupils could be Tasks. But we fight it! We try to steer them to saying things that deploy the structures we have been practising or which meet the criteria. Pupils try to say things they can't quite say, or try apply a rule to an irregular form, or use English syntax, extrapolating from what they know, in order to communicate. And when they do this, we label it as an error.

I think that in order for language to be successful, we need to keep these possibilities alive:

    When we set work, we are genuinely interested in what the pupils say or write.

    When we challenge pupils to express themselves, both we and they understand that they can take risks even if this will naturally lead to more errors.

    If we ask pupils to express themselves, we are requiring them to curate their own repertoire of language that they can draw on.

If we do these things, then we are straying into Task Based Learning.

Dual Coding works for Vocabulary Learning

 I am not going to start by defining Dual Coding. I'm going to show a powerful tool in learning Vocabulary and you can see if you agree that it is an example of Dual Coding.

Here is an example we use with Year 6 when they come on Induction Days in July. We know it works because we test them in September! Partly to see if they still remember, but mainly to show them what an effective technique it is:

If you test any of our Year 7s on confiture, they instantly tell you it means jam. From one lesson at the end of Year 6. As well as guimauves, pain, fromage, moutarde and lots of other foods for the lesson described in this post.

I have had ex pupils contact me on social media to say it's 10 years since they learned items of clothing in Spanish and they still can't forget the words. Most memorably, cow 13 wearing socks. I recently met someone I taught 26 years ago (at parents' evening - I teach her son) and I should have taken the opportunity to test her - I remember her class learning I couldn't bring the kitchen sink, it was évier (heavier) with wordplay and pictures for household items. This was the 1990s when we still taught nouns. And one pupil once did the entire GCSE vocabulary list this way. Her twin brother laughed that this was a whole weekend she would never get back. She got a grade A. He didn't.

The confiture example above is in a powerpoint. And other examples have found their way into our department booklets, as a regular first activity in a new unit.

But more often, it works like this:

1. Pupils have a piece of paper.

2. I say a new word. (Tell any pupils who do know it not to shout out.)

3. Pupils say what the sound of the word makes them think of.

4. I draw it on the board and pupils draw it on their piece of paper.

5. I tell them the real meaning and they write the English and the TL next to their picture.

6. They draw the real thing, incorporating it into their first picture. This is important. If it's two separate pictures the dual coding won't work.

7. I do some testing later to help reinforce retrieval.

8. They never forget the word.

Even the versions that end up in the booklet or on a powerpoint originally started this way, with pupils telling me their word associations and choosing the most memorable ones.

The reasons we do this on paper is in case any of the pictures are highly memorable but too scurrilous to go in exercise books. For example piscine or bragas.

Here's some examples with Year 11 working on Environment Vocabulary.

You can see inundación, where the water goes in and under your house. You can see a fun deer (fundir) who is melting. And a (latex) condom full of tin cans (latas). And an actual explanation of why batteries are called pilas complete with the story of Volta and Galvani's argument about frogs.

And the other reason it's fine to do it on paper, is that the real image is the one in pupils' heads. The pictures on the board will be rubbed out. The piece of paper will be lost. The image in pupils' heads is indelible.

This is why this is an example of Dual Coding. The word is encoded in the pupils' minds with the word and the image. It is stored quickly, easily, effectively and permanently. If you are interested in cognitive science, you can't find a better example of Dual Coding. More importantly, if you are interested in teaching vocabulary, it works!

How the current GCSE works across topics - My Granny went to an aquarium and she doesn't like geography.

NB The GCSE referred to in this post is the outgoing GCSE. Although I am now teaching the new GCSE in exactly the same way.

 Extra incentive for reading this post. It contains video (click here if it doesn't load) of my very ordinary classroom in case you want a nosey about!

The video shows the set up of the lesson. I have written on the pupils' desks in Spanish (in board pen).  On one side of the classroom, the sequence is:

I like/I love/I don't like        because I can/can't/have to/don't have to

especially if                         but if..., I prefer...

_____ likes / doesn't like...

Then on the desks on the other side of the classroom, I have written (in Spanish):

I went/I was in                    I wanted / ___ wanted

I said... ____ said              I decided / we decided

was ____ing                      I ________ed / ____ __________ed

I would have preferred to ___________

You may recognise this from the original My Granny went to the Aquarium post. Because this lesson is for a Year 10 (beginners) group who have already done the Aquarium lesson. And then recycled it to talk about a Theme Park. I don't really need to write the structures on the desks, because each pupil in the class has ownership of their expression. So by looking round the class, the pupils can remember who says what and build their story. And if someone gets stuck, each pupil can prompt them with their expression.

The original story was something like this:

Me gusta ir al acuario porque me gusta ver los peces, sobre todo si hace mal tiempo, porque si hace buen tiempo prefiero ir a la playa. A mi hermano le gusta tocar las estrellas de mar. 

Fuimos al acuario y yo quería ver los peces. Pero mi hermano dijo, "Quiero tocar una estrella de mar." Entonces decidimos ir a tocar las estrellas de mar. Mi hermano tocaba una estrella y yo sacaba una foto cuando dejé caer mi móvil en el agua. Hubiera preferido ir a la playa.

And they can transform it to come up with things like:

Me encanta ir a un parque de atracciones porque me gusta montar en una montaña rusa. Sobre todo si hace sol, porque si llueve, prefiero ir al acuario. A mi hermano no le gusta montar en las montañas rusas. Prefiere comer refrescos y comer muchos caramelos. 

Fuimos a un parque de atracciones. Yo quería montar en la montaña rusa pero mi hermano quería comer caramelos y beber refresco. Decidimos montar en la montaña rusa. Me divertía mucho pero mi hermano vomitó. Vomitó en mi pelo. Lloré. Me hubiera gustado ir al acuario.

You can see the same structures reappearing in each. These are to meet the AQA criteria of opinions, reasons, examples in different time frames, and narrating events. It's worth pointing out that the two sides to the classroom deliberately correspond to the "two halves" of the game plan for the speaking exam. And crucially, there is a very limited number of verbs for each story. The first one is entirely constructed around to go, to see, to touch, to take photos, to drop. This means pupils can pick four or five verbs and use them to tell a complex story which meets the exam criteria.

As we moved from talking about the aquarium to talking about the theme park, we challenged pupils to do it more and more fluently, independently and spontaneously. The important message to the pupils is that they don't need to learn more Spanish. They need to get better at using it. And we are now carrying this across to a new GCSE topic - talking about school lessons.

So we used the expressions on the desk to reconstruct the aquarium/theme park stories from September. Then we agreed on some easy infinitives to work with for talking about lessons: to talk, to work, to shout, and as a class, we improvised the following story:

I like science because I can talk to Alice, especially if we work together. But if I have to work with Vincent I prefer to work in silence. Unfortunately Vincent likes to work with me. I went to science and I wanted to work with Alice. But Alice didn't want to work with me. I was working in silence but Vincent was talking and the teacher shouted at me. I would have liked to work with Alice.

I don't know who this Vincent is.

They produced it quickly and spontaneously from the repertoire of expressions. We wrote this one on the board together, then made sure everyone could say the whole story. Every version was slightly different, and some pupils can use their repertoire more flexibly than others. You can see in the version on the board, they conjugated the verb we work, which wasn't one of the structures on the desk. This what happens when pupils have a core repertoire: more things stick to the core. The same way once you have a snowball, you can roll it around and more snow will stick to it. What you mustn't do is have an even covering of Spanish (ticking off grammar points on a grid) because it will just all melt.

Corpus - dead body zombie language

 The exam boards' draft GCSEs they have been working on are out. And I am not going to be commenting on them while they go through the next stage of approval. Apart from to hope that the generally warm initial reception from teachers is taken as a positive. And a little reminder that the flaws in previous GCSEs (Controlled Assessment, target language prompts in Role Plays...) were introduced by the DfE, not the exam boards. The exam boards have the job of coming up with something that meets the stipulations they are given, works for teachers as a course, and works as an exam.

So I am going to try to tear myself back to what I was thinking about last weekend but didn't have the time to write about: Can I get my brain around the rationale for a syllabus based on High Frequency Language as driven by NCELP and OFSTED?

Hopefully since it started in March 2021, one aspect of this blog is an honest and frank attempt to deal fairly with the ideas we are being asked to adopt. And in many cases I am worried more by the unbalanced pushing of ideas to one extreme, rather than against the ideas themselves. I go along with most of the ideas, but I don't go all the way. And I have made tweaks, for example in making grammar more explicit in our booklets, which as a department we are now evaluating. But one thing I haven't posted about, because I just can't get my head around it, is the High Frequency vocabulary approach.

I can only see the clashes and downsides. I will list them and then see if in the process of writing this, I can start to glimpse why there might be a positive side.

1. Is the High Frequency Approach compatible with the Synthetic Grammar Approach?

NCELP and OFSTED are advocating a focus on learning the language as a grammatical system. Explicit and well-sequenced knowledge building up a picture of the linguistic structures. This includes things like deliberately selecting the words to be taught because they exemplify a pattern (grammar or phonics feature). And excluding other words that would distract from the pattern. Yet we know that the most high frequency language is the most highly irregular. Words which are in everyday use get the corners bashed off. Words which are mostly in the cupboard or even still in their box are in pristine condition. 

Here are the most common 100 words in French. They don't fit well with an approach wanting to start with simple clear building blocks. Words like le, en, de, son need a lot of unpacking!

So logically, what words would go best with an approach based on a synthetic language approach, starting from little regular building blocks that can introduce one thing at a time for pupils to deal with? Logically perhaps it would be cognates. There are youtube videos which announce you can learn thousands of Spanish words in minutes. For example by replacing the ty on the end of university to make it into universidad, or opportunity into oportunidad. This approach would seem to be the natural bedfellow of a "one step at a time follow the pattern" syllabus.

If it is true that the syllabus specified the grammar of jouer au foot, jouer du piano but the High Frequency Vocabulary didn't have any sports or instruments, then that's where this should have had a good look at itself and stopped under the weight of its own internal contradictions. But perhaps that story is a myth.

2. Is the Synthetic Grammar Approach compatible with the High Frequency Approach?

That might seem like the same question, but in a recent video Scott Thornbury turned the argument on its head. The High Frequency Language is taken from analysis of corpora of language as used by speakers. What if the study of collocation of words in corpora shows that language is not actually built grammatically at all? Grammar is secondary to idiom. This is the nature of language. Words go together in chunks. If you take the logic of grammar + vocabulary, you end up saying things that are just not said. Examples? Until McDonalds deliberately subverted it, you couldn't use the verb "to love" in the present continuous. The answer to "Who is there?" in French is, "It's me", in Spanish is, "I am me", in English is "It is I" (because the verb to be takes a predicate not an object) but everyone says, "It is me". The grammar is the same in all three languages. But it's not the grammar that determines what you say. The Synthetic Grammar approach is undone by the findings of corpus analysis. It's not how language works at all.

3. Is the High Frequency Approach compatible with Communication?

The "benefit" of a High Frequency vocabulary approach is supposed to be that it pushes us away from lists of random nouns that we've fallen into in order to teach our pupils the plethora of random trivial stuff they might want to say. That it breaks the hold of topics whereby the syllabus is structured by teaching pupils to say things without regard to careful sequencing of the grammar. This is clearly an example of what I mentioned above of an idea which has been pushed too far. Of course I agree that learning should not be a series of "learn to say this and then move on" episodes. It felt a bit like that in the mid 90s, but even then I am sure it was more thought-through than that. But if teaching Pets is to be replaced with teaching nouns you can have which exemplify regular masculine and feminine endings... And we are happy to teach red dog, red tortoise (but not green dog, green tortoise because that requires adjectival agreement and we only teach one thing at a time)... then you can't ask the question, "What pets do you have?" You can only say, "What regular masculine or feminine nouns qualified by an invariable adjective do you have?" So communication has gone out of the window. The corpus approach, together with the synthetic grammar approach has, in a glorious self fulfillment of the word "corpus", led to a dead body of language. A zombie language which is studied for form, not for pupils to create meaning. And of course this reminds us there are dead languages too, which this approach is all in favour of more pupils studying. Precisely because it is an intellectual exercise unsullied by actual foreigners who communicate in the language in their unpredictable idiomatic ways.

4. Is the High Frequency approach compatible with Social Justice?

And if communication has gone out of the window, then so has social justice. Because if mother is High Frequency, but step mother isn't, if Christian is on the list but other religions aren't, if Spain is on the list but Puerto Rico isn't... then this isn't about a plethora of trivia. It's about pupils' lives. Of course the answer then is, "They are not learning to talk about things: They are learning the language." So communication has to go. Because as soon as this hits the real classroom, pupils want to learn to say things. So any High Frequency Vocabulary approach has to be immediately qualified by, "Oh, yes, of course if they ask you can teach them things." Which is an admission of its failure. Yes to: "We need to make sure we address the balance and make sure we teach more of the grammar and more of the High Frequency Words." But No to: "We should build the syllabus out of High Frequency Words."

5. The High Frequency approach WOULD be compatible with authentic materials.

One area where a High Frequency Vocabulary approach would be useful would be if pupils were learning through reading or listening to lots of rich authentic materials. So a syllabus based on a secure knowledge of non topic words, word classes other than nouns, words which have more of a role in sentence building than in their own meaning, words with a core meaning but multiple other uses (such as "de"). The words which make up the majority of most texts, as NCELP often say. This would make so much sense if our pupils were exposed to a diet of books, stories, non fiction, documentaries. The texts would be a good and natural source of the high frequency words. And the high frequency words would be the key to understanding the texts and not just guessing at meaning from cognates and topic words. BUT, the OFSTED approach is that we should be very cautious with authentic or even modified texts. Pupils should be exposed to texts which are artificially (synthetically) created to model and rehearse the language and grammar patterns pupils are learning. They want us to believe pupils read by parsing known grammar and vocabulary to arrive at meaning. So again, the High Frequency Vocabulary approach is incompatible with other aspects of this project.

There are other arguments too. In the US, teachers fight against the idea that there exists Plato's ideal form of the language. For them, the classroom is a communicative space. And the language in that classroom is valid language. Their pupils are emerging speakers of a language, transitioning from monolingual to bilingual. And the language that matters is the developing language of their pupils. They approach this from a social justice perspective, resisting the idea of an imperialist "correct version" of the language. But going back to his video, Scott Thornbury resists it from a linguistic perspective. Having already pointed out that corpus analysis shows that language does not equal grammar + vocabulary, he goes on to say that language learning does not happen by breaking down the linguist's language in to what seem like logical chunks of grammar and predetermined vocabulary. The pupils' language is grown out of an accumulation things they are learning to understand and say. Which is not the same as a breakdown of the overall grammar.

You must watch the video for his omelette metaphor.

This is all good fun and I enjoy thinking about it. Even if I couldn't get anywhere near finding an acceptable rationale for structuring the curriculum around High Frequency Vocabulary. But what really counts is what happens in the classroom. Day in day out, we find our pupils want to communicate. They want to know how to say things. Often personal, sometimes bizarre, maybe cultural. Sometimes which fit in with what they can say, sometimes which just have to be learned as a chunk. And we wouldn't want to remove that element of language learning. For the pupils to be focused on what they can say and what they want to be able to say, is a good thing. The teacher has a vision of how their language is going to accumulate and be conceptualised. And may increasingly share that with the pupils. But when you get in the classroom, meaning and communication come first. Watch Scott Thornbury's omelette video and it will become clear why. You don't make an omelette by chopping up the body of a dead omelette.

So, is the NCELP-OFSTED explicit knowledge about language curriculum a logical clearly thought-through solution? Or is it a mishmash of political fads and individuals' personal preferences in a barely coherent project? The role of High Frequency Language, incompatible with so many of their other approaches suggests it may not be as rigorous as they would like to pretend.

Reading in Modern Languages in 2022.

 In the light of a recent national Ofsted report on supporting pupils struggling with Reading, our school has been doing work on each subject department's approach to texts.

As a department, we have thought about the texts, tasks and strategies we use with learners, and how we make them accessible to pupils with different reading ages.

Here's a summary:

Pupils with Lower Reading Age:

Pre-engage with pupils on cultural knowledge, including knowledge of local places and activities.We have pupils who don't know where Cromer is or don't know what a Leisure Centre is.

Integrate Listening and Reading – teacher reads text aloud and pupils follow the text.

Use the key words/pictures/actions/sounds to support phonics throughout KS3.

Use similar texts with variations. Including revisiting texts and language from previous units.

Use parallel texts in English and French to ask pupils to find words.

Strategies of using the Questions (in English, multiple choice, gap fill etc)to make the meaning of the text accessible.

Identify topic vocabulary. Identify powerful non topic / high frequency vocabulary.Identify grammar features.Use these step by step strategies to build up precise understanding of the meaning of the text.

Texts with very high % of known words and grammar which pupils are readingin order to practise recall and see the language modelled.Including structures which are revisited across topics.

Integrate teaching of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing.

Pupils with Average Reading Age:

Check prior cultural knowledge.

Use key words to reinforce phonics and anticipate problems when reading aloud or “silently”.(Pupils should still pronounce words correctly in their heads!)

Strategies of using the Questions to access the meaning of the text.For example the order of the questions helps locate the position of the information in the text.

Use texts with similar language but with the information structured differently.

Use parallel texts in English and French to ask pupils to find new wordsincluding where the structures or word order are different.

Build knowledge of powerful non topic language and grammatical forms to access precise meanings.

Analyse the quality of texts as models for improving their own writing.

Texts with high % of known words and grammar which pupils are readingin order to see the language modelled. Including structures which are revisited across topics.

Integrate the teaching of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing.

Pupils with Higher Reading Age:

Read texts in order to access new cultural knowledge.

Use texts to introduce new vocabulary for pupils to deduce from context and co-text.

Use reading aloud to check fluent phonics.

Strategies for dealing with texts with more unknown words or structures,to be deduced from the construction of meaning.

Expect pupils to process known words including powerful non topic wordsand grammar features to read precise meanings.

Encourage pupils to take responsibility for noting down and using new words in their own work.

Use some authentic texts or modified texts.Or texts designed for reading for information or pleasure, not just as models of language.

I would be interested to hear what MFL teachers think about this and whether it fits with how you use reading. Hopefully there's something of a continuum of strategies from scaffolded to independent which teachers can deploy flexibly to support and encourage learners.

But this comes with an important corollary...

Following the controversial Ofsted "Research Review" in Modern Languages, we have retreated from authentic texts or even modified texts. We have decreased the use of texts for information or reading for pleasure, and instead we use texts to rehearse and model the language we expect pupils to be learning to speak and write. We create texts using a high percentage of language pupils know. And we don't expect them to make cognitive leaps in deducing meaning, supposedly beyond their "novice" level. We have been told that learners arrive at meaning by parsing known words and grammar, and require texts where over 90% of the words are known. We were worried that we were labelling pupils with higher literacy levels as "good at languages" and pupils with weaker literacy as "bad at languages". As a result, we have changed our assessment texts to make sure they simply test pupils' knowledge of language they have learned.

Looking at the profile of our learners, and the strength of reading in our school, I think we are going to have to re-introduce texts which pupils read for meaning: to find information, to learn new things, and for pleasure.

You may like to look at this post on Teaching Reading for Pleasure in the 1990s for comparison's sake.