AI and Language Learning

Red flag. Since I wrote this, I have discovered that Google Bard's sexism is also accompanied by colonialism and racial stereotypes. Of course this is not intentional, but it is a result of the material it has been trained on. And it has no moderation or filter. I asked it to write the story of an American child who goes to Guatemala. It immediately made stereotyped, negative, colonial, prejudiced assumptions. The conclusion of my post was that the best use of AI is to let learners chat with it. This is now off the table. Here is the start of the story it wrote, based entirely on affirming stereotypes:

And if teaching in the UK, that doesn't strike you as problematic, just imagine you are teaching Spanish in the USA, to a class of pupils many of whom are from a Hispanic background. That's the stereotype of Latin America they live with. And based on a false comparison with the States as a rich, clean, comfortable, safe, entitled, white country.

Here's the post as I wrote it. But this isn't funny anymore.

 Yesterday I saw an article advocating the use of Google Bard for language learning. Google Bard is one of the popular Artificial Intelligence bots currently causing a storm with their amazing ability to replicate human speech. I have already tried to use Bing and ChatGPT, so I thought I would test the capabilities of Bard and see if it really is any use for teaching languages.

My first question was simple. I asked it, in Spanish, to explain the rules for using question marks.

It gave me perfectly good examples, in Spanish, of questions using the Spanish ¿___? . But its explanation made no mention of upside down question marks. It just said to put a question mark at the end. So it failed my first test.

I had this test ready, as I'd already used it on ChatGPT (which also failed it). The reason is that these AI chat bots seem to have been developed to work in English. They can then translate into other languages, but their working is in English. It's important to realise this, and the fact that it does impinge on its ability to work as a language learning tool. It's also alarming to note the fact that it doesn't detect when its examples don't match its explanation. More examples of this to come!

I wondered, if it's working in English then what will happen if I ask it for words that rhyme? If I ask it for words that rhyme with pescado, will it translate into English and give me a list of words that rhyme with fish - dish, wish - and translate them back into Spanish? It did this:

So, it is capable of working in Spanish. It's taken a definition of "rhyme" that means containing the same vowels. So lavo sort of rhymes with pescado. But I can't help noticing expedientes on that list. Which doesn't rhyme at all.

I did another test of its Anglophone bias by asking it in Spanish who the President is. I thought it could offer maybe AMLO or Sanchez as possibilities, because I had asked in Spanish. But it automatically assumed I meant Joe Biden. I've tried this cultural bias with ChatGPT with questions about Spanish food or French music. It does tend to come up with answers known to English speakers and even stereotypes.

Back to language based questions. This is one that Dr. Rachel Hawkes had alerted me to, when she was genuinely using ChatGPT to "help" create language learning resources. She asked it for a list of French nationality adjectives ending in "-ain". It was unable to do this, producing a list including the marvelous "espagnolian". So I tried it with Google Bard:

It didn't have the wonderful and undesired inventiveness of ChatGPT. But it still was no use at all. Joe Dale had a further extended conversation with Bard on this question where it acknowledged that it had done badly, and then in a series of attempts went from bad to worse.

Unlike some of my questions, this wasn't a deliberate trap or tricky test. It started from a genuine question Rachel asked to try to save some time. And it's not clear why it failed. It seems that AI isn't very good at taking language apart. So gaps in texts, parts of words, or focus on endings can all trip it up. Unfortunately these are exactly the sorts of things we want to concentrate on in language teaching.

I tried to use it to create a text where it removed the words for his and her and replaced it with son/sa/ses for the learner to choose the correct one. I explained this carefully in English, to avoid it simply doing what Microsoft Word would do and replace the letter string son even if it was in the middle of the word. Even so, it did this:

Not only has it done what I was worried about, and replaced son inside the word sont, and sa in the word responsable, but in giving the "answers", it's also tried to do it with the words garçon and attentionnée. We can't ever understand why this happened. AI works by "learning" from huge amounts of language. And somewhere in that learning it knows that çon is equivalent to son. And it thinks that tion is the same too. So it's struggling with phonics! That's cute, because so are our learners!

I didn't pick it up on the sexism of its examples. But I had previously challenged chatGPT on a very similar piece of writing it created. It got very snarky and self defensive. Of course, its biais is a reflection of the material it has been trained on.

While we are talking about using it to create resources for the new GCSE, here's what happened when I asked it to write me a story using only words taken from the 2000 most frequently used words in French.

I was surprised at the mistake with est peur. I've done similar things with ChatGPT and it shares all the flaws that we're finding here in Bard, but it doesn't tend to make mistakes in its French. But both have the annoying tendency to happily tell you they have done something, when they haven't. I am pretty sure s'enfuir and un serpent are not in the top 2000 words in French. But then again, ChatGPT's story had sword, treasure and dragon. If only it just said, "Sorry, I don't know what the 2000 most common words in French are" then it would be fine. Bing AI also has this tendency to oblige and make things up when it doesn't know. Which is inexcusable because Bing does have access to the internet and acts as a search engine.

So far, Bard immediately failed all my requests based on language. Whether they were tests I designed to see if I could catch it out, or genuine requests of the sort you might make for creating language teaching resources. You can see more on this twitter thread. It also failed other straight-forward requests like a list of masculine countries in French.

So instead of trying to see if it would work for creating resources for a teacher, I decided to see how it would work for a learner asking for explanations of language points. This is one of the uses directly mentioned by articles advocating the use of Google Bard for language learners.

Where shall we start? I may as well say at this point, that it goes on to fail at explaining every single grammar point I asked it.

Here it is saying that c, z and s are all pronounced as th in Spain:

Now it tells us that mieux and meilleur  are pronounced the same. (It made the same claim for bien and bon.)

And now it explains why you need a grave accent on the word for at in French:

Again, you can see more hilarious examples on the twitter thread. It got in a muddle with tout/toute and with black and white cows being zebras. Oh, go on, I'll give you that one here:

I was surprised at that one, because the difference between some cows which are all black and white (des vaches noir et blanc) and a mixed bunch of black cows and white cows (des vaches noires et blanches) is the go-to example used in explaining the rules for adjectival agreement. I think that ChatGPT may be slightly better here. But both ChatGPT and Bard suffer from the general problem of the examples they give just not matching what they are explaining.

So AI isn't good at looking at parts of words, and it isn't good at explaining grammar with coherent examples. What else do people suggest using it for? It's suggested that it is good at giving feedback to learners. I know already that ChatGPT is terrible at this. Just as with grammar explanations, the examples it picks out from pupils' work, just don't match the point it was trying to correct. Let's see how Bard does. Are you feeling hopeful? Sorry:

It has ignored the actual mistake in using the article with a job, and the question of gender. And instead it's made up something called "noun-verb" agreement, saying the verb est should be feminine.

Alarm bells should be ringing. We should not be using AI for grammatical explanation. AI has no knowledge or intelligence. It is simply a very very impressive predictive text tool. It has been trained on patterns of human speech. It can parrot and sound as if it knows what it is talking about. But it has no knowledge. Any information it gives is a lucky coincidence, the result of putting words together in a way it has spotted humans do. And it seems that the humanity it reflects is anglophone and sexist. The fact that it comes even close to giving vaguely reliable sounding information, is a comment on how predictable we all are!

What should AI be good at? Well, language, I suppose. But have a look at the twitter thread where I posted all the questions I asked it. It failed every single one. It's inexplicably bad at language, or maybe languages. This article from The Times may be behind a paywall, but its conclusion is that "Letting AI teach is like letting Casualty actors run A&E." AI is just mimicking. Nothing else.

And here's what was my final paragraph. Which now has to be withdrawn. Because interacting with google bard is not safe for our learners.

Except there is one way you could use AI for language learning where the potential is huge: chat to it. The clue is in the name ChatGPT. In your prompt, explain that you want it to be a conversational partner for learning the language. Tell it your level. Ask it to answer but also to ask questions. And have a conversation with it.

When you start to use google bard, it does warn you that it is experimental and may be inappropriate. But all the articles suggesting you use it for language learning don't say that. And they should.

Coming up on the horizon already: The new GCSE

 How much of a roadblock is the new GCSE going to be? There are several things to look forward to over the next few years. The NCLE hubs working to share good practice, the possibility of a new government, and hints of a National Language Strategy being formulated. Will this be a period of renewal and excitement? Or will it all be insignificant pretty little daisies growing around  the edges of a hulking great boulder: the new GCSE.

We know what is in the new GCSE: grammar, vocabulary, role plays, pictures, translation, dictation, reading aloud. Will it be similar enough for us to easily move to teaching the new exam? Or does it require fundamental change?

The exam boards have indicated that the areas of content will be similar to the current topics. Many of the tasks and question types will look familiar. It would be reassuring to think that minimal adjustment is needed in planning and teaching. And yet, this exam was supposed to be a lever in bringing about change in how we teach. So is it dangerous to assume we can carry on as we were?

At the East of England Association for Language Learning meeting in June 2023, Rachel Hawkes warned us to be careful. Of the current GCSE, only 50% of the vocabulary list is on the new GCSE list. So there is a lot we could cut out. Perhaps more importantly, 50% of the vocabulary on the new list, wasn't on the old list. So we do have to teach words that we haven't been teaching before.

The vocabulary list is central to the new GCSE. The idea is that with limited time for learning, the content to be learned should be clearly defined. And the GCSE panel specified that the most logical vocabulary to learn is the words which are used most frequently. This way, from KS3 (or even KS2), we can cut out words which are not going to appear in the GCSE. All those lists of pets, foods, sports, places in town, pencil case items, family members. We don't need to teach so many nouns.

And the words we do choose to teach can be revisited regularly. When they are introduced and how often we come across them again (and again) can be preplanned. Texts can be built out of the words and out of the carefully sequenced grammar. And this is what NCELP did. Their materials are a marvel of carefully sequenced and revisited language. A far cry from so many text books with long lists of words met only only once and grammar points covered ticked off on a grid.

This is the task facing exam boards and publishers. To do it properly, they have to take this approach: start with the defined content (grammar and vocabulary), sequence it, and then build texts out of it. Starting from the vocabulary list, planning the occasions when the words are to be met, and then writing texts using those words.

Sounds easy. But it is immensely difficult. The exam boards have already come a-cropper with words in the Sample Assessment Materials creeping in which are not on the list. I think, like a vegetarian exchange student staying with a French family, that one of the offending items was chicken!

This summer I have turned down writing work from companies wanting to tweak and update resources for the new GCSE. Because doing it properly will not be tweaking. Doing it properly means starting from the vocab list and planning what to create. Like cooking based on what is in the fridge, not on what you and your guests would like to eat. 

It means you have to hold at arm's length any actual texts of interesting or true information. Because the words you need will not be the words you have at your disposal. So you have to start to create an alternative reality built out of the words you do have. Reminds me of this sketch rewriting the the Sesame Street song, being forced in frustration to change one word at a time until you end up with "Stormy Nights... can you tell me how to get to Yellowstone Park." Because ultimately content, culture and meaning are secondary to meeting and practising the language.

If this is how professional published material will work - starting from the word list - I think teachers will work differently. When we write or re-use texts, we will write the text first. Then we might use the multilingual profiler to check which words we have used are not on the list. And then we can give a gloss of those words in English so pupils don't have to worry about them and we don't have to throw away our text.

So we won't be doing it "properly" like the publishers will have to. We will be doing it pragmatically. Taking texts and checking them, tweaking them where we can.

Will we be cutting back on vocabulary taught in KS3? It sounds like a great idea. But what words will be cut? We've already mentioned chicken. If not many foods or animals are on the list, then what do we do? Teach the core ones and let individual pupils know the ones they personally want to ask for? Because at GCSE, they can use "chicken" in the speaking and writing exam. But it won't be in the Listening or Reading exam, and the Speaking and Writing tasks will be devised so as not to require any chicken.

This model of teaching the core high frequency vocabulary and handing out individual preference words to individual pupils sounds like a lot of work. Teaching individual pupils individual words. But it also puts a stop to communicative tasks in the classroom. If the only animals all pupils know are dog and fish -and you teach cat, bird, snake to individual pupils but not to all - then how do they do a survey about what pets they have, when they don't know what the other pupil is saying?

Here's a question. What are the Restaurant Role Plays going to look like at GCSE if words like chicken aren't on the list?

So again, I don't think I am going to be doing it "properly". I will not be removing words from KS3 which are not on the GCSE list. I don't think I'll be removing them from GCSE either. When it comes to revision, homework and exam preparation, I can be much clearer in telling the pupils what words they have to know. But I don't think that is the same as long term language learning.

At KS3, I will be sticking with our approach of simultaneously building pupils' accumulation of language and developing what they can do with it. So that, like snow, rather than having an even coating (prone to melting away), they have a snowball that more and more language can stick to.

And I think that if that's what works at KS3, then it's what works at KS4 too.

It would be lovely to think that rather than a massive boulder we crash into or have to find a way around, the new GCSE is a bit of a speed bump that slows us down and makes us pay attention, but doesn't actually make us change our plans completely.

Thoughts on Dictation

 The new GCSE is going to include a Dictation test as part of the listening exam. This is in order to test pupils' knowledge of the sound-spelling link and make sure we are all explicitly teaching phonics.

The immediate red flag is, of course, FRENCH!!!!! French, with its silent letters and redundant grammatical endings which occur in the written form but not in the spoken form. Dictation has been a staple of schooling for French children, already fluent, but struggling to learn to spell.

The reason French pupils do dictation is to STOP them writing things down how they sound. It's about their knowledge of the spelling and grammar of the written form of words, concentrating on features which are not detectable in the spoken form.

So the sentence

les petits garçons mangent de magnifiques gâteaux

has six markers for plural in the written form, but only one (les) in the spoken form. Knowing to add the various endings s / x / ent is nothing to do with the sound spelling link. It is a grammar test.

From the perspective of a sound-spelling link test, would it be acceptable to transcribe the sentence like this?

les petit garçon mange de magnifique gâteau

The grammar is wrong, but the sounds are transcribed correctly.

Or what about this?

Le petit garçon mange de magnifiques gâteaux.

This one is grammatically consistent, but they mis-transcribed the le/les at the start.

What if they wrote something like this?

lait petit garce ont mens-je deux magne y fit que gatte eau

It's complete nonsense, but a good effort at transcription.

How about:

J'ai deux chats qui habitent dans ma maison.

Jé de cha qu'y à bite dent m'a méson

The thing that means you write the first, not the second, is your knowledge of the words. Not knowledge of the phonics.

In French, dictation is about writing a word you know, despite what you hear. So pupils who hear j'ai joué and write je joue are doing the right thing. Badly. If they wrote j'éjouer they would be doing the wrong thing well.

This may well be a nightmare for the exam boards. And looking at how they intend to mark the dictation task in terms of what is acceptable (sound/meaning/grammar) may well be one of the criteria for choosing one exam board over another.

I'm going to leave that to the exam boards to panic over for now. And start with what I CAN do to get stuck in to dictation.

So far, I have come across several interesting things to tackle:

1. How much French can pupils process?

2. What is the interaction between sound and meaning?

3. Grammar?

So I find that if I give pupils a blank piece of paper and read a sentence to them, they find it very hard. By the end of the first word, I have protests that they can't be writing the first word and simultaneously listening to the rest of the sentence.

There are two solutions to this. One would be to dictate single words as in a traditional spelling test. The other would be to have pens down, listen to the whole sentence, then attempt to write the parts you could make sense of. And fill in the gaps in a second reading. Pupils find this very difficult, but that's not a reason not to work on it.

This approach brings in the dimension of processing meaning. It is impossible to hold a whole sentence in the mind as a sequence of sounds to be rendered into written form. To hold the sentence in your head, you have to process the meaning. So for pupils, the process is not just one of transcribing sounds. It is: listen and understand, probably translating into English, then write the sentence in French, probably translating back from English into French. So a separate listening task and then writing task.

Once we understand that the second half of the dictation process is a writing task, this is where the need to tackle grammar comes in. So a pupil has to decide whether the sentence they are writing requires the form aller/allez/allé/allée/allés/allées, for example.

Here are some thoughts on how to tackle this. Some I have tried and some I will be trying:

Instead of a blank piece of paper, give the pupils options to pick:

je peux faire les magasins / je préfère les magasins - the teacher reads one of the options and the pupils have to listen for which one is actually said. This puts the attention onto the sounds. But when I have tried this, the lure of meaning is still strong. With this exact example, pupils wrongly went for I prefer despite what they heard. This seems to be because they were more familiar with les magasins as a noun than in the expression faire les magasins and so picked the one that made most sense to them. It is possible for your brain to be totally convinced that you have heard something that wasn't actually said. There's a listening from the Expo textbook that says, "Dans ma chambre" but once you hear it as saying "Donald Trump", it's impossible to un-hear it.

Instead of a blank piece of paper, give a sentence to modify:

I use a whole sentence rather than a sentence with gaps in. For example, pupils have a printed sentence like:

J'aime aller au cinéma avec mes amis

and they hear a variation with one word different. First they listen and identify which word has changed. Then on a second listening, they write in the new word correctly. This works much better than a sentence with a gap to be filled. The printed sentence is supposed to support the pupils' understanding and reduce the cognitive load of meaning, listening, remembering, processing, spelling. This reduction of cognitive load is not as effective if the sentence we give them already has a gap in it. It makes it much harder for pupils to work out than we might think, when a vital part of the sentence is missing! In fact it seems to throw them back on trying to transcribe the sound of the word to be inserted. We may think the gapped sentence helps scaffold meaning, but in practice it seems to give much less support than we expected. We may think the gapped sentence is giving a layer of support. What what if it is just giving them another layer of task? Giving them a complete sentence that they need to correct by writing in the new word that they hear works much better.

Give them a printed sentence in English:

The pupils have a sentence printed such as

I would like to take the bus into town

Then the teacher dictates the sentence in French. Pupils are not struggling with the meaning, because that is given to them in English. It recognises that Dictation is a dual task, and focuses on the second part: writing the sentence in French. In this case the dictated sentence helps and supports their writing. Pupils can feel as if they are being given the answer rather than panicked over having to write down what they hear. This feels like a positive perspective on dictation and I will be giving it a go!

Make processing writing a two stage process:

The teacher reads the sentence in French. But asks the pupils to write down exactly what it means in English. Then the pupils translate their English sentence into French, supported by hearing the sentence again a second time in French. I haven't tried this. I will give it a go and see how it works. It may be an over complication. Or it may be taking apart exactly the process that pupils have to go through in order to be successful.

Tackle grammar explicitly:

We need to talk to pupils about the way one slight change in sound changes other words in a sentence.

grande vache noire mange sounds exactly the same as grandes vaches noires mangent

We teach this grammar. But do we teach that it all depends on whether the first word you hear is la or les? And practise picking up on this? So we need to make dictation a tool we use in grammar teaching. Before we get to the stage of finding grammar is an issue when we try to do dictations.

I think the key is going to be focusing on what the specific demands are. In any given practise task (or test), do we want pupils to:

correctly spell known words, keep sounds in their head, process meaning, translate into English and back again, attempt unknown words, apply knowledge of grammar... ?

As we become more aware of the actual demands involved in dictation, we will be able to target the skills required, hopefully with more and more success.

Note I haven't even got into the teaching of phonics here! I'm a great advocate of explicit teaching of the sound-spelling link. One of my very first posts was on exactly this! Phonics, the basis for everything.

Writing: Criteria, Cognitive Load, and Feedback

 When we ask our pupils to do writing, we are not just testing their recall. We are working on how well they can deploy their French in order to create a better piece of writing. We are looking for detail, personalisation, and coherence.

But when we do this, we increase the cognitive demands considerably. As well as having to recall the French, our pupils have to think about the selection and ordering of ideas, how they link and are developed or contrasted.

And this invitation to express themselves opens up more challenges. Instead of sticking to a Present, Practice, Production model, and churning out exactly the things they have just been learning, they may bring in language from their own repertoire and find ways to say things they want to say. This drive to communicate, to say things, to have their own control of what they want to say and how to say it is not something we want to crush! But sometimes it does feel as if we are stamping it out with our feedback. 

This happens in two main ways:

You're trying to say things you can't. Just stick to what I've taught you.

You've said what you want to say, but you haven't used the language features I wanted to see included.

Here's some examples of pupils' work and my feedback where I wrestle with this.

Of course, sometimes, you get a pupil who has the perfect balance. They can think carefully about what to say AND organise it coherently AND write accurately AND build it out of the structures we've been learning AND bring in language from their own wider repertoire of French:

I like the way they put together the ideas to contrast what they have to wear and what they can choose to wear, and what they have decided to wear. Good selection of ideas, developing thoughts around one idea at a time, rather than linking separate ideas. Careful attention to the language features of the topic (adjectival agreement). Bringing in French from their personal repertoire (j'ai décidé de / au lieu de) to make it read how they want it to sound. They have the perfect balance of building something out of French they know, alongside wanting to express themselves, and wanting to craft a piece of writing that works.

On the other hand, sometimes you get work like this.

This pupil has made errors in just about all their adjectival endings and some of their verb endings. The thing is, I know that this pupil, when they were just writing sentences in their booklet, had correctly written une veste noire and une chemise blanche.

So what has happened? What do we need to do about it? What should I say to this pupil? What mark should they get?

Here's my feedback on this piece of work:

This is a pupil who will instantly look at the mistakes in gender agreement and realise what they have done. But when they wrote it, their attention was on other features. They were focussing on meaning and on expression and on what they were saying. And they did a good job. They discussed what they used to wear and what they wear now, and which they prefer. This is very different from the sentences in their booklet just itemising in a list all the things they wear. And they are bringing in words from their own repertoire in order to achieve this. And this is what I want. I don't want my pupils to have no interest in expressing themselves.

I have this next example which interests me a lot. It is a pupil who does very well in languages, can read authentic texts with confidence and tackles things other pupils struggle with. But this piece of writing made me raise an eyebrow because it was too careful and accurate!

Their comment at the end is revealing. Unlike the other pupils, their focus was always on the language not on the ideas. But it reads like a series of sentences, without the flow or sense of expression the other pupils were aiming for. It's more accurate. But in some ways less ambitious.

This is where I am going to need a good metaphor to feedback to the class. I am thinking of something along the lines of a circus act. Someone who does a couple of backflips on the ground is quite impressive but fairly safe. Someone who does a backflip on a narrow beam, is very impressive but it might all go wrong. Someone who does a backflip on a high wire risks total failure. But well done for trying. Hopefully when it comes to their French, they have a teacher who can help them understand what went wrong and help them get back on the horse rather than scaring them off forever.

Novices and Experts

 This morning, Isabelle Jones posted a link to this interesting blog post on Novice learners and Expert learners.

As MFL teachers, we have met this concept in the Ofsted Research Review. It says that most of our learners are Novices. And only a few pupils at the higher levels of GCSE are in any way to be considered starting to reach Expert level. Expert pupils may start to cope with extracting meaning from texts with unknown words and be able to start to communicate and express themselves. But for most of our pupils, Ofsted mandate a concentration on explicit knowledge of phonics, grammar and high frequency vocabulary. Communication, self expression and reading that involves deduction and inference of meaning should be delayed until pupils are Expert.

Behind this there is a noble and extremely complex idea. It is a view of education which does away with the old idea of "ability". Instead of labelling some pupils as able and others as less able, it asks us to look at where those differences between pupils start to appear, how they are reinforced, and how they become self-fulfilling. 

It is closely linked to the idea of cultural capital and the importance of knowledge. Specifically to the idea that "skills" and abilities can be broken down into knowledge. By thinking in terms of "skills" and "ability" we have loaded the dice against pupils who don't have the same level of cultural capital to start off with. We have allowed some pupils to fly and some pupils to sink, explaining it away with the concept of "ability," effectively blaming (or praising) the pupils.

Instead of this, we are now exhorted to think not of the skills, but of the knowledge. Some pupils with a slightly better starting point, get a head start and are labelled as "able." Other pupils may be missing some knowledge and have a slower start and seem unable to perform the skills we ask. What is the knowledge that needs to be put in place? What is that knowledge that pupils who do well have, and other pupils lack?

Lovely ideas. And ones that perhaps teachers have always approached through working carefully with pupils as individuals, nurturing their attempts and their skills, watching very carefully to pitch the level of challenge and support.

But a child-centred approach is out of fashion. It is portrayed as being the opposite of what is supposed in the previous paragraph. It is portrayed as being a lazy, coasting approach with too much play and not enough ambition. We also have a fashion for defining the curriculum with rigorous sequencing, rather than a focus on classroom pedagogy and the pupil's development. And perhaps we are also a nation of Novice teachers, with a dearth of experience. And of course, teachers love to be offered a formula, a magic bullet, some pseudo science, a bandwagon, a fad.

You will have guessed, that the Novice-Expert distinction is one I am uncomfortable with. So why don't I like it? For a start, the idea that content can be broken down into knowledge is the easy part. Especially if we then test for recall of that knowledge. It can appear to be very successful. But the idea that "knowledge is key to acquiring skills" part of the deal can end up being completely forgotten. I have written here about how the rush for knowledge can be at the expense of thinking, creativity, expression, experimentation.

The Novice-Expert distinction legitimises this. It demands that we teach knowledge first, so that skills can come later. Much later.

I would say that this is an idea that doesn't stand up on its own. The post I referred to at the start almost acknowledges this by at the same time as setting up the Novice-Expert distinction, declaring that we need to see it as a continuum. Thank goodness. But once we forgo the attractive neat binary distinction, there's not a lot of the idea left.

Because it is part of a bigger idea. The bigger idea is that there is a very interesting relationship between knowledge and skills. And how we INTEGRATE the teaching of knowledge and skills is really important.

People blurt out the mantra, "But you need to know things before you can think."

This shocking image from an Ofsted video has been circulating on Twitter, shared by Early Years Teachers.

You may think it chimes with what I just said about the importance lying in how we integrate the teaching of knowledge and skills. But the context is that of a video stipulating explicit teaching of knowledge. And the caption on the picture makes it clear that knowledge comes first before a skill can be performed. With a picture of a child playing with a shape-sorter.

Surely playing with a shape-sorter is the absolute paradigm that explicit knowledge does not come first. When we say some pupils lack cultural capital, it may well be that they missed out on the opportunity to play with shapes. Not that they missed out on having it explained to them.

But it's the same right through to Secondary School. And even in "knowledge based" subjects like Physics. If you are going to learn Newton's First Law, you need to confront how you think about how things move. You may well think that if you push things they move. And if you stop pushing them, they stop moving. This is thinking. The science teacher wants you to examine this idea and discover that there's a better way of explaining it. Things do stay still until something pushes them. But things also stay moving until something stops them. If under the guidance of a teacher, you start with your thinking, observe objects moving, come to a new conclusion, then you are learning. If someone tells you the knowledge, "Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force" then that's not going to mean anything.

Of course, no-one is advocating that. Knowledge-based teaching is very careful to engage with prior knowledge and pitch the level of challenge so that it moves the pupils forward but doesn't overwhelm. But this does rather clash with the idea of "You can't think without knowledge." Learning happens by thinking, engaging with content. You can theoretically split thinking, knowledge, learning. You can theoretically split skills and knowledge. But in practice, what matters is how they are integrated.

In language-learning this is reflected in the debates around form and meaning. Or learning and acquisition. Or explicit and implicit learning. While the distinctions are useful for debate, the whole point is the interaction, the integration, the synergy, the balance.

In Languages, my parents' generation learned grammatical forms as a purely intellectual exercise. But since then it has been axiomatic that you don't delay the learner's ability to express themself until the grammatical system is mastered. We construct a curriculum which balances the pupils' ability to say things, with their evolving conceptualisation of the language. And the two are in no way incompatible. Conceptualisation of the language is what allows you to say more things. Wanting to try out saying more things is what drives conceptualisation of the language.

Where next for Languages?

 I wonder what the new National Consortium for Languages Education is going to be like and what will it mean for us in the classroom?

Just like NCELP, they are mandated to build on the 2016 review of language teaching and its core principles.

I have written on Twitter a little bit about NCELP. They will have a chapter of their own in the History of Language Teaching, as an extraordinary landmark attempt to try to bring about changes in practice and thinking.

I don't think that Chapter is coming to a close. They have made us think about important questions. And whatever comes next, we can't ignore them.

Firstly, the Sequencing of Learning. The NCELP schemes of work have raised the bar for any publisher in terms of the logic of what is taught when. We can't continue to see textbooks organised around ticking off grammar content in a grid, planning where it is met (once or twice) without now thinking in terms of the pupils' conceptualisation and accumulation of language.

Likewise, the focus on phonics is a well overdue shift away from the old idea that we shouldn't show pupils the written form, because it would interfere with their pronunciation.

There are other aspects which I think we have only just started to get to grips with, whether or not we ultimately end up accepting them. One is the idea that while we should be very careful to introduce things in carefully planned steps, they should also be deliberately contrasted. This is also linked to the idea of removing duplicate markers, so that pupils have to focus on the specific form (and its meaning). So instead of saying, "Je suis allée en ville hier", if we want the pupil to focus on the past tense, then we should show them, "Je suis allée en ville." That way they have to look at the verb form and can't depend on the word 'hier'. And we should ask them to distinguish between go/went or between different persons of the verb. The questions here are about how well we understand what NCELP are trying to do. It's not just about spotting patterns. It's about how pupils process language.

I can see that my pupils are happy to know that aller is "go". But despite our teaching, how much attention do they pay to the endings aller, allé, allés, allée, allées, allez, allais...? Are they just happy to pick up on "go". And are we as teachers happy that they then use that to try to deduce the meaning from the whole sentence, rather than processing the endings? Do we assume that inflection is something it takes time for pupils to grasp the importance of? Or do we think it's something we need to force pupils to process?

Then there's the High Frequency Vocabulary idea. This has so many implications, and I can't yet see clearly what it means for my teaching. Does it mean the end of topic teaching? I can see the importance of non topic words and the very high frequency words. The thing is sometimes these words are highly grammatical. Or are low on meaning, high on re-combinability. Meaning that they are very slippery to teach with a bottom up approach. Je vais à la piscine; J'habite à Paris; Je vais au cinéma; Un pain au chocolat; La dame au chapeau rouge... In each one à is doing something different. Might it be better for pupils to learn some of this in chunks without getting stuck over-thinking words like à or du, de la, des? Like the pupil in this post trying to say things like, I like pizza with pineapple.

Does a focus on High Frequency Vocabulary mean a bottom up approach, focused on processing known words and grammar? Or is it the key to a revived focus on authentic texts and materials? If these are the words that feature in all texts, and if they are the key to unlocking meaning, then more authentic texts should be accessible. We've always been good at asking pupils to look for the words strong in meaning. Which can be deduced from clues in the context or may well be cognates. If our pupils are going to be better equipped to deal with the little words and process grammatical inflections, does this mean we can have more (not less!) focus on authentic texts?

If a High Frequency Vocabulary approach means an end to topics and to lists of inconsequential nouns to allow pupils to talk about their trivial lives (pets, stationery, hobbies, clothes), then could it instead bring a greater focus on culture and Culture? A move away from the first person obsession would also fit well with the grammatical sequencing. In Spain they... This Spanish person... In England we... I...

Ultimately, I can't tell how great the role of NCLE will be in where this goes next. What we need to see is what the new GCSE means. I'm holding off digging deep into what it means until the drafts are tweaked and firmed up. We will need to understand the marking criteria in detail to understand what is rewarded. The DfE were right in thinking that if they wanted change, then changing the GCSE was the way to do it. But whether those changes will be exactly what they intended, we will have to wait and see.

Language World 2023 Part Two

 In Part One of these two posts on my talk at Language World 2023, I looked at how we find ourselves in the middle of a polarised debate about language-learning. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on explicit learning of well-sequenced grammar, selected vocabulary, and phonics. On the other is the idea that communication and meaning come first, with grammar only making sense once pupils have enough language for the patterns to emerge.

At the end of the first post, I said that for me, the key thing is a well-structured and deliberately sequenced curriculum. But one that shifts the focus from just accumulating knowledge of the language, to a deliberate development of what pupils can do with the language.

And we don't have to look far for validation of this approach. We may be worried about Ofsted or even our own schools being obsessed with knowledge, but what we are required to teach is the National Curriculum. And the National Curriculum is very clear that our pupils should be making progress in what they "know and can do" with the language.

What do I mean by developing what pupils can do with the language? I mean a curriculum where we deliberately focus on how well pupils can develop their answers in speaking and writing, with increasing spontaneity, detail, personalisation, complexity, accuracy and independence.

The next few slides showed examples from my school's curriculum to show what I mean by this. Here I will give links to previous posts explaining activities in greater detail. And at the end I will come back to look at some overall principles and what "grammar" really means for me.

First an example that happened just before the conference so featured as a last minute extra, without a slide. Here's a story for you.

One of my Year 10 pupils arrived early before the others. I asked him, in Spanish, "Do you like to go to the zoo?" He looked puzzled because zoo pronounced in Spanish doesn't sound like a word. So I wrote zoológico on the board and asked him the question again. He said, "Sí, me gusta." I raised an eyebrow in expectation. He thought and said, "Sir. I am going to need the words for monkey and scratch." I put these on the board for him. He then said, in Spanish, "I like to go to the zoo because I can see the animals. In the holidays I went to the zoo and I saw a monkey. He was eating a banana. But while he was eating the banana, he scratched his... I was sick."

This is where I want pupils to end up. Able to develop answers spontaneously. With a secure repertoire they can deploy. It meets the GCSE criteria of extended answers, justified opinions and narration. And pupils with this kind of a working core of grammatical knowledge do well when they move on to A Level.

In my talk, I went back to the beginning and showed how first of all we work on fluency and spontaneity. Even saying/writing nonsense. Just to get the French flowing with activities like World Record Sentence or Connectives Dice (see second half of this post).

With activities like this, two things can happen. On the one hand, pupils relish the randomness of the sentences and enjoy saying things that no-one has ever said before. (Isn't that the point of grammar?) Or on the other hand, they try to make it make sense. Which is taking the next step in the right direction.

We quickly establish that knowing the French isn't the issue. What we need to spend time on is getting better at using our French. Thinking of things to say, what to say next. Making it coherent, varied, more sophisticated, more detailed, more personal.

Activities like Pimp My French focus on this, by taking a simplistic repetitive answer and improving it using all our repertoire. Annotating model answers and writing in colours helps pupils think about how to deploy their repertoire and create a better answer.

We look at how creating a piece of writing with just one infinitive has positives and negatives. Positive: it sticks to one idea, it shows off the whole repertoire of what you can do with an infinitive, it saves your other infinitives for another paragraph, and perhaps this person really likes playing with a ball.

But of course, this paragraph is also repetitive. So we look a paragraph (C) with more infinitives. Which turns into a bit of a list with and, and, and,  because there was no real link between the activities. And then a paragraph (A) with carefully chosen activities which do link into a coherent paragraph. You can see, the pupils then write their own versions of these 3 paragraphs.

Except often they don't. When you ask them to write paragraph (B) or (C), they instinctively want to improve it and make it read well!

You can see the beginnings of my Year 10 pupil's monkey story here, as pupils start to develop one idea, rather than just link ideas together.

In my talk, I moved on to explaining how to develop this kind of narration.

I expect you probably already all teach the structures involved. Opinions. Verb + infinitive. Past Tenses. In my talk I showed how we deploy them to create a narrative. Each pupil has ownership of one of the key structures. And we go round the class to build the story. Here's a post on how to set this up. Initially it follows a template, but as it gets transferred across topics, pupils deploy the repertoire more and more flexibly, (as shown here) until they can spontaneously develop answers on any topic.

So where does this leave grammar? Firstly, you can see the accumulation of grammatical forms. But the important thing is that they are added on to a working repertoire. And they are added because they are needed and useful. With a specific use. Imperfect to set the scene and say what was happening. Preterite or Perfect to say what happened. Different persons of the verb when you need them to create conflict or a difference of opinion. I talk to pupils about their "snowball" of language. Instead of leaving their French to melt, they have to grab hold of some, make it their own, and then more and more language will stick to it.

And secondly it takes a slightly different definition of grammar. Rather than taking the formal grammar in the sense of a linguist's dissection of the overview of the language and chopping it up into what seems logical chunks and sequencing, it focuses on the pupils' grammar. Grammar in the sense of their growing repertoire and ability to deploy the language. How the language is articulated, put together, used by the pupil to create meaning and develop answers. Scott Thornbury has a metaphor for this. He says that the synthetic grammar syllabus is like trying to make an omelette by taking an omelette, chopping it up, and trying to rebuild it back into an omelette. Instead, what I am trying to do is to take the raw ingredients and slowly cook them into something tasty. Developing the pupils' grammar, not chopping up the linguist's grammar.

I finished my talk with a third metaphor, bringing it back to the title, "Having your cake and picking the cherries," with the idea of language-learning as similar to Food Technology. You have your ingredients and you learn to use them to make something nice. If you have ingredients left over you didn't use, there will be something missing. And don't keep demanding ingredients you haven't got. Make something tasty with what  you have got.

And I added one last image. We often talk about the swing of the pendulum. From one pole to the other. In this case, from Communication to Grammar. But rather than a single pendulum, this is a Newton's cradle. The balls on the end swing wildly. But the balls in the middle never move. We are bashed from both sides, but we can find a middle way!

Thanks for coming to my talk!

Photo byHelen Myers.

Language World 2023 Part One

 Fantastic to meet up with so many people at Language World 2023! As always at Language World, there's a wonderful atmosphere and an opportunity to recharge your batteries by talking to people who share the same passion and purpose.

My talk was about balancing Communication and Well-Sequenced Grammar.

In this first post, I shall pose the questions. And in a later post, I will sketch some possible answers and try to redefine the debate.

Surely the two things are not incompatible? Sometimes we are being invited to see them as sitting at different ends of a spectrum.

On the one hand, we are being told that the most important thing is explicit and direct teaching of phonics, grammar, and vocabulary. And on the other hand, we hear that language is acquired through Comprehensible Input and developing intercultural competency. It is argued that that we should give pupils lots of exposure to the language before starting to break it down and look for grammatical patterns.

In our teaching, this supposed incompatibility is reflected in something as fundamental as the idea of teaching a series of topics. What if, when we teach a topic, we then abandon that language and move on to another? What if the topics we commonly teach mean that because each pupil wants to be able to talk about their own interests or pets or family or ambitions or outfits, then our teaching becomes a list of trivial fluff, mainly lists of nouns so they can each say the thing they want? Planning the curriculum by equipping pupils to talk about a series of different topics or scenarios may not be the best way to sequence the grammar. And there may be things in the unit that we teach them to say, which contain grammar that is incidental rather than planned. What if we are focused on the outcome of the unit; a test or conversation or poster, rather than the learning?

All of these are great questions. But none of them mean we have to abandon communication or self expression. Or even topics. All of the above dangers are present when our Year 7s create their Art Exhibition. But surely, if we bear these questions in mind, it can and does work. So the whole point of teaching the grammar of gender, agreement, articles and word order, is so that each and every pupil CAN write what they want. They all create different artworks but we have equipped them with the grammar to be able to describe them. Grammar is a shortcut where knowing the rules means you can say things you want to be able to say, not just rehash what you have learned. Grammar is creativity and communication. That's the whole point.

So, to borrow from Professor Henshaw, on the one hand we are being asked to see language learning as a collection of grammatical forms. And on the other, we are being invited to see it as a collection of things pupils can say.

There must be a middle way.

So how can we ensure that well-sequenced Grammar teaching and Communication are compatible. What does it look like in practice?

Well, there are many ways that each school can do this, once they've set themselves the challenge of making it happen. In the rest of my talk, I showed examples from our school's curriculum that demonstrate how we do it.

But there is a principle involved. Our curriculum is based on what the National Curriculum asks us to do: Develop what pupils know and can do with their language. And the key element is that we are deliberately developing what they can DO.

So if at one end of the spectrum there is a grim emphasis on Knowledge (just look at the slide from the Ofsted webinar on the principles of curriculum design) and at the other end, there is a hope that just letting them interact with the language will see acquisition happen, then we are trying to sit somewhere in the middle. 

We are school teachers, so we do explicitly teach grammar and vocabulary. But we also constantly work on the quality of what pupils say and write. By quality, I mean increasing spontaneity, fluency, development of ideas, personal expression, independence, accuracy and complexity.

None of these things happen by accident. They are deliberately worked on.

Here you can see the exemplars for each of the units in our Year 8 curriculum.

You can see, we do have topics. If you look closer, you can also see that the language for all topics is very similar. It is based around opinions and reasons (using verb + infinitive constructions) and conjunctions. This forms a strong core, to which other grammar is added. Present tense verbs, perfect tense verbs. But the main thrust of the year is not about learning more and more French. It is about getting better and better at using your French.

In part two I will look at materials, activities and examples of pupils' work to show what I mean by this focus on how well pupils can use their language. And try to work out what this means for what grammar we teach and how we define grammar.

Top Tip for Dictation

 This post is going to start out as a top tip for Dictation. And may end up being just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Dictation means for teaching listening in MFL.

It's inspired by @MissWozniak's talk at this weekend's TM MFL Icons Teach Meet. (Recording here.) Listen to Jennifer's talk for ways to start thinking about how to make Dictation accessible, especially in French.

My top tip is, instead of using gapfills, use whole sentences with a word that is changed.

So for example you could give the pupils the sentence with a gap:

J'aime aller à la plage parce que je peux _________ dans la mer.

Then they hear the full sentence J'aime aller à la plage parce que je peux nager dans la mer. And they have to write in the word nager.

I have found it's much easier to give the pupils a full sentence for example:

J'aime aller à la plage parce que je peux jouer dans la mer.

They listen and change jouer to nager.

Our KS3 tests contain this kind of exercise and it is generally done well and with far less panic than you get with a sentence with a gap in it.

I can see two possible reasons for this. Firstly, if you are giving pupils a sentence with a gap, there is already a level of cognitive challenge. The sentence is meant to be there to support them, but with a word missing, they are having to work hard to access the "help". In this case the missing word nager is a key word from the sentence, strong on meaning. Perhaps the first word that they would have been drawn to if they were given the complete sentence to make sense of. We, as experts can make sense of the rest of the sentence without the key word, using meaning and form to deduce what might be missing. This is an exercise in itself for the learner.

Secondly, maybe the tendency is for pupils to focus on the gap. To ignore the rest of the sentence, which as we saw may not be as helpful as it was intended to be. So when they listen, they are focused entirely on the gap in isolation, trying to work out which sounds to fill it with. Which inevitably come and go too quickly, without putting together sound and meaning let alone spelling.

So giving them a whole sentence with one word to be changed means that they have to listen to the whole sentence in order to spot which word is different. And the sentence they are given is a complete sentence that they can start to make sense of. They don't need to try to work out what type of word might go in the gap. They can see jouer and it's then just one step to replacing it with nager.

From experience, I would say it has been quite successful as a way to start asking pupils to transcribe words from dictated text. If you just want a top tip, you could stop here. Because, as I said, this could be just the tip of the iceberg!

What I think this is really getting at is the nature of dictation. It is not a simple exercise in phonic transcription, a friendly test of pupils' grasp of the sound-spelling link.

The Ofsted Research Review is wrong when they say that comprehension of French proceeds in a linear fashion from decoding sounds, to recognising known words and grammar, to arriving at meaning. You cannot tell if the word you heard was port or porc from the sound of the word. You have to have a feedback loop between meaning and sound at the sentence level.

And in French there is a multiplicity of ways of phonetically transcribing any utterance. Some of them meaningful, some of them nonsensical, some grammatically plausible, some not. So dictation is always going to be a test of meaning and grammar as well as the sound-spelling link.

Here's a fun example based on one of the proposed example dictation texts from one of the exam boards: Demain j'ai un concert. This is phonologically indistinguishable from deux mains géants qu'on serre. Of course no pupil is likely to write that. And it contains a grammatical error in the gender of mains. But it shows the wild variation in how an utterance can be interpreted. And makes us question exactly what our pupils are hearing when they listen to French.

We had a similar thing when we created listening materials to go with some of the recordings that go with the KS3 Expo textbook. Each listening question from the textbook turned into a 4 page set of activities that the pupils did in the computer room, with access to the listening track so they could pause and rewind as required. And we used it with GCSE groups not KS3. In order to make the listenings from the KS3 book accessible to KS4, we needed to structure 4 pages of work per listening track. Because they were not accessible at all. Here's one ridiculous activity that was in there that really makes the point: What are our learners "hearing" when they listen to these tracks?

One of these is inspired by the pupils always hearing huit tissues instead of produits issus. Not to mention what they hear on the listening, again from Expo, about les_expositions!!! Oh, and there's another one where dans la chambre is now universally heard as Donald Trump. Once you've heard it you can't unhear it.

Picking the correct option in each case, is less to do with the sound you hear and much more about making sense of the sound. And turning it into words that make sense as a sentence.

So this isn't really just about dictation. It's about our whole approach to Listening. I think the inclusion of dictation in the new GCSE will be the start of unpicking what happens when we use Listening in the classroom and in the exam.

Firstly, I think dictation will end up not being dictation at all. Because it can't. You can't have an exam which pretends to be a phonics check but which inevitably is much more a check of grammar and meaning. You can't have an exam where there is a near infinite number of correct phonetic renditions of a text. What you will have instead is an exercise where there are sentences read out, but what is really being tested is the spelling of know words. Like nager in the example we began with. So the pupil isn't transcribing, they are recognising the words and being tested on whether they know how to spell it. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say, they are being tested on their ability to spell known words and not attempt to transcribe them because that's where interference from English phonics would lead to error.

Secondly, I think the difficulty of dictation will reveal the difficulty of Listening, as I have sketched out above. The current situation of Listening in the GCSE exams is absurd. I remember being on a panel of mainly Spanish native speaker teachers who thought that our Listening exam level was low. Because we have slow scripted speech and questions in English. It was only when they themselves got some of the questions wrong, they began to realise what was involved. They were used to training pupils to listen to natural speech and answer questions that showed they understood details of what was being said. I have written about it here, but basically they realised that our Listening is not about comprehension but about processing word by word and being tested on specific language features. Not on meaning, but of knowledge of the language. In a kind of dictation that you have to do in your head. A sort of word by word processing is required with a focus on the exact language, which is different to the comprehension of meaning as you listen.

And this will again come back to the error in the Ofsted Research Review. Our learners do not arrive at meaning by processing word by word. They start by approximating overall meaning, content, context. And then proceed to the detail of the language, holding bottom up meaning of words and inflections of words in constant tension with overall top down meaning. The questions in our GCSE target the lowest level of that process: the grasp of the tiniest inflections, sometimes even losing sight of the meaning of the overall sentence. For example the question, "What did one school do that really impressed her?" The answer that shows comprehension would be "They grew fruit and veg on the school field." But this was not an acceptable answer. You had to show word-by-word processing and put "They grew fruit and veg on part of the school field." Can you see how the approach to Listening has lost sight of comprehension of meaning?

I think the difficulties of dictation mean we will have to re-examine what we are doing with listening. On the one hand, where we are expecting word-by-word transcription, it will have to be fairly basic. And it may reveal that listening questions in the past have required mental word-by-word transcription to the extent that they are impossible. Perhaps this revelation may lead to a reconsideration of listening.

Deep Learning or Distraction?

 It's March, so it's time for the Year 7 French Exhibition at the local Windmill arts exhibition centre.

Every pupil in Year 7 creates an artwork and describes it in French. Then it goes on display to the paying public.

The idea is that from the beginning, pupils can use their French creatively, for a real purpose and for a real audience. In 2011 we won the European Language Label for an MFL curriculum built around creative outcomes for every unit. This post outlines how it was part of a LinkedUp project between schools, using tangible outcomes as a driver of pupil engagement and deep learning.

The idea of Deep Learning is that it should be creative, personal, collaborative, involve time outside the classroom, and have a real purpose beyond the classroom. It should have an outcome that is big and important. There should also be a creative process where the pupil makes decisions crucial to the success of the project.

The opposite view, which is much more in fashion at the moment, is that all this is a distraction. That we shouldn't have to motivate pupils or show them the relevance of what they are studying. Instead, we decide what is important, we break it down into explicit steps, and they learn by memorising and being tested on it.

Through this shift in thinking, we have kept our curriculum and examined it in the light of the changing fashions in ideas. We have rewritten the booklets to make the teaching of grammar and phonics more consistently explicit for all teachers in the department. The question is, do projects like the Windmill Exhibition now feel more of a distraction than a driver of deep learning?

How could it be a distraction? Here's why: 

• What if we are focused on the product not the process? So there's a deadline and we skip over important learning because we need to get the picture and the text done.
• The pupils' attention might be too directed towards the meaning and not enough towards the forms of the words.
• What if the pupils' descriptions bring in random words that they are never going to need again? When we should be teaching carefully selected vocabulary that exemplifies grammar patterns and which they will meet over and over in a carefully programmed way.
• What if pupils are trying to say things they can't? So they fall into error but we gloss over it because they are "communicating well."

I think all of these considerations do need to be taken into account. In fact this Unit of work very much brings you up against them. But while they are things to be aware of, they are not things that mean we should abandon the approach.

Here's an example of one of the exhibits:

You can see what the grammatical objectives of the unit are: Word order, gender, adjectival agreement, prepositions.

Here's a page from the booklet using describing shapes and colours to work on the concept of gender and why French sentences need it:

So what is really happening in a curriculum that asks pupils to use their language for a purpose? From the "Deep Learning" point of view, they are taking ownership of their language, relating it to things that are important to them, and taking responsibility for the quality of work that is to be presented to an audience.

But from the point of view of well-sequenced grammar teaching, it also works. Asking our pupils to be creative is exactly what drives the need for grammar. Grammar, by definition, is what allows you to say an infinite number of things, not just repeat what the teacher has taught you. They may decide to draw a pirate ship or an astronaut or a daffodil or a heron. Good. The possible plethora of random items they put in their pictures is grammar in action.

The description of any one of the artworks looks simple. Stating what is in the picture, the size, the shape, the colours, the position. But the fact that hundreds of pupils can all produce their own unique version using the French that they have been learning, is what you want from grammar learning. We teach definite and indefinite articles, gender and and word order, precisely so that pupils can use any nouns and adjectives they chose. This isn't wasteful low frequency fluff. This is the whole point of teaching grammar. Grammar is creativity.