Maximising AI: Using Gemini Storybook Gem and Brisk together

Next week we are starting the new academic year and we will be planning first lessons for all our classes. After analysing GCSE exam results, this is exactly what I am doing this week: planning my first lessons in GoogleClassroom. 

In the case of KS3 (Y8 and Y9) I always like starting the first lesson setting the expectations of the class, what is our motto and why "Languages, a life skill to achieve", going through all the apps we will be using and making sure they can log in properly, (Sentence Builders, Languagenut, Quizlet) and a quick revision, about two lessons, on the work carried out last year. What can the students remember?

This year, I have also planned to carry out a reading activity to revise key vocabulary and grammar learned last year. Will my students remember any??? 

For that, I have used the assistance of AI, and inspired by Joe Dale, I created a PhotoStory for my lesson boosted by Brisk. I am planning, first, to read the story as a whole class, asking students to read aloud, asking them key questions on the text and while students use their MWBs to interact with me while reading the text. 

To create my resources, this is the process I followed with links to the final activities, all created within minutes, using Gemini AI and Brisk Teaching.

1. I went to Gemini AI, PhotoStory GEM option. Once I was there, I gave Gemini the following prompt:  "Create a Photostory for Y9 students of Spanish, in Spanish, using the vocabulary in the attached document. Make sure the story is engaging for 13 year old students".

I uploaded my Sentence Builder Booklet in PDF format, containing all the sentence builders learned by my students in Y7 and Y8.  Gemini created the following storybook, "El verano de nuestros sueños"

2. I opened the storybook so it showed on my screen, and opened Brisk from my Chrome Google Extensions bar. Once Brisk was open, I clicked on "Create" and "Forms" and I used the following prompt: "Create a reading comprehension quiz (20 multiple choice questions and two short answer questions) in English about the photostory that is showing on the screen".  

Within seconds, Brisk created this Form. I thought it was pretty good! 

3. As I want to support my students when carrying out the activity, I clicked on "Boost Activity" "Tutoring Option" in Brisk. This option makes the whole difference!! Once clicked, Brisk creates a task, which you can just share with your class, where the students carry out the previous Reading Comprehension Quiz, but now, with the help of a virtual Tutor which will guide them through the process.  

The final activity to share with students, using "Boost Activity" in Brisk, looks like this. 

The whole process took minutes!!! 

Overall, I am very happy with the result: The Storybook is engaging and looks like a book!!  I can exploit the text, traditionally, while sharing the link with my students in GoogleClassroom and then expect students to work independently with Forms and having the Tutoring option for help.  

After GCSE results day: strategic thinking to “feed forward”

Congratulations to all departments for your GCSE results! 

Whatever your students got, remember, not YOU, it is important to analyse the data, to celebrate success, to look at trends, to identify strongholds and weak links. At Princess Risborough we are extremely happy, as students performed above national overage for MFL and they obtained the results we had predicted, which is extremely important, to avoid nasty surprises on results day!!

It is important and fascinating to look at the data provided by the exam boards, for example, using Centre Services in AQA. You can analyse results by skill, but also by question: which part of the writing or oral exams did your students struggle with? Which particular questions in the Listening and Reading papers were challenging or very accessible? Why? 

Although next year our students will sit a different exam format, still this information is extremely valuable to practise skills and make realistic and spot on predictions in your next cohort of Y11 students. 

If your department is lucky enough to have different groups/classes per language, can you spot a trend in performance among classes, which may lead to teaching and learning issues and approach? This can then be addressed in CPD for your department. Can you notice trends in relation to gender and tiers? 

This information will be key for your school departmental results analysis and will help you analyse trends and most importantly, identify an action plan to boost grades and overall performance in all your students. 

Once trends have been identified, think about which skills students performed the best at and why and which skills were the weakest. 

How are you going to tackle the weakest areas in your department? 

Here are some strategies that have worked for me over the years and will help your new Y11 students to prepare for the next exams in June 2026.

Tackling Listening an Reading skills 

In our case, these two skills seem to be the weakest links year after year, mainly because of the mismatch between the language we teach for productive skills and the language students encounter, in very different contexts, in the Reading and Listening papers. This issue is meant to be corrected with the new GCSE for MFL and the introduction of specific vocabulary lists to be revisited within a variety of topics. 

Nevertheless, these papers are all about exam skill and getting used to the type of language that students will encounter in the exam. 

To overcome this issue, dedicate, as a department, one lesson every two weeks to independent listening and reading practice.

To start with, you will need to do this as a whole class. Get past papers questions, for example from the questions that students found the most challenging from your this year analysis. Even though we are dealing with a new GCSE syllabus, model with your class how to tackle the questions, by using the strategy “I do, we do, you do” and progressively expecting students to work independently in class. 

For this, have a set of headphones in your department, or ask students to bring theirs together with their own device so they can carry out listening tasks, independently: going forward, backwards or even manipulating the speed of the audio. 

Give students the transcript of any task,  so that they can read and listen to the audio material. Create your own listening tasks with fill in the gaps, fill in the gaps without gaps, so you make students focus on key words which they normally find difficult to identify.  

Give students the mark scheme so that they can mark their work and reflect on their performance. 

However, the most important thing is for students to make a note of new vocabulary encountered in these questions, add it to their Quizlet lists, or their vocab books. Then ask them to revise the list every so often. It is important to make students aware of how different words appear in different contexts!!!

Tackling writing and oral skills

Dedicate another lesson every two weeks to timed writing tasks to be carried out in exam conditions. These sessions are vital in Y11 and will allow you to start revising Y10 topics as from September. 

I give students a writing question, one for Foundation and one for Higher, based on past topics and students prepare it as h/w, in our case, making sure they use our 5 Magic Powers in their answers. 

This forces students to revise past topics, key vocab, structures and grammar! Then, in exam conditions and for 30 minutes, they carry out the task in class. 

It is important to mark these tasks as soon as possible using the official mark scheme for your board and to give students feedback while sharing the mark scheme with them. 

This will allow students to become familiar with mark schemes and will make them aware of what is needed to achieve a particular grade. 

At this point, it is vital that students see the link between the writing and the oral exams!!! 

When they revise for these writing tasks, strategically set by you, they are also revising and learning potential questions for the oral paper! 

This takes me to how to boost oral performance: 

After spending 30 minutes carrying out the timed writing task, students can use the other 30 minutes to revise oral skills on the same topic as their writing task.  

The way I do this successfully, is by using MWBs.

I show two photocards in the screen and students write in their MWBs what they would say about the photos.  Remember that in the new GCSE, students will have 15 minutes preparation time when they can take notes which they can take to the exam room.  This technique prepares them to make good use of that time, quickly! As I only give them 3 minutes to write possible answers before shouting “Boards up”. 

After that, I ask questions in Spanish on the theme in relation to the photos and students write down what they would say. This really helps students to gain confidence before moving to individual oral practice in pairs! 

Using Mizou has been a revelation for this technique, as students can practise individually their oral skills!  I have crated courses in Mizou for all topics covered so far in Y10 with potential/model questions that students may encounter in the actual oral exam. These are always available in Google Classroom and will form a key element of revision before their oral exam. 

As the year progresses, you may practise the Roleplay and Reading Aloud components of the oral exam, as a whole class or in pairs carrying out different games. 

The important thing is to link the writing question that students prepare for h/w, with the oral practice tasks that you plan for these sessions. 

This means that one lesson every week, is used for students to practise specific skills: either reading with listening or writing with speaking. 

To carry out these tasks you may use external platforms such as Languagenut too but just by using past questions using a platform such as Exampro or ExamWizard is just enough. 

In fact we believe so much in the power of consciously teaching listening, that at KS3, students have a lesson every two weeks dedicated to independent listening practice. 

Finally, think of the power of departmental CPD: what about requesting a recall of papers at different grades to analyse them as a team? 

Does your team need training on the use of AI to boost teaching and learning in your department?

 For example by learning how to use Mizou, Brisk, Diffit, ChatGPT or Gemini for Google. There’s a very interesting tool in Gemini to create photo stories based on given vocabulary which will allow students to practise reading for pleasure using GCSE vocabulary away from the exam context! 

Remember, that we are teachers of languages to communicate and although we teach GCSE courses, the maximum goal should always be reaching Proficiency at the language to Communicate. 

New GCSE Y10: Sequencing our Curriculum Map and access to new Teaching Resources

Like everyone in England, I have spent this academic year revamping our department Curriculum Map and Learning Journey to reflect the demands of the new GCSE.  I viewed the whole process as an opportunity to revise not only our curriculum for KS4 but also for KS3, while we redesigned new and more up-to-date teaching and learning resources for our Y10 students. 

At Princes Risborough School, we follow AQA. I do not like relying on textbooks for the delivery of lessons, but as this was a new syllabus, we decided to choose a textbook, which we could use to mainly, for reading and listening purposes. We went for the Pearson's textbook for AQA. 

Next step was to design our new curriculum for KS4 without depending on the structure of a given textbook, neither on the order of themes as per the AQA syllabus. In order to decide our curriculum map, it was important to think about our own school’s context, the depth of topics covered at KS3 so that we could determine a sequence of topics that would best suit our students, not the textbook or the AQA syllabus. This sequence may well be very different for another school.

The Sequence

In our case we decided to teach:

Term 1: Technology and Free Time + Assessment 1

Term 2: Celebrities and Holidays/Tourism

Term 3: Family/Relationships + big input on the oral exam and End of Year Exam 

It is worth mentioning that we started teaching the GCSE course after May half term when our Y10 students were still in Y9, as students at Insignis Academy Trust, get a new timetable and start their GCSE choice subjects in the last 6/7 weeks of the Summer term. 

During these 6/7 weeks, we covered the topic of Festivals with a big emphasis on La Tomatina as our star festival. 

Why this sequence?

As I mentioned the topics were driven by our school context and our KS3 Curriculum Map, to ensure progression. In Y9 students had been studying, mainly, the topics of Holidays and Tourism, so we felt that it would be great to start Y10 with something completely new to move away from fatigue. 

Throughout KS3, all topics covered, referred to talking about myself, so we thought it would be nice to start the GCSE course in Y9, following the pattern of holidays but in relation to a festival that students attended or would like to attend and which would require them to describe what people normally do there, moving away from "myself" and focussing on third persons: People tend to....

Following the pattern of talking about myself but starting to describe what others do, starting Y10 with the topic of technology was a good choice: it needed substantial new vocabulary while still being loyal to our 5 Magic Powers of key structures and will allow students to talk about themselves but also about third persons: technology can.... technology could...

The topic Free time really followed the path led by Technology, but it would require going back to talking about myself, the topic was also extensively covered in Y8, so we could start getting pace. 

After talking and understanding information about hobbies, learning about Celebrities made sense: a topic which, again, allowed us to move away from the myself realm and focus on another people achievements: the celebrities in different tenses.

Finally, after Celebrities, it made sense to go back to Holidays and Tourism and revisit all the vocab/structures learned during Y9; to finish Y10 with the topic of Family, revising key vocab learned in Y7, and take such vocab to a new dimension, as students could use previous  vocab in new contexts, to express a special occasion celebrated as a family, or activities they do together as a family, or what their family members had achieved, revisiting the vocab of Celebrities in a new context. 

I believe this Curriculum Map has worked for us. 

We have created two documents to go with the curriculum map:

A vocab/sentence builder booklet for students: 

Sentence Builders Y10 Booklet + Grammar   

An oral booklet based on the sample material published by AQA. 

GCSE Oral Booklet 

To access SoWs and curriculum maps for the new GCSE, click here

To access all our Teaching and Learning slides, following the sentence builders in the booklet and our SoW, click here. 

I created a Teaching & Learning Sequence for each topic, comprising around 50/60 slides per topic, with Listening, Reading and Oral material incorporated in the sequence. Writing tasks and materials created for our independent, listening lessons, once every two weeks, are not in the sequence. 

Curriculum Maps will change from school to school as they take into account the progression from KS3, the school context and the need to revisit vocabulary in different contexts. 

What is your curriculum map for KS4? Why have you chosen to teach a specific sequence of topics in a particular order? 

Relationships in the classroom: high fives and handshakes. The two sides of the coin.

Last Monday, I had the privilege to participate in a discussion about relationships in the classroom for TTradio.org hosted by Tom Rogers and Dean Boddington. The discussion took place around a viral reel of a headteacher high fiving kids in corridors in a primary school setting, I believe, which was very much praised on social media. 

The debate centred on the fact that building relationships in the classroom by teachers was much harder than just to display "one to one" banter in the corridor.  The debate opened a full discussion on the role of relationships in the classroom and it got me thinking about how teachers develop these vital relationships, in particular, in a secondary school setting. 

Is it wrong to high five children in corridors?

Definitely, not! It is a sign of having a good rapport with students. I do it sometimes! However, there's a danger to think that relationships can be reduced to high fiving students, one by one in the corridor, especially for new teachers or non teachers at home. High fiving may be perceived as a sign of a good relationship, which, in turn happens as a result of a strong "teaching and learning" procedure, matched with great "behaviour management strategies". A skilful status quo which is difficult to achieve in every classroom, regardless of the subject, and which can only be truly reached by a whole school consistency approach to behaviour management and teaching and learning approach.

The two sides of the coin: building up relationships

In other words, shaking hands and high fiving students in the corridor, in my opinion, is the result of what is going on in the classroom, in every single classroom of a school:

• The setting of high expectations in all students: anchoring in challenge and a believe that all our students can achieve great things. We must communicate these expectations with our students and when they raise to the challenge, we must use our school reward system to acknowledge the effort, so that we build safe environments, where students are willing to take risks and push themselves. 

• The above should take place, in tandem, with a strong and fair behaviour management policy. Yes, I will be positive, yes, I will praise you when you do well BUT if you make the wrong choice, there will be consequences, in a fair and safe environment. Students should be clear about what this entails and it should be consistent across the whole school. At PRS, we use the "warn, move, remove" strategy. Using a firm voice to address a non-desired behaviour in our students and the consequence if these persist, is essential. "Jonny, the expectation is that when the teacher talks students should be quiet. Make the right choice, this is just a warning, if you continue talking you will need to be moved. It is your choice" and move on with the lesson, to allow little Jonny to reflect on what you said and allow him to rectify his behaviour. If this does not happen, then little Jonny will be moved or removed. 

• The two points above will not work UNLESS we have a strong teaching and learning strategy in our lessons. In other words, we must plan and deliver well planned lessons, where scaffold of activities take place, where we constantly check for understanding, make students accountable for their learning by making them think hard at all times through skilful, scaffolded tasks. We must do this in a safe environment, smiling, rewarding good choices by students, using cold calling, so everyone can be accountable for. When this takes place, students will feel they are making progress, which will result in them learning and acknowledging they are doing so! So they willl start collaborating with us.  I wrote a blogpost on how to adapt questioning in the MFL classroom to achieve this, which can be found here. 

• When these three conditions take place, students will feel positive about themselves, about our subject. We, teachers, will respond positively to their responses and as a consequence we start developing positive relationships. This happens by the way we reward the students with a smile or a "well done, that was a great answer" or an Achievement Point or Merit. Students will start feeling good about themselves and most of them will respond positively to us, the teachers. When this happens, over and over again, we start developing relationships, we may high five students in the corridor or school duties. We may start having short conversations with our students about their weekend, their holidays; they may start opening up to us. The trust status quo has been stablished. However, if wrong choices are made in the classroom, especially in a setting with 30 students or more, our behaviour management policy must always be adopted. This is what I mean about the two sides of the coin: 

High expectations + excellent teaching and learning strategies, on one side, and behaviour management skills + fairness, on the other side.

So, coming back to the viral video of a headteacher high fiving students. It is absolutely fine! However, let's not be naïve, high fiving students is the result of a skilful approach to learning and behaviour management, not to be taken for granted, neither to be simplified. 

SOS: So after the Y11 mocks, what?

We just completed our second set of mock exams for Y11 before the February half-term and after analysing results, most students missed the next grade up just for two or three marks. This shows me that the next three of months will be key for my classes. How to maximise our time with our Y11 classes from now up to their exams to improve grades a grade or more?  I wrote a post on this topic in 2021 and my approach has not changed much!

This is my straight-forward line of action, which I have followed for many years, to make sure that students improve their Mock results for at least one grade.  In fact, although a SOS guideline, these are strategies we apply to all our KS4 lessons, including the new GCSE course. 

Maximising Listening skills

This is the skill our students tended to underperform in the trial and in the real GCSE exams, the wrongly called the passive skill!  Nevertheless, listening is the foundation of the learning journey to achieve fluency and get students using the language.  In our department we believe so strongly in the fundamental need to develop listening skills, linked to phonics, that we start tackling this skill at KS3 with a dedicated lesson every two weeks where students carry out listening personalised tasks, independently, with their headphones, in Google Classroom. I wrote extensively about listening at KS3, how to exploit textbook audio material and how to create a virtual language lab in this blog. 

Focussing on GCSE,  these are the strategies we adopt as from Y10:

• We 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. During that lesson, we prepare listening material + transcripts, based on the topics we teach in the curriculum and students carry the activities individually with their headphones.  
• During the first lessons we do independent listening practice, we record ourselves and create classic activities such as "dictation with gaps" "putting sentences into order" "fill in the gaps without gaps" or "finishing the sentence", using 100% vocabulary that we have covered in lessons, so it is 95% understandable material, this is an example of a Y10 Independently Listening session. The idea is to treat listening for learning and retrieve vocab in a listening format.
• As we carry out these lessons, and definitely at this stage of the GCSE course in Y11, we use mainly past paper listening questions,  for that use Exampro activities for AQA. Examwizard is the equivalent for Edexcel Pearson. We choose tasks, on a given theme/topic, so we concentrate on specific vocabulary at a time. When we create the tasks using Exampro, we use a variety of questions: Foundation, Overlapping and Higher. Students work with at their own pace individually, using headphones, so we also develop independent learning skills: Students learn how to revise for the listening exam, once they are at home. 
• Use the transcripts wisely. Share them, with your students, at all times, but especially when carrying out exam style questions. We always include the transcripts and the mark schemes. Remember this is listening for learning not testing!  Use the transcripts to create pre-listening tasks, so there is an opportunity to look up vocabulary and do translation activities.  Ideally, this can be done in previous lessons, or as a homework task. During our listening independent lesson, students always listen to the audio while reading the transcript and then complete the task. Students work at their own pace and some may do only 2/3 tasks this way. On a second listening lesson, they can attempt some of the same tasks, again, interleaved with previous topic tasks, without  using the transcript, although this is always accessible to them. This is a powerful listening technique: Listening while reading the transcript. This practice has become more valuable now with the new GCSE and the reading aloud task, as this will provide excellent modelling practice for students for the reading aloud task, as well as developing their phonological recognition and develop listening processing skills.
• At some point in the process, we also carry out an exam style question together: we look at the transcript first and highlight key vocabulary. We read the exam question and make sure we understand it, emphasising key words which may act as distractors in the exam: a sentence may start with something someone likes but later will say what they love, which is what is needed for the actual task. We pay attention to key, high frequency words that can be key for the listening exam, especially negatives and superlatives and opinion key words. We analyse why a particular question is challenging and what is key in the transcript to make it accessible: developing  metacognitive skills as we go through the thinking process of tackling a listening exam question.
• We look up random vocabulary in transcripts and reading past papers: vocabulary that has appeared in previous years and we know we have not taught explicitly, and we 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: falta, ancianos, sopa de marisco, productos lácteos or me enteré/me decepcionó/ me di cuenta in AQA!
• Students must 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 a reading task!

We keep doing this routine every two weeks, starting in Y10. During our normal lessons, we continue emphasising listening skills via Modelling activities such as Dictation, listening Battleships, Finishing the sentence, Spotting the listening mistake etc.. Over time, start mixing up topics and themes and set up listening tasks for homework too.  

Maximising Reading Skills

Students tend to do better in this skill. Learning  high frequency words and random general 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. The use of Exampro or Examwizard can prove 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  the Writing paper 

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 carrying out key activities throughout the GCSE course to help students learn these Sentence Builders and transfer them to their 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. This is my model video on how to tackle the 150 word question in AQA, modelling with students they thinking process they have to through when tackling a writing task question/bullet points.

• We also dedicate a lesson every two weeks, to carry out a timed writing task in Y11, as we do with listening as from Y10.  For the tasks, again, we use Exampro past paper questions. We always prepare two tasks:  one aimed at Foundation level, including Description of a photocard, 40 words task a d 90 word task, and another at Higher level, 90 word task and 150 word task. Every two weeks, students for homework, prepare one of the tasks (Foundation or Higher), taking into account the 5 Magic Powers. 
• To be successful in the previous task and to do also really well in the oral exam, especially the General Conversation, students need to fulfil certain criteria.  This is what I call the 5 Magical Powers:
  • Use of different tenses (at least three)
  • Giving opinions 
  • Giving Reasons
  • Talking about someone else, in its simple form, the use of reported speech mi madre/amigo dice/dijo que..
  • High Impact expressions

  We embed these Magical Powers in our SoW as from Y7! In fact our mark scheme at KS3 is based on how well these powers have been achieved in a written/oral task. Click here for a Blogpost on this. Looking at the new GCSE, still these criteria are present so it makes sense to get students familiar with them as from Y7! The idea is that when preparing their writing task for a timed writing lesson, they must make reference to these powers. 
  
  
  To help students to use the Magical Powers, we created the following document, with examples of the Powers to practise as from Y10. This document has been printed in A3, laminated and displayed in the students' desk.  Click here for a copy.  Students also have their own laminated copy for their bedrooms! 
  
  
  I have talked extensively about the Powers before, but one of the elements I developed recently is the use of LINKS or NUGGETS.  
  
  
  What are the NUGGETS?
  
  
  My Y11 students were really struggling with verb endings so I thought of using LINKS or NUGGETS, basically expressions acting as shortcuts,  which can be used for different tenses, without having to conjugate a verb.  I still expect most of my students to use verb endings but, if they struggle, in a moment of panic, the nuggets work wonders. Similarly, those students who can conjugate well and easily can alternate traditional conjugation with the NUGGETS, as these are also examples of High Impact expressions (a Magical Power), widening their use of vocabulary!
  
  
  

  
  

  How do they work? If students do not remember the endings for the present tense, especially for irregular verbs, they may use Suelo/Suele/ Me gusta/ Podemos/Se puede. In the Preterite, Decidí/empecé a, in the Imperfect, Solía, in the future Voy a and in the Conditional Me gustaría. The NUGGETS or LINKS are very popular because once you use them, you just need to use the Infinitive after them!!

  
  

  They also help weaker students to understand that an infinitive can never be used without the support of a NUGGET or LINK.  When we practise sentences, for example, we always do it using a verb ending but also a LINK/NUGGET if it is possible.  This has helped my students a LOT to avoid grammatical mistakes regarding verb endings. 

  
  

  The nuggets or links work so well that these are introduced as from KS3, so they become a second nature for students when they reach KS4.

 During our Writing Timed lesson, students carry out their Foundation/Higher task in exam conditions, which will be marked by the teacher, using the AQA Mark Scheme, so we can give give students specific feedback.

This technique, has dramatically improved the writing grades of our students in exams. As a matter of fact, we start using Timed Writing lessons in Y11 as from October Half-term up to their Study leave.

• We retrieve, constantly in lessons, the 5 Magic Powers that students need,  to get the highest grades in the writing and oral papers.
• During lesson time, we carry out Translation activities in a game environment using MWBs.

Maximising Speaking skills 

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 created this Oral booklet, based on past paper Roleplays and Photocards, as well as, example oral questions. 

• We try to spend as much lesson time as possible on oral skills and scaffolding activities leading to fluency. This is the only skill which is very difficult for students to master 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, we 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! We are also continuing with this practice with the current Y10 cohort in preparation for the new GCSE. On this occasion, the model questions will be in preparation for the conversation to take place after talking about two photocards in the last part of the oral paper and the questions that will be asked after the reading aloud task (AQA)

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

• We help students practise these questions via home work tasks and we connect the oral to the writing: for example, we link the next timed writing, as explained above, to the same theme/topic covered in 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 of 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. Using our 5 Magic Powers has certainly helped us with this link, as the powers are valid for both productive skills.

• 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. We tend to do this in writing with MWBs too. It works wonders as it reinforces the link between the speaking and writing paper and gives confidence to students before tackling purely oral tasks.

• We dedicate our lessons two weeks leading to the Mock and real MFL orals to just to practise oral skills. 

• As with writing, we retrieve, during our lessons, key verbs in different tenses and high impact expressions: basically our 5 Magic Powers.

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. For a blog just on maximising Speaking and Writing skills at Y11, look at this blogpost.  I would be super happy to hear what other techniques you use which are successful for you and your students!