Motivating students: Rosenshine's principles, not too easy, not too difficult, just right!

Although currently at half-term, I have been inspired, by many social media contributions, to write about motivation in the MFL classroom, a major issue, I believe, for many of us! How can we motivate our students to do well, to become independent learners and embrace the learning of MFL? Specially, at KS4 level leading to KS5? The constrictions of the GCSE syllabus, exam pressures, and harsh marking of papers for languages has, definitely, taken its toll but not everything is grim looking!

At a basic level, there's a lot that MFL teachers can do in everyday lessons, which we may take for granted, that can have a big impact in motivating most of our students. Of course, at a high level, doing project based learning, collaborative work with partner schools, a rich extra-curricular activity programme and opportunities to take languages outside the classroom and raise the profile of MFL, are also important factors. However, in this post I would like to concentrate on the basics: the ingredients for great teaching that help motivate students and take responsibility for their learning.

What motivates students?

In my opinion, is as simple as feeling that they are making progress, which consequently increases their confidence and as a result motivates them to continue doing well to make even more progress. 

As teachers, we have the power to plan and carry out activities aimed to help students to make this progress. For that, we do not need to become over complicated in our teaching, but just reflect on the ingredients of what makes great teaching. Why? 

Because great teaching, where activities are not too easy, neither too high, just right,  will spontaneously make our students make progress, hence, motivating them to do well, to take pride in their learning and to become, ultimately, independent learners (some with big help from us).  This takes me directly to reflect on Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction for great teaching. Principles that we all use, exploit, sometimes, unconsciously, in our lessons.

What makes great teaching?: Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction applied to MFL

1. Modelling

At its most basic level, in MFL this means modelling the structures we want students to master after a sequence of lessons, or a lesson! I do this via Sentence Builders. At a more complex level, this means providing worked out examples of good answers, for example for writing and speaking tasks at GCSE level or Alevel and narrating to students our thought process. Activities that work well at this level and will motivate students from the basics are any Teacher or Student based Reading/ Listening activities based on a give Sentence Builder or Key structures:

• Put sentences in the right order, read by the teacher (Sentences can be in English or TL on the board)
• Dictation activities or Delayed Dictation tasks
• Trapdoor reading activities
• Reading a sentence, stop and students finish it, this can be done as a whole class, in pairs, with mini whiteboards or orally. Jane Basnett offers an example on how this can be achieved by working with a model paragraph in this post here . A great example of low preparation, high impact activities for students to make progress just in a lesson.
• Battleships listening/ Reading game activities. 

• Bad listening: Teacher reads a paragraph of which students have a copy but with key differences that students need to spot.
• Filling the gaps in response to a paragraph read by the teacher but without gaps! So students need to really listen for detail while listening to and reading their text as they do not have the gaps to write the missing words.
• Narrow reading/listening type of activities: Spot the difference, completing boxes with key information.
• Providing example of written or oral tasks and analysing these with students, having a mark scheme with them, to find out why they are good, not so good or outstanding answers: what are the ingredients of a great response?

2. Structured/Guided Practice

This involves, extensive practice of structures, controlled by the teacher, with scaffolds for difficult tasks until these are mastered: the power of overlearning!!! which will increase confidence and will help students make rapid progress, hence, enhancing motivation. If we add a real communication element to the practice process and a game or competitive element, motivation is pretty much guaranteed! 

Similarly, having high expectations is key here too. When I tell my Y8 bottom set students: "this is a GCSE expression that I am confident you can use at this stage now", such as Me gustaría que mi casa tuviera ( I would like that my house had (subjunctive)),  90% of my students learn the structure and use it systematically! 

Always aim a little bit higher! Students, even those in low sets, will make progress as long as they have enough practice to master the content and this is practised periodically and they are not bombarded with many challenging expressions that can result in cognitive overload. Do not make the language over easy, as that can be as much a demotivating factor, as being too difficult and moving too fast! Some students will think, what is the point?, to too easy as well as to too difficult input!

High impact activities at this stage can include:

• Translating key sentences based on Sentence Builders from English into TL. This can be done in many different ways: via mini-whiteboards led by teacher using any IT tool to provide prompts if wanted, although teachers can just make up sentences on the spot! If IT tools are used, TaskMagic, Wheel of Names and Flippity can be excellent at this stage! Click on a previous post here on how IT tools can assist Sentence Builders practice. If the links of our activities are shared with students, then, they can practice translating sentences in pairs after a whole class practice.
• One dice, Speak! Based on the popular game One pen, One dice, this is an idea from Vincent Everett: Students work in pairs and are given a dice, student A rolls the dice until they get a 6. Students B needs to make as many sentences from their Sentence Builder as possible until their partner gets the 6 and they swap roles. 
• Any board game based on translating elements, focussing on a given Sentence Builder or key structures. Genially digital games are brilliant for this at the current situation!

• Jenga Games where students need to create a sentence before allowed to move a piece.
• Any information gap activity! where students need to exchange information with a partner. The information would, of course, be based on those key structures we want to practice!
• Stealing Sentences, a classic from Gianfranco Conti. I like doing it in three levels, so at level three students need to translate the sentences, with support of initials rather than just read them!

• Translating Pyramids, another classic from Gianfranco Conti.
• Ping-Pong Translation, as outlined by Gianfranco Conti.
• Dictogloss, which would include listening, reading, oral and writing on a given text! 
  
  
  
• LearningApps activities

 

 3. Checking for understanding: the use of Questions

Questioning is key! and it will help for retrieval practice too while keeping students motivated and alert! A good session of questioning after key, structured practice, or as part of this, is extremely powerful. In other words, questions should be the centre of lessons! Make sure you always reward accurate, correct answers!

Some Questioning techniques that helps students make progress and keep them alert are:

• Cold calling, not just volunteers!  so no student can relax!
• No opt-out, if a student does not know the answers, I move to another student and then I come back to student A again.
• Say it again, better, after a few rounds of questioning: Where do you go on holidays? I come back to the same students and ask them to say again but better, after having heard answers from fellow students!
• Think, pair, share!  This is great for more open general conversation questions or to practice the photocard part of the exam.
• Whole class response: Whiteboards!  Many activities of the activities in structured practice can be done this way! 
• Ask all students: What have you understood? versus Have you understood? Ask students to tell you exactly what they got from the lesson and reteach if necessary any gaps in subsequent lessons.  This is great as a plenary!

4. Retrieval Practice: Interleaving and reviewing material

This is extremely important in languages! Students must be given opportunities to revisit the material over and over again, this is critical in the case of grammatical structures but also with high impact expressions that can be used in many different topics and which should be embedded quickly in the students' mastered lexicon corpus. Make sure that students obtain a high success rate before moving to another concept! Techniques for retrieval practice:

• Daily, weekly, monthly review. Great as a starter activity! Ask students to translate sentences from last lesson, last week's lesson but also from last month! As time progresses, from last half-term or even last year. Reward students who succeed in this. To do this, the activities from Structured Practice are great as we can always incorporate content from last week, last month etc.. mixed up with new topics. Interleaving is key here. 
• Involve everyone! Whiteboards are ideal for this but also LearningApps activities and Quizizz quizes.

• Vary the way retrieval practice is carried out: Teacher led, but also via self-quizzing (quizizz , LearningApss and Quizlet are great for this). Use simple translation tasks, but also open responses tests (Quizizz allows you to do this). 
• Creating a knowledge map starting from some key words.
• Train students to be proactive at this! Self-testing. If you have a bank of resources available to students for each topic, say, Quizizz activities, LearningApss or Quizlet courses, you can prepare revision schedules for students to start with and encourage them to modify your schedule or create their own one based on their own needs. Click here for a post on how Padlet can assist you to create such schedules!

Click here for a post that Jane Basnett has recently created about low prep high impact activities in lessons. 

Click here for a post on how digital tools can assist on Retrieval Practice in lessons. 

5. Gradual Mastery of concepts: development of Fluency

Gradually, the scaffolding and support that we give students via the structured practice can be removed so students start producing language fluently, on their own, without having the Sentence Builders in front of them or having to be given model answers to be translated from English to TL. For students to be successful at this stage, they need to be engaged in the independent practice of structures: having a bank of self-quizzes for students to work independently, as explained above is crucial. When students manage to reach this stage, even at a basic level, their confidence suddenly plummets, and, with that, their motivation too. Good activities at this stage are:

• Speed dating activities where students formulate questions to each other for 5 minutes to move to another couple.
• Piedra, papel, tijera (stone, paper, scissors). Two students play together and whoever wins asks a question to their partner who needs to answer in the TL. Another variant: the winner speaks for a given time on a particular topic, using key words, as support, from the board.
• The Flippity Random Picker option, with key vocabulary instead of names! can be very useful here. The groups of 2,3,4 etc. (increasing difficulty as the number goes up) will generate groups of 2,3,4 etc.. words. Students can be asked to say or write a sentence incorporating all the vocabulary in each group. Below there is an example with 4 groups of 2 words each. Students would have to say or write 4 sentences using the words in each group.

• Creative written tasks via Padlet, so students can see each other's contributions and learn from one another. 
• Drama oral activities. Click here for a wide range of drama activities to be used in MFL lessons  designed by Creative Multilingualism. 
• Creative oral tasks via videos, short films, short stories, comics created by students
• All board games discussed above but now, with an open ended response. This is great to practice the General Conversation questions. 

I believe that by creating memorable, sticking lessons, with high expectations and lots of retrieval practice to allow student to master content, students make natural progress, which in return will make them feel confident, which contributes to becoming motivated! 

How do we motivate students? By delivering great lessons, having high expectations, even for low ability groups, providing learners with all the ingredients they need to make progress, so they believe in themselves and find MFL achievable! Creating the right balance of not too difficult neither too easy! JUST RIGHT.