From Structured Production to Fluency

I have decided to write a short post on the trickiest and most difficult stage of the language learning journey: the transition from structured production, where students practise the structures and chunks in our Sentence Builders, to spontaneous output, where the students can produce such structures freely and, most importantly, creatively by manipulating the chunks and applying grammatical rules.

What is fluency?

Before I show my strategy, I would like to define what fluency means for me in the context of a secondary school setting, with limited curriculum time and pressures from external exams.

Fluency does not mean to be able to speak freely on any topic, as a nearly bilingual person would do. That’s another interpretation of fluency, which, hopefully we can reach at some point, normally towards the end of Year 13 and in some cases by the end of Y11.

In my context, fluency means that my students can reproduce in speaking or writing format, unaided, from memory, the structures we have practised on a given topic and in the case of intermediate learners, to start combining Sentence Builders from past topics and applying grammar freely to express their own opinions and saying what they want! In this sense, my Year 7s can be fluent when talking/writing about Free Time for example, which is hugely motivating. 

Students start creating schemata in their long term memory with the studied Sentence Builders on different topics, creating a web of fluencies/schemata which relate to each other, allowing them to manipulate language and combine key structures and vocabulary, such as suelo, me gusta, me gustaría que… fuera/ si tuviera la oportunidad, etc… and apply grammatical rules, in new contexts, becoming creative with the language, to reach, little by little, the more general definition of fluency, which for me would mean the true internalisation of the grammatical system and a big corpora of vocabulary/structures, which can be reproduced by the brain, automatically, to create utterances and which, as I said, in my experience, starts occurring by the end of Y11 or Y13, if not later!

It is liberating then, to say to my Y7 you are fluent in Spanish on this topic and as you become fluent with other topics too and start applying the grammar and combining structures more freely, you will become a truly fluent speaker of Spanish in any given topic. But your first step is there!

How to achieve fluency?

In my experience, it is essential to have a clear SoW and learning path for students. That's why I always advise teachers to plan backwards. Start by deciding as a team, what outcome/ model text you would like your students to be able to produce by the end of a topic or unit, making sure that you incorporate structures and grammar from past topics/sentence builders, retrieving key structures in new contexts. 

Once that is decided, design the Sentence Builders based on the vocabulary/grammar needed for your students to reach your final outcome; and reflect on the activities you, as a department, are going to use to help your students at each stage of their learning journey within a topic, from Modelling, going through Structured Production to reach Spontaneity/Creativity.  Having a list of these activities in a given SoW can be extremely useful for a team, see the second picture below. 

Do not expect Fluency/Spontaneity/Creativity to happen spontaneously without careful planning and a clear  structure. Spontaneity or the EARS part of the learning journey, using Gianfranco Conti's nomenclature, needs to be planned and structured and it relies on a robust implementation of the two previous stages of learning (MARS). Move too fast, and the last stage will not happen! hence, why it is so difficult to achieve in a secondary school setting, although not impossible!

Strategies to achieve fluency

Have a “less is more” approach, specially at KS3, so that you avoid cognitive overload. Start increasing the amount of topics/grammar to cover in a given year, as students become more mature. In our case, we teach 3 topics in Y7, 4 in Y8 and 4/5 (as we study a film as a topic) in Y9. You can see this in my KS3 SoW, which you can find here. 

Retrieval Practice and Recycling of key structures, called Universals by Gianfranco Conti, or high impact expressions by me, is key. This requires careful planning of the SoW, and the material to include in your Sentence Builders. These should incorporate content vocabulary but also a list of key structures and high frequency words, recycled in different Sentence Builders, so when given a new Sentence Builder, around 20 or 30% of the structures are already known to students. They will feel motivated too.  When deciding your activities, for the Modelling and Structured Production stages, make sure you  incorporate vocabulary from previous topics. Retrieve past topics and LEARNED STRUCTURES, CONSTANTLY. it is what I call EMBEDDED RETRIEVAL PRACTICE. A blog post on this can be found here.

Case example:

My Y10 students studied problems/accidents during the topic of holidays and they learned the structure "un dia iba a/quería + infinitive" (salir con mis amigos, ir a la playa, which allowed them to recycle vocabulary from Free Time anyway) "cuando de repente, me picó una medusa/ tuve un accidente con el móvil/ me caí al suelo/a la piscina etc...".  Students learned these structures extremely well via Structured Production activities and could produce them spontaneously when we did the topic. I thought that was a nice way to incorporate a story, which could be funny so memorable, as Vincent Everett explains in his blog, to their GCSE repertoire. Consequently, in subsequent topics, we always incorporated a problem or an accident that happened to them when in school, when working at the weekend, when they met their best friend. Every time we revisit this subtopic, I incorporate new key structures to the problem, "le dije" "me dijo" " ese dia estaba contento porque había ganado una competición de música". All my students now, can narrate, fluently, a little accident/problem in many different contexts using key vocabulary, thanks to constant revisiting of the stuctures!

Recycle of all the activities you used in the Structured Production stage but with a twist. In the previous learning stage, I tend to use many translation type of activities, either by using Battleships, Information Gap activities, Oral Ping-Pong and especially LOTS of classic BOARD GAMES, which at the moment I do via Genially Templates and those produce by the talented Marie Allirot. A link to Marie's Boardgames as she showed in the ALLLondon Show & Tell in June can be found here. 

I use these templates all the time!  However, at this final stage, instead of expecting students to translate a sentence, the boardgames tasks will require students to create utterances from a given word, for example, or answer open ended questions on a given topi, always incorporating questions from past topics too, which force students to retrieve language/structures from their long term Memory. 

Flippity and Wheel of Names are also brilliant ways to develop fluency in this way! firstly in writing via mini white boards and then in pairs by testing each other. I explain how I do this in these two youtube Videos of mine:

How to maximise Wheel of Names (via Blended Learning) for Spontaneous Production. In this video example, I use translations but for spontaneity, I would use open ended questions or the beginning of a sentence they have to finish, or a topic students need to write or speak about, for a given time. Video link here

How to maxime the the use of Flippity (via Blended Learning) for Spontaneous Production. Video link here 

Other activities that work for Spontaneous Practice:

Oral presentations via Flipgrid. This can be very powerful if students feel confident about the language and the structures they need to use. 

Use of Padlet, where students write from memory what they remember from a particular topic. See example below from my Y9 students.  I also find that trying spontaneous production in writing before doing it orally, helps a lot!

3,2,1. Speak on a topic for 3 minutes, then change partner and do it for 2 minutes then for 1 minute!  This activity works extremely well combined with Speed Dating! 

Any Dice game linked to a topic: have six topics on the board numbered, if you get a 1 you must talk about that topic for a set period of time.  I love Vincent Everett's idea, where students work in pairs and scribble in a piece of paper while their partner speaks and stop when their partner stops talking.  The person who managed to speak the longest, more scribbling in the sheet, is the winner! This is his blogpost where he explains this activity. I tried this a couple of weeks ago and it worked brilliantly!  All students wanted to speak for long. 

Group talk like Greg Horton beautifully explained in the ALL June conference last week.  Get students to work in groups of 3/4. Set some questions on the board, mainly opinions on topics, and students must have a conversation, agreeing and disagreeing with each other on the given topics. This works really well if, previously "small talk" phrases have been taught to students such as: estoy de acuerdo, pero estás loco! , se te va la olla, de ninguna de las manera, pues para decir verdad, yo diría que, ¿de verdad?, tienes razon, no tenía ni idea! 

Piedra, Papel, Tijera (Stone, paper, scissors) where the winner needs to answer a question or talk on a topic. This can be combined to 1,2,3 or the Scribble Vincent's idea. 

Use of Flippity: the Randomizer in pairs. I am going to use this next week with my Y10s in preparation for their oral exam: students click on the randomizer and must answer the given question from column one, using the structure, some how, from column 2. Example here. 

Finally! Practising questions!!! if we want students to be fluent, they will need to ask questions. This can be done, easily, with Flippity and the Randomizer using question words that students need to create to find out things about the life of the teacher, for example.

Fluency is not easy, but if it is planned effectively it can take place as early as Y7!!!