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!