Practising Exam skills at A Level with Wheel of Names

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about A Level teaching. There are so many activities and ideas to help us teach languages from KS3 to GCSE, but hardly anything for A Level teaching. In the case of Spanish, I have always loved Neil Jones' Blog, Ollie's Boletín and the weekly news from Fiona's A Level news, which have always inspired me with ideas and resources fo which I am extremely grateful!

In this short post I want to exemplify how gamification can successfully and easily take place at A Level too, to practise those elements of the A Level exam which are vital to score the highest grades. For AQA, these are the six skills that students need to have command of:

• Listening for key information / summarising texts from audio input
• Reading for key information / summarising texts from written input
• Accurate translation skills = Command of application of grammar
• Essay writing skills: analytical and critical skills + vocabulary + accurate application of grammar
• Knowledge of culture and society to be applied to the essay and oral exam
• Oral skills: Fluency + development of ideas + knowledge of culture and society + vocabulary + accurate application of grammar + analytical and critical skills

Most of these skills can be practised with simple, interactive, fun games.

I use Wheel of Names (Yes! my favourite app!) to develop oral follow-up ideas, containing analytical thinking in my students, orally, or in writing, to start with, using MWBs in a competition format between two teams. The questions in the wheel have been taken from several Stimulus Cards from AQA past exams. When a question pops up, a student in the correspondent team needs to answer such question, backing up their ideas with specific examples (data, facts, events) showing their knowledge of Spanish society. Students need to answer on the spot, developing fluency. 

The same technique can be used with a proper Stimulus card. In this case, students need to respond to the information in the stimulus card, giving a critical opinion and making sure they make reference to all the information printed in the card. This is an essential skill to have if students want to score marks from the top band in the exam. Again, giving an element of competition between a team A/B works well after doing work with the whole class with MWBs: How do you react to this information?

The same principle can be used to practise reading summarising skills in a fun way as an activity embedded in our lessons:

Finally, the same technique can be used to practise essay skills for the writing paper. In this case, a question comes up and students, in MWBs or in paper, write a paragraph answering the question in relation to a text or book. They must do so, giving evidence to prove a point and explaining how this evidence proves such point, another essential element to score high marks in the A Level essay. After writing their paragraphs they exchange it with a partner and mark each other's. Where does the paragraph fall within the mark schemes bands, why? Alternatively, students can work in pairs and write a paragraph collaboratively.

Finally, Wheel of Names is perfect to carry out simple games with translation or grammar!

These little games are not only great way to embed exam skills practice in lessons, but they are also a great way for students to use on their own to revise for their exams as part of a revision schedule. They work great to be used with a language assistant if you are lucky to have one. After working with them as a whole class competition, I share the URL with my students and they work in pairs, orally.

I know I use Wheel of Names a lot, but, isn't it a versatile, easy to use and above all GREAT tool to be used even at A Level?

Developing ideas at A Level via authentic resources: a model lesson

I haven't written much in a while, due to revision sessions, oral exams etc.. but the Year 11s have now gone and tomorrow will be the last lesson with my Year 13s! So, I thought I would post something on A Level, specifically for Y12. This is a model lesson which exemplifies how I use authentic resources to give ideas on a given topic to my students, which they can adopt to discuss a point of view and make clear reference to Spanish society. In this particular case, the lesson follows the Edexcel Syllabus and concentrates on the impact of Tourism on the environment. 

Students had already done some work on Tourism and the impact it can have on the environment. This lesson meant to consolidate those general ideas and blend them with a real case scenario: Benidorm, ¿héroe o villano?

The first activity was a metacognition and retrieval practice opportunity for students to self-reflect, on vocabulary and ideas that they could remember, without access to notes, from previous lessons. I wanted students to work individually for this activity and self-assess themselves!

Secondly, I explained that we were going to look at a case study, Benidorm, and showed the following super short, Tik-Tok video. We watched it three times and students just described what they could see and the contrast of the images:

For this, I expected students to use the vocabulary they had recalled in their metacognition exercise. This video is, in essence, a post GCSE photocard task, which all students should be able to react to and improvise some ideas on. Look at this post on how I exploit Tik-Tok videos, instead of photocards with Year 11s. 

The purpose of the lesson was to instil ideas into the students, to do that, I decided to use an adaptation of the following authentic blogpost, through listening. I made a short summary of the blogpost and identified unknown, interesting and idiomatic vocabulary in the text: click here for my summary.

I created a Tarsia activity with such vocabulary and students matched the Spanish to the English.

The lesson followed with a listening activity where the new vocabulary would be key! I did this as a Dictogloss activity: I read my adaptation/summary of the blogpost to the students, twice. They took notes in English and/or Spanish, then, in pairs they reconstructed the text in writing.

Why Dictogloss? 

By doing this activity, students practised the skill of sumarising a text from an audio source, part of the A Level Paper 1 exam. 

Similarly, they were listening to two very good points of view about Benidorm as a tourist resort: a negative point of view, accusing the city of destroying the Spanish coast and a positive point of view, which defends Benidorm as a model of sustainable tourism, thanks to its skyscrapers, which concentrates lots of tourists in a small space. 

Students had to listen to these contradictory points of view steal and use them in future lessons to exemplify their own views on the topic.  Similarly, Dictogloss, allows me to personalise an ordinary listening activity, as I could act the text while reading it! By reading the text to students, I could pause, go slowly or faster, as needed,  and use gesture together with eye contact to put the text ideas across! 

Finally, students reconstructed the text into Spanish. After 20 minutes, students were given the transcript so they could compare their written versions to the real text. To finish the lesson, we all summarised the positive and negative points about Benidorm as a tourist resort. 

Follow up

Students were given a direct link to the original post, much longer and complex than my summarised version, and a 5 minute authentic video from La Sexta talking about Benidorm. For homework, students had to read the authentic text, watch the 5 minute video, take notes and write a 250 essay on Benidorm, ¿héroe o villano?

In subsequent lessons, students can create presentations and, ultimately, they can debate on the topic.