SOS: maximising skills for the GCSE exam!

Just before our Xmas break and before I got Covid from one of my lovely daughters, we conducted our Oral Mock exams for MFL. After Xmas we will carry out the other papers: listening, reading and writing. It was a strange feeling as last time we did these oral exams was back in 2019! 

In this post, I want to concentrate on a straight-forward line of action, which I have followed in the past, when Mock results for some sets/students were at least one grade below Baseline Grades, based on Midyis predictions. In fact, although a SOS guideline, these are strategies we apply to all our Y11 lessons as from September, for a matter of fact! 

Maximising Listening

This is the skill our students tended to underperform in the trial and in the real GCSE exams, the Cinderella skill, like Gianfranco Conti calls it! We started tackling the listening skill at KS3 and I wrote extensively about it in this blog. However, these are the strategies you can adopt at GCSE:

• Dedicate a lesson every two weeks, exclusively to practise listening skills. We have three lessons per week so, one of those 6 lessons, in a fortnight, is exclusively a listening lesson.
• Look up random vocabulary in transcripts and reading past papers, which has appeared in previous years and you know you have not taught and create Quizlet courses. This is one of mine, I have two of these courses. Students learn this vocabulary over several homework tasks. It is amazing to see how some of the most random vocabulary keeps appearing in exams, year after year like: ancianos, sopa de marisco, productos lácteos or me enteré/me decepcionó in AQA!
• Use Exampro activities for AQA, if you have the subscription, on a given theme/topic, so you concentrate on specific vocabulary at a time. If you don't have a subscription to this site, I would recommend you do so! It is affordable and invaluable in preparing students for exam style questions!
• When practising listening, for example via Exampro tasks, do it as a way to learn the language not to test it! For this, we always start by giving students the transcripts first, looking up vocabulary, doing translation activities, filling in the gaps, ideally in previous lessons, or as homework tasks. During our listening lesson, we always listen to the audio while reading the transcript and then complete the task. We may do only 2/3 tasks this way and then we attempt them again without the transcript. On a second listening lesson, we will do them again, interleaved with previous topic tasks, without transcript. 
• Students do add, any unknown vocabulary appearing in the transcript to their own random Quizlet courses: the more vocabulary they know, the better they will be at recognising it in a listening but also reading task!

Keep doing this routine every two weeks and during your normal lessons, emphasise listening tasks via Dictation, Battleships, Rock Climbing, Faulty Echo etc.. as explained in my previous listening blog. Over time, start mixing up topics and themes and set up listening tasks for homework too.  

Maximising Reading 

Students tend to do better in this skill. Learning random vocabulary, as done per listening, and all topic vocabulary is key for success! 

I normally tackle this skill via homework tasks, as I personally like using lesson time for oral/listening activities mainly. Exampro proves invaluable here too!

The key for success for this skill is to treat it, like the listening component, as an opportunity to learn the language!  So, students are encouraged to add any unknown vocabulary to their Random Vocabulary Quizlet, when carrying out the activities. In fact doing this is part of the homework task!

It is important that students don't see this practice as a test/assessment but as a learning opportunity!  Going through the reading tasks/answers with students and stop, to model, as a whole class, the thinking process to tackle those tricky questions, it is vital and super important. 

Don't just ask students to complete a task: reflect on the process of how students came to a particular answer and why it was not another. The exam is full of "catchy" bits, so training students to recognise these and look up for intensifiers, synonyms, negative words etc.. in a text are crucial skills!

Tackling Writing

To get better at this, students need models of what a good writing task looks like and must know the structures/vocabulary/grammar extremely well! This is why using Sentence Builders throughout the GCSE course, not just at KS3, is so important: as these provide a wonderful framework to work with and manipulate the language as needed. 

All our Sentence Builders for GCSE can be found here . Of course, interleaving, retrieval practice and key activities throughout the GCSE course to help students learn these Sentence Builders and transfer them to the Long Term Memory, are essential.  To get ideas on Writing Tasks in general, as from KS3, visit this blogpost. 

• Present students with a model of a writing task. Silvia Bastow has written extensively on how to do this on this Blogpost  as has Sonja Fedrizzi on this other Blogpost. Inspired by these two wonderful educators, this is my model video on how to tackle the 150 word question in AQA:

• Dedicate a lesson every two weeks, to carry out a timed writing task in Y11.  This is the list of Timed writing tasks, which I created based on past papers to train students to carry out the AQA 150 word task.   Every two weeks, students for homework, prepare one of the tasks, taking into account the advice given on the right box:

     During our Writing lesson, they will carry out the task in exam conditions, which will be marked by me, using the AQA Mark Scheme and giving them specific feedback, which they need to tackle on the next task:

This technique, has dramatically improved the writing grades of our students in exams, prior Covid. As a matter of fact, we start using Timed Writings as from October Half-term up to Study leave in May.

• Retrieve, constantly in lessons, those verbs in present/past/future, that students need, together with high impact expressions to get the highest grades in the writing task.
• During lesson time, carry out Translation activities in a game environment! Genially games, as well as Carousel Learning tasks can be great here!

Maximising Speaking

As with the Writing skills, it is important to model how to tackle the different components of the Speaking exam. In the case of AQA, knowing how to do well in the Roleplay and the Photocard is essential, as these two components will provide 50% of the marks for the whole oral and they just require exam technique! To prepare students well for this, we have created this Oral booklet, based on past paper Roleplays and Photocards, as well as, example oral questions. 

• Spend as much lesson time as possible on oral skills. This is the only skill which is very difficult for students to maximise on their own! Similarly, it is the skill that will motivate them the most to study a language at GCSE and beyond!!! If they feel they cannot speak, they will give up on the subject. For that, you can use, some of the activities proposed on this blog, preferably from KS3.
• Using the Oral Booklet, model and practise, first in writing using MWBs, the Roleplay and Photocards. In Y11, these present great starter activities for a lesson! After practising as a whole class with MWBs, Students can practise the tasks, easily, with their partners as the oral booklet has on one side the student card and on the other the teacher's version. 
• To practise the General Conversation part of the exam, 50% of the whole speaking mark, give them model questions which students can start preparing in flashcards, little by little as from Y10, as the course progresses. I make it clear they cannot learn by heart all these questions! but having them in writing, gives them some confidence for their own revision on what a good model answer looks like! 

Make the link between the General Conversation in the Speaking exam and the Writing exam

• Help students practise these questions via home work tasks and connect the oral to the writing: make the next timed writing, as explained above, linked to the same theme/topic as a previous oral homework task. There’s a clear link between both exams and students need to understand such link!

  Students must realise that by revising potential oral questions for the general conversation they are, in fact, learning potential content for the writing tasks. Understanding this link breaks down the gigantic task of tackling four different exams for GCSE. Such concept is also reinforced by using multi skilled activities and the same type tasks to practise different skills, for example Battleships for listening, oral and writing. Students must understand that all skills are interwoven and must be practised interlinked with each other.

• During lessons, dedicate time to practise the general conversation questions in a game format. This is an example with Flippity: students click on the randomiser, play, Piedra, Papel, Tijera and must answer a question as it spins. To make the task more challenging, ask them to include a high impact expression, from the second column, in their answer. 

• Dedicate your lessons two weeks leading to the Mock and real MFL orals to just practise oral skills. 

• As with writing, make sure you retrieve, during your lessons, key verbs in different tenses and high impact expressions.

These techniques have made a big difference for me year after year and have helped my students maximise their grade! I hope it is useful for you. I would be super happy to hear what other techniques you use which are successful for you and your students!

My best (not free but worth every penny) apps and sites to support EPI

I have written a few posts on the apps and digital tools that I extensively use to deliver my lessons and support Sentence Buillders and the EPI methodology, led by Gianfranco Conti. However, so far the vast majority of these apps were free ones such as Flippity, Wheel of names, Genially, LearningApps, DeckToys, Loom or Canva. 

Today, I would like to talk about the sites and apps, which are not free, but that are essential in my MARS EARS approach to teaching Spanish and are worth every penny! Of course, budgets vary massively from school to school, but hopefully this list will help you decide which ones you could try and start using within your budgets.

Modelling and Awareness-raising

Sentencebuilders.com

This is the first stage of the learning process via a lexicogrammar approach to learning languages. Although most of the process will involve the teacher providing live models for students via a Sentence Builder, which can just be displayed into an Interactive Board, using various repetition techniques and activities such as Syllabing, Spotting the missing word, Dictation, Delayed Dictation or Sentence Puzzle, to mention but a few, the site Sentence Builders, can really add an element of fun for whole class activities at this stage.  

This site is super affordable and it is evolving by the day!  It operates around the concept of Sentence Builders. You can use pre-populated Sentence Builders, under Premium Resources, in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Welsh! or, and this is what makes the site so special, you can create, using the site itself, your own Sentence Builders, which you can share with your school or the whole community! Once created a Sentence Builder will look like this, and will generate endless online activities:

It is great for this Stage as you can display it on the board, do repetition as needed, as you would normally do with a PPT or Smartboard slide, but most importantly, after repetition, if you click on the little beret cap icon at the bottom (teacher tools) you will have many choices to display your Sentence Builder: with just initials, with just consonants, with the English translation, without, with the word shape etc.. and now the fun starts!!

After a few repetition rounds with all the words displayed in both languages, I tend to show the Spanish version, firstly, without vowels, then 50/50, finally just initials. I involve the whole class but doing choral repetition to start with and moving to cold calling after a few rounds, working in teams to get points! As this is the modelling stage, students just say the Spanish, but with the added difficulty of having to remember some of the missing letters. I love it, as it avoids me to create a PPT with different slides and it makes the lesson super engaging!  For information on how to use the teacher tools in the Sentence Builders site, have a look at this blogpost.

If you click on Random Spanish prompt, in the yellow box, the site will create random Spanish sentences, based on your Sentence Builder, which you and your students can read, incorporating Phonics into your lesson in context, and translate into English to help memorising.

At this point, I will point out grammatical structures, without explicitly explaining them: Raising Awareness, and will elicit grammatical rules already studied: For example for this Sentence Builder, about holidays in the past, I would ask students to transform the Spanish sentence at the bottom, to the present and would practise the verb IR in the Present tense, followed by "de": voy de vacaciones/ voy de compras/ voy de paseo or just the verb SER. The site will also allow you to print out your Sentence Builders or any Premium, pre-populated ones, which is great to make your own Sentence Builders Booklets! 

Receptive Processing 

This stage is very much linked to the previous one, as it involves to create high-intensity processing practice via listening and reading tasks, (controlled input). At this stage, the Sentence Builders website is great too, as it will create, automatically (once your Sentence Builder is created), a wide range of classic EPI activities such as Dictation, Delayed Dictation, Read and translation, Listening to Translation, Delayed Copying etc.

The site allows you to create your own classes, very easily, and will provide login details for your students. At this stage, I assign a pre-defined path of activities, based on receptive input, which students may carry out during the lesson, as all my students bring their own device to lessons, or as Homework Tasks. 

Structured Production

Sentencebuilders.com and Textivate

At this stage, where students will be required to produce their own sentences via careful planned scaffolded practice, based on the studied Sentence Builder, I use, the Sentence Builders site again. Now, I pre-select activities within the Translate to Spanish option, which will give a lot of  scaffolded opportunities for pushed output: from Word gap (click) to Type all (no clues). Students get points and immediate feedback and you can check progress from your classes section. 

Textivate, another super affordable site by the same creator as Sentence Builders, Martin Lapworth, is another great site for Structured Production activities. The concept is very similar to Sentences Builders, but activities are generated from a text you previously add to the site, rather than a Sentence Builder.

EARS (Expansion, Autonomy, Routanization, Spontaneity)

The Language Gym, Languagenut and This is Language

This is the latest stage of the process and the most difficult to reach! At this stage, the structures have been extensively learned by the students and are practised, interleaving past structures from old Sentence Builders and requiring students to start manipulating the language to create their own output. Scaffolding will still be needed, though! Activities such as creating presentations, freer translations, open questions with limited time constrictions, work well at this stage. Other classics include: speed dating, the spider game, group talk or speak bingo. 

At some point in this stage I will cover grammar via an inductive process, see this blogpost here and will use another of my favourite sites, The Language Gym. The Language Gym allows you to practise the language, via a wide range of pre-populated activities. The site is the digital version of the popular The Language Gym books, authored by Gianfranco Conti, Dylan Viñales and the Language Gym team! So if you use the books in your lessons, this site is a must, and again super affordable! Similarly, using the pre-populated activities in the site, although they don’t coincide entirely with my sentence builders, is priceless to start learning new vocabulary on a given topic, as I explain below.

At this stage, my favourite activity is the Verb Trainer. The verb trainer, does what it says in the tin! It will help students memorise conjugation of verbs. In the Language Gym you can, very easily, create classes and assign assessments from any of the 8 types of exercises above. I love the Verb Trainer because, it helps students drill verb endings in a fun way, especially if you carry the activity live, where all students compete against each other and provide some prizes, like my scratch Bitmoji cards!  It is a winner every single time and students will start using the Verb Trainer independently to revise different tenses, before oral and writing tests. You can practise up to 9 verb tenses, making it ideal from KS3 to KS5!!! My Alevel students use it too!

At this point, together with lots of productive tasks, I also carry out many listening and reading activities moving away from our Sentence Builder.  This process is important, as I want to train my students to learn more vocabulary than just that practised in our Sentence Builders, in preparation for their GCSE exam. I wrote a post on vocabulary learning and how I distinguish between Productive and Receptive vocabulary. Click here to read that post.  To learn Receptive vocabulary, which ideally I would expect to become productive as the students become better linguists and independent in their learning process, I use The language gym activities but also the following sites:

Languagenut and This is Language.  Both of these sites will require the creation of classes, which is very easy to do, and log in details and both of them will be based on pre-populated activities.

This is Language is a site designed to practise listening skills from authentic videos, recorded with native speakers, based on typical GCSE questions and topics for French, German and Spanish. I love it because it allows me and my students to practise exam-style listening content, in a very engaging way, far away from the boring, constricted exam listening tasks and audio files.  The site also allows students to practice grammar and vocabulary aimed at AQA and Edexcel, which makes it a great independent practice tool at KS4!

Recently, the site has also added a Speaking type of activity, which looks great! You can choose a topic, a type of question within that topic and before students record themselves with a suitable answer, they are encouraged to watch some videos with model answers and activities to inspire and enhance their pre-learned oral questions. I love this task, as it practises listening for oral productivity, a key aspect of the EPI approach. As part of the learning process, while carrying out the activities, students are encouraged to add any learned new vocabulary into their Random Quizlet and learn it as part of strategic homework tasks. 

My students really like This is Language and the videos! They are designed, as all the activities in the site, for KS3 and GCSE. You can choose videos per topic for KS3 or by board for GCSE, and within that per theme/topic. Once you select a topic you have a few videos to choose from. I love the fact that you have different accents to choose from, ranging from different regions of Spain to South America. The stars represent the difficulty of the listening, and once a video is selected and assigned, students can slow down the audio as needed in order to carry out some really good activities, which exploit the video resource fully!  

I have found that using This is Language in the last stage of learning on covered topics, expands my students vocabulary and trains them to listen to unknown, unprepared words/structures. The fact that they have access to the full transcript and they are encouraged to look words up, makes it a very powerful tool, which can then be used independently by my students in preparation to their GCSE or just internal exams. 

Languagenut can be used from Primary to GCSE level, with plans to extend it to Alevel! It is available for French, German, Mandarin and Spanish. I love it because we can use it from Y7 to GCSE, under the same subscription. It has a very wide range of pre-populated activities to choose from which are assigned to your classes. 

The activities I mainly use for students to learn new vocabulary via reading and listening, are those under Exam Skills. The texts range from different level of difficulties, which I can assign to specific students. Students will complete the activities and when encountering new key vocabulary, they will add it to their random Quizlet, as done with This is Language. Every so often, my students need to learn this personal random quizlet and when carrying out productive tasks, I always encourage them to use some of such structures/vocabulary. 

Languagenut will also allow students to practice writing and speaking, using the GCSE exam framework. This is great to promote spontaneity as students cannot prepare a given set of questions and writing titles, making it the perfect GCSE revision tool! Students can record their answers and submit them for you to listen to! 

I am lucky that my department can afford these subscriptions! However, there's something for all pockets and focus! When used within a planned sequence of lessons, all these sites can be extremely powerful in the MFL classroom to achieve fluently and develop independent skills in students!

Stretching ALL students in MFL, not just High Achievers!

In these post I will be focussing on how to stretch ALL students in the MFL classroom and in the process, any high achievers that you may have, but not exclusively them, especially if like me you use Sentence Builders. I have read lots of comments suggesting that the lexicogrammar approach or EPI, following Gianfranco Conti’s nomenclature, can be boring and not stretch students in lessons, especially those with a higher aptitude for languages.

Anchor in Challenge

I have experienced the opposite. ALL my students, including  highly motivated students with an aptitude to language learning, can actually fly using this approach. The reason why is that from a very early stage we plant the seed for more sophisticated structures, which nurtures my students' curiosity and makes them explore grammatical concepts earlier and start being creative with the language. Sentence Builders allows me to Anchor in Challenge.

How to stretch students

Curriculum Design

Make sure you design a good curriculum which allows for creativity and the exploration of grammatical concepts early on. 

On one hand, your students will feel special, clever as you point out that some of the structures they are learning are 7-9 grade structures, you are telling them that you BELIEVE  IN THEM and they CAN ACHIEVE. 

On the other, High achievers tend to love finding out how the language works and planting the seed to interesting grammatical structures is key to make them expore!

For example, our Sentence Builders in Y7 incorporates the structure me gustaría que mi madre fuera + personality adjective  (I would like my mother to be), which in Spanish would require the use of the Imperfect Subjunctive. 

ALL our students, independently of ability, can recognise and/or use this structure and they feel good! On top of that, high achievers are prompted to work out how we would say I would like my parents to be which would require them to use fueran (3rd person plural), which they often decode after applying the pattern from “tienen” (they have= adding -n to the 3rd person singular tiene), so applying that pattern they add “n” to “fuera”. When I carry out this metalanguage thinking skills session, I do it for the whole class: having high expectations.

Later in the curriculum, in Y8, the same structure reappears now under the topic of Where I live: Me gustaría que mi casa fuera and we introduce tuviera. It will be repeated in Y9 too in the topic of tourism: me gustaría que mi ciudad fuera/tuviera” 

Our curriculum, based on Sentence Builders, is very well thought out and is full of high impact expressions like this, which are analysed in lessons, engaging high achievers and making ALL students feel clever! 

Such structures are introduced and practised extensively, with more simplistic structures. However they are not introduced all at once. Remember  less is more, and at KS3 we can spend weeks with a single sentence builder until students are fluent with it.

These are a few of the structures spread over our Sentence Builders at KS3 and recycled at KS4:

Le gusta/nos gusta/les gusta, instead of just me gusta

Me gustaba, so students work out les/nos gustaba, as they have been introduced to les/nos gusta: IDENTIFYING PATTERNS

Me gustaría + infinitive 

Me habría gustado + infinitive pero no pude As with Me gustaba, they soon work out le/les/nos habría gustado

Se me da bien, so students start working out se le/nos/les da bien

Puedo/podemos + infinitive

Suelo + infinitive

Solía + infinitive, so students work out solíamos/ solían

Siempre he querido hacerlo, so students start modifying it to siempre he querido + any infinitive

Me hace sentir bien

Me hizo sentir bien, so students can modify it to me hace/hizo reir/tener miedo/estar contento

Si pudiera me gustaría, so students start analysing pudiera and take risks to say, si pudiéramos. 

Si tuviera la oportunidad me gustaría+ infinitive 

Me ayuda a /me permite + infinitive 

All these are complex but extremely frequent expressions in spoken Spanish which students naturally use to express themselves and if following a textbook, would only encounter in Y11 or Alevel, recurring to Google Translate in the meantime!

Using a random personal Quizlet

All our sentence builders are linked to our departmental Quizlets. However, at some point in the learning journey, we carry out extra listening and reading activities moving away from the structures in the sentence builders, once students are fluent in a particular topic. 

Students always collect this vocabulary, which we nominate receptive, in their Random personal Quizlet courses. They have a Random Quizlet course per topic. Student learn this vocabulary, so that they can recognise it in listening or reading tasks. However, I also encourage pupils to use it in creative responses to substitute vocabulary from the official Sentence Builders. 

Could you?

When carrying out retrieval practice activities or structured practice tasks, mainly with mini whiteboards, but also in oral tasks, I always encourage, by modelling myself, students to extend their answers, using some of the high impact expressions above in new contexts: INTERLEAVING. 

That is great, could you use "me hizo + infinitive" to extend your answer?

I also encourage them to use the receptive vocabulary which we encountered in listening and reading tasks, from textbooks or Exampro and away from our Sentence Builders.

Many do it instinctively after a few lessons! In these video tutorials I demonstrate how I do this with Wheel of names and Flippity:

Have a repertoire of enrichment activities 

These activities are not just for high achievers but, for anyone who would like to stretch themselves and enrich their MFL experience.

I used to keep folders in my classroom with reading activities, such as graders or the lovely Authentik Magazines. I still do! But I have now a lovely repertoire of enrichment and extension tasks on OneNote, under the content library, to be done during lessons, as decided by students if a whole class tasks is finished or as extra learning at home. 

My repertoire include:

Independent work in the Verb Trainer of the Language Gym. What about learning about a new tense?

Independent work using This is Language and Languagenut

Extra videos + worksheets

Short films in Spanish 

Netflix Series

Zig-zag listening activities 

Zig-zag reading stories

The Language Gym Extranjeros book.

Cooking  recipe book/you tube videos for students to create their own dish 

Learning Spanish with songs with a link to Lyricstraining. 

Anchor in Challenge

I have high expectations and expect from ALL students a level higher than that expected by National Curriculum standards: at KS3, I expect some work at GCSE level and at GCSE level some work at ALevel. 

This principle is particularly important in the case of stretching the high achievers. So I give them websites aimed at higher levels and they love it! Languagenut and This is Language is brilliant for this, although not free, as you can assign special assignments to specific pupils within the same class, or have a challenge assignment for the whole class.

In the case of Spanish these two free websites are invaluable for KS4 students:

Hola Carmela

Spanish Podcasts

The use of Golden Expressions (Idioms)

Apart from the High impact expressions, which normally include idioms, blended within our Sentence Builders, we give students from Y7 to Y11 our Golden Expressions sheet. I challenge students to learn two idioms from the Golden Expressions sheet every half term and use them within oral or written activities. When done, I use my famous Scratch cards with Bitmojis. See this Blogpost here. 

A copy of my Golden Expressions sheet can be found here. 

Planning a rich curriculum

This means any extra curricular and cultural activity which will inspire students. The key is to offer it to ALL the students. 

We use Poetry in lessons: the Gloria Fuertes poems are brilliant for this, as they are authentic but easy to understand for all students. They also provide a perfect opportunity for high achievers to expand their repertoire of vocabulary and be creative with the language. 

Encouraging creative writing following models from Stories and Poems can be extremely powerful! 

Organising a speaking/debating/board games in MFL club 

Theatre Viewings etc.. are also excellent opportunities to stretch your students. A wrote a blogpost, on extracurricular activities to enrich your curriculum some time ago, with many ideas to try! 

Project Based Learning

As I explain on this blogpost, the importance and the power of Project Based Learning in MFL to stretch students and open the door to cultural understanding.

Our MFL curriculum includes a little project every year during KS3: Picasso Project for Y7, La leyenda del Espantapájaros (short film) for Y8 and Coco the film for Y9. These projects are embedded within our curriculum and are carried out by all students with scaffolding and specific Sentence Builders, so all students are enriched. Higher achievers, particularly enjoy Projects, and very quickly start manipulating the language, if a solid foundation to the structures expected throughout the project, has been set up. 

My experience is that Sentence Builders are a great source to stretch ALL students as it provides a solid structure and foundation on what to excel, plants the seeds for more sophisticated grammatical structures and creative language, avoiding the use of Google Translate and focussing on communication and fluency. 

Example of Work, in exam conditions, from a Y11 High Achiever using Sentence Builders and a Rich Curriculum: How you prepare for exams and problems in your school.

Example of Work, in exam conditions, from a Y11 middle range student using Sentence Builders and a Rich Curriculum: How you prepare for exams and problems in your school.  Careless mistakes are highlighted but not corrected. Student needs to correct them. 

Language Show 2021 Webinars

It was an absolute pleasure to present today twice in the Language Show 2021. Thank you everyone for your lovely comments, they really mean a lot!  The actual webinars and presentations can be found below:

Blended Learning, Giving students superpowers!

Developing Oral Skills in MFL: From Modelling to Fluency

As promised presentations for both talks can be found below too:

Developing Oral Skills in MFL: From Modelling to Fluency 

Blending Learning: Giving Pupils superpowers!

Low ability classes: how to reach them!

Three years ago, I had two vey disillusioned classes, one in Y8 and one in Y10. Both were mixed ability groups with many special educational needs, together with disorganised demotivated students. The Y10 class (1st year of GCSE) had lessons always in the afternoon, being one of them on a Friday Period 8 (3:40-4:30). It was not easy, and although the lessons were good, the students were clearly not enjoying Spanish and certainly, I was not winning them all.

I started to do some research on what would work for them and I came across Gianfranco Conti's blog The Language Gym and the Lexicogrammar approach to teaching. I was doing many of the things portrayed in the blog but not in a systematic way. At the time we had ditched the textbook and had a rich reduced curriculum. We also used Knowledge Organisers (with nouns, verbs etc..) but students still struggled to create accurate sentences and to make rapid progresss.

I introduced Sentence Builders to both classes, and consciously spent more time in the modelling stage of learning, with many listening/reading activities before moving to structured production.

The change was instant. Students were increasingly more and more engaged and started to become better at Spanish. It was the beginning of my lexicogrammar journey. All my Y10 students passed their GCSE with at least a 4 grade.

Low ability students often struggle to learn languages because they tend to have poor memory and poor processing skills. When we add to the equation not much curriculum time and a big syllabus to cover, the result is a I can't do attitude which tends to translate into low expectations from the part of the teacher and demotivation from the part of the students. It is a dog chasing its tail situation. This is my strategy. 

15 steps to reach low ability students: a sequence of lessons

• Less is more and have high expectations. Expect all your students, regardless of ability, to do well in MFL. However, at the beginning you may have to go extra slowly with certain classes with a big proportion of low attainers. Do not rush, because, in the long term it will pay off and you will be able to increase the pace enormously. It’s important to set robust roots. 
• Using Sentence Builders is key as these give a structure to learning and will allow students to make progress quickly, hence increasing their motivation. They are also great for students with poor memory retention as it prevents them from turning to Google Translate! Their Sentence Builders becomes their Google Translate and in time, they will memorise them. Similarly in mixed ability classes, SBs will allow you to differentiate easily via scaffolding: while you reinforce structures, high flyers can move on to use more complicated language. 
• Spend lot of time modelling language (your Sentence Builders) via listening activities so that students get good phonetic models and eventually memorise the vocabulary. Think of lessons as a space to help your students to transfer your sentence builders into the long term memory, so students learn the chunks for later manipulation. Carry out Modelling activities with mini White Boards. These are amazing to add a fun element to the lesson and a competition feeling, while creating a non threating set as students just need to wipe out their answers if not sure. They are also great to stretch high ability kids if needed. Great, Lily, can you extend your answer with something we learned in the last topic? See below for some of my favourite Modelling activities at this stage. 
• Start focusing on small chunks and increase them in length and speed (when doing listening activities) little by little. 
• Some Sentence Builders will require the use of verbs. Start teaching the infinitive form of the verb first. (With normal modelling tasks) As this will allow you to start introducing a variety of structures! Suelo, me gustaría, nos gusta, me gusta etc.. See Example for the topic of Holidays. Then move to the first/third person forms, through another Sentence Builder, and finally the we/they forms via an explicit grammar explanation of a given tense. 
• Start every lesson with a Quick Fire session revising last lesson's chunks and interleaving structures from past weeks even months or years! I do this with MWBs and I just make up sentences! Sometimes for this Retrieval PracticeI may use Wheel of names.
• After at least 1 lesson, sometimes I need 2 or 3 at this stage! Start moving to Practised Production activities. See below for activities ideas at this stage. Remember to differentiate via scaffolding with sentence builders. You can push hard and if the activity is difficult, allow some students to use their SBs for support.
• Introduce questions to students on the topic you are covering and expect some improvised answers from students. To help students at this stage, ask the questions orally as a class and expect students to write down model answers in their MWBs. Then do it orally. If students cannot improvise anything, give them ideas on things they can say in English, for them to translate orally for you. Go to another student and come back to the same student, to make sure they can improvise something this time! 
• Repeat the above activity but now with a game! The genially games are excellent for this, but now with questions that students need to ask each other and respond to. 
• Ask students to carry out a Writing Task (90/150 words) on the studied topic, interleaving information from previous topics. My students tend to do this for homework. Have high expectations and model the writing task with your students first by creating a task collaboratively! Instructional videos like those created by Sonja Fredizzi are great for students to refer to when at home and developing independence. Before this writing task, my homework’s consist of explicitly learning the SBs with a Quizlet aligned to them, reading activities, translations etc..
• Mark the writing task and provide feedback to students, including oral collective feedback, and use a lesson to improve the task based on such feedback. I do not mark all mistakes but I highlight them and expect students to correct them during this lesson. Students then rewrite their task: without mistakes and improving it regarding content, if necessary. Do not accept poor quality writing! 
• Carry out more practice of structures with games and information gap activities via oral questions. 
• At this stage, students should be quite confident with their sentence builders so it is the perfect opportunity to explicitly teach grammar!
• Use Flipgrid and Padlet as tools for the students to start being creative and write/speak their own discourses. At this stage, I encourage students to add past topics vocabulary. This is the More Creative/Fluent stage of learning! 
• Finally, I ask students to provide a Writing Task 2 on the topic or oral presentation. Any task based activity will come after this stage. 

Excellent activities for the Modelling Stage of learning 

• Dictations with MWB (Miniwhite board) 
• Delayed Dictations: like normal dictations but students have to wait a few seconds before they are allowed to write their sentences/chunks in their MWB. In those crucial seconds, they should repeat the sentence to themselves to help them memorise structures. 
• Translations both ways. (Miniwhite board)
• Putting sentences, from a list on the board in English, into the correct order as you read them randomly. Increase your speed or reduce it according to your students' ability/needs. 
• Bad listening: provide students with a short text (in TL less challenging in English more difficult), based on your Sentence Builders, read it to students but with small changes. Ask students to highlight the differences first, then to write the structures they hear. 

• Gap filling activities based on a text read by you but without gaps! This is an excellent activity as students need to fully concentrate as they don't know where the gaps are. Similarly, it is an excellent activity for students to try to guess where the gaps will be likely to be, which is an excellent way to emphasise and work with collocations and priming. 
• Rock Climbing: You create a grid like the one in the picture and you call out combinations which students need to jot down (always read a choice from the bottom line, a choice from the second etc.. hence the name of Rock Climbing!) This is another great activity to recycle as an oral/writing task too!

• Listening Battleships: You create a grid with many sentences in it and then you call out the sentences and students write the coordinates of the sentences you read. I love this activity because it can be used later in the Practised Production stage, as a retrieval grid or even for homework, where students need to write down the sentences into Target Language. 

Excellent activities for Practised Production

• Use Wheel of Names and Flippity randomiser for students to start practising the language, first via MWB, lex by you, but then, sharing the links, as oral activities in pairs. I combine these activities with the game Stone, Paper, Scissors. It works extremely well!  I may ask students to write the sentences in their books, after doing them with MWBs as a whole class, for extra practice with some classes: every child uses the link, spins the wheel and write their translation in books. I explain how I do this with Wheel of names in this video. 
  
  
• Use the Sentence Builders website.  This website, created by Martin Lapworth, creator of Textivate and TaskMagic, allows you to create your own sentence builders and hundreds of activities, which students access via their own accounts, which teachers create for them. It is an absolutely excellent site to help students memorise and practise your Sentence Builders. Activites include, translation both ways (with initials, missing vowels, anagrams form) reading activities, listening activities in chunks or in sentences and many more! Excellent for homework tasks and easy to monitor progress.

• Any information gap activity works at this stage! Below is an example with Ping-Pong translation. 

• Battleships but now students play in pairs and need to guess their partners coordinates by saying the sentences. More confident students can be asked to extend the sentences appearing on the board. 
• Board games where students need to translate sentences: Jenga, Snakes and Ladders, Connect Four etc.. for this I use Genially Templates. You can watch this video where I explain how to use Genially. 
  
  
• Stealing Sentences three levels! 
• Rock climbing but now students do the active in pairs. Students write specific coordinates and their partner need to guess the actual coordinate. Great for translation activities too! 

Remember, not to reinvent the wheel! Revamp and use the same activities in many different ways! I show how to do this on this blogpost. 

This sequence, complimented with a game/competition element and lots of praise, did win my disaffected students a few years back and it still works today. The process may seem slow but it increases in pace as you do it more and more!

That’s why starting to adopt this strategy at KS3 is key to have more curriculum time at KS4. However, it works equally well at KS4 for the first time too. 

Have a look at this blogpost where I go through a sequence of lessons at GCSE level using Sentence Builders. 

It works as my lessons become sticky and allows students to process information into the long term memory and automatise the language.

The strategy is based on the Lexicogrammar approach, underpinned by Rosenshine’s principles of instruction, summarised in the three pillars of Retrieval Practice, Interleaving and Spacing and Feedback driven Metacogniton aiming to create self-efficacy and independence in learners. 

 

Assessment Time = Feedforward and Aim High!

Last week we started a new term in the UK. Despite having been teaching for years, I always get nervous and apprehensive in September. It was a lovely, albeit tiring week, by the way! During our fist week, I had several people asking me about assessment in my lessons, especially as I don’t use textbooks. Do I write my own reading tests? Do I record my own listening activities? Do I adapt material from test assessments in textbooks? 

The truth is I do a little bit of everything.

Why do we assess? The Power of Feedforward 

It’s important to ask ourselves this question. Do we do it because the school ask us to do so? Do we do it because of parent pressure? Do we do it to inform, especially, our teaching and help our students become independent learners by reflecting on their performance (feedback driven meta cognition)? 

In my case, I do assess to inform my teaching and my learners, and, of course, to provide data, which my school and parents demand.

This means that assessment must be purposeful and should be embedded in students' language learning journey, as a tool to check for information for the teacher, using Rosenshine’s terminology, while providing meaningful feedback to the students, on how well they are doing, so they reflect on their knowledge/skill gaps and take (independent)action, with our help, to close such gaps. 

Feedback should really be called Feedforward via assessments. 

Low stakes tests 

Great MFL teaching should incorporate lots of modelling opportunities and  structured production tasks leading to spontaneity and creativity with the language. In order to successfully drive our students in this journey, we must constantly check for information, check they are confident with the structures we teach. I do this via lots of embedded retrieval practice, see this post here. This means that I am constantly assessing in my lessons. I do it through low stake tests which I, sometimes, do not even call tests. 

For this, I use, mainly, two tools, mini whiteboards and powerful questions:

• Questions that allow me to check for understanding 
• Questions that allow to deepen understanding in my students by making connections between new learning and what they already know.
• Questions that allow students to think and 
• Asking all students, hence, the power of mini whiteboards.

It is true that I also need data, so every three/four lessons, especially at the beginning of a new topic, I carry out low stakes tests. This means that it is done in paper.

I give students 10 small sentences to translate, both ways, based on the Sentence Builder covered and incorporating structures from past Sentence Builders (interleaving); we mark them in class (students mark their partners’ work, 2 marks per sentence and 1 mark if a mistake was made) and at the end of the lesson, as an exit ticket, students tell me in Spanish, their mark, which is always out of 20. This mark, I collect not only as evidence of progress for me, but also to give Merits to all those achieving 100% or even 80-90%, in a given test.

The key element for this tests is to make sure that students are ready for them and everybody gets at least 80%.  

These tests are a celebration for the class, a way for students to show that we care for each other and they feel safe, not anxious. This means lots of previous practice activities (normal tasks and also via LearningApps or Wheel of Names) and a couple of specific learning homeworks, via Quizlet or Memrise, linked to our Sentence Builders. 

These tests involve 0 preparation for me! My students love them and do not cause anxiety because very rarely they do badly, so it’s a great way to get a well-deserved Merit! 

Assessing all skills? 

I don’t do official end of unit tests and definitely not in all four skills. I rather use my, already reduced curriculum time, teaching/learning/practising the language. I use reading and listening tasks, as modelling tools to help my students learn the language not to be tested. However, twice a year we do two official assessments, following my school protocol. In these assessments we include two skills only: one productive and one receptive. 

For KS3, we adapt material from different textbooks while adding bits in relation to our studied Sentence Builders. We use textbook audio files, so students get used to many different voices, not only their teachers.

At KS4, we use Exampro, which uses past papers GCSE questions, which can be selected by topic and level (Foundation, Overlapping, Higher). We tend to do lots of Exampro activities as part of our normal classroom activities, so again, students are ready for these. 

At the end of these tests, we do Self-Reflection tasks to help students to reflect on what went well, identify gaps and decide an action plan to overtake these hurdles. 

Example of KS3 Self-Reflection sheet

Example of KS4 Self-Reflection sheet

Similarly, Y11 students carry out a Writing Task in test conditions every two weeks to help them to master the 150 words GCSE question in the exam. For this, students are given a list of writing tasks. Directed by me, they prepare one task for homework, after, as a class, we have modelled, collaboratively, a good answer and after reading the question support information provided in their given writing task Title in yellow:

Y11 Timed Writing Questions and support

I mark these tasks using the AQA mark scheme, providing oral feedback on OneNote so that students, as part of the lesson, reflect on their performance and learn what to address in the following task in two weeks’ time.

In other words, assessment should be used to feedforward and anchor in high expectations! 

Of course Digital Tools can also be used for low stakes tests: Quizizz, Quizlet, MS Forms and Google Forms, are also great ways to provide short tests for students to check on their understanding and make them reflect on the outcome!