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. 

 

Curriculum design at KS3: Less is More!

I've just had a wonderful CPD day today. In the morning I attended, albeit virtually, the ALLswmfl conference with great speakers and in the afternoon we had our first Clubhouse MFL discussion organised by Katie Lockett, where we were discussing MFL uptake to GCSE. At some point the question on what an excellent KS3 curriculum looks like popped out, which has inspired me to write this entry. I am not implying our KS3 curriculum is perfect or excellent but it is working very well. By working I mean is enthusing our students and our pupils are enjoying Spanish at KS3, resulting in many choosing this language for GCSE (a MFL is compulsory in my school at this level in most cases).

What are the elements of our Spanish curriculum?

• Adoption of the MARS EARS approach by Gianfranco Conti and the use of Sentence Builders
• Getting away from textbooks (we use Mira/Viva in the background, just to extract listening and reading material to some extent)
• The notion that Less is More: we only teach three big topics in Y7/8 and four in Y9.
• Interleaving of structures and topics. In fact, we dedicate nearly the Summer Term at KS3, to revise all the topics/ Sentence Builders/ Grammar studied since September.
• The identification of some High Impact expressions or Taste of Fluency Expressions/Universals using Gianfranco Conti's nomenclature, which are introduced at Y7 and are recycled thoroughly throughout the whole KS3 journey.
• The identification of High Frequency Words. We obtained these from the NCELP and we have tried to incorporate as many of these to our Sentence Builders. 
• Cultural projects clearly embedded and well structured into the curriculum with specific Sentence Builders attached to them, thus, avoiding the use of Google Translate.

Why adopting the MARS EARS approach?

This approach focusses on Lexicogrammar and develops skills in our learners by teaching less content but more functions aiming to achieve fluency in the students. For a whole explanation of this methodology visit The Language Gym Blog or read the book Break the Sound Barrier, which I thoroughly recommend, by Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith.  

The approach has four differentiated stages: 

Modelling of chunks or Sentence Builders

Awareness Rising through planned repetition of structures, led by the teacher.

Receptive processing. This means controlled input of the selected chunks via planned listening and reading activities, such as narrow readings or listenings among many others!. 

Structured production: pushed output of the selected chunks. This stage will require grammar practice and drilling once the intended chunks have been assimilated and embedded in our students' longer term memory. 

Expansion. Automatisation. Routanisation. Spontaneity. This is the last stage of the language journey and difficult to get to, where students learn to use the learned language creatively and spontaneously. 

Why does it work?

This approach works because it breaks up the language in affordable chunks which are easier to assimilate by students as they reduce cognitive load in the working memory. It takes less time to retrieve a chunk of language than trying to retrieve words individually and then apply grammatical structures to them, such as verb endings and adjective agreement. Carrying out the second action can be frustrating, breaks fluency, results in inaccuracy and demotivates students to speak. Retrieving chunks, on the other hand, is more efficient from the point of view of working memory. It is the first step to fluency and reflects how we learn our mother tongue. I recommend reading Memory, what every Language Teacher should know by Steve Smith and Gianfranco Conti too, where they explain, beautifully well, the way our memory works and why a lexicogrammar approach is best. 

Because our curriculum is designed to deal with one/two pages of Sentence Builders for a whole term, students have a lot of time to embed these into their long term memory, start seeing patterns and, we, the teachers, can dedicate more time to planning spontaneity, via  structured production and many, many, many retrieval practice tasks and planned manipulation of the language. 

Students feel they are in control, feel motivated as they can start speaking and feel they are making progress! For this to work, we must be FREE which is why my department decided not to use textbooks in the strict sense. Most importantly, the whole department contributed, to certain extent, to this curriculum so we all had ownership of it and shared they same goal: to achieve fluency in our students while making them independent learners in their language language. 

This approach allowed us to apply the Just right effect, which I have mentioned in so many other blogposts: the curriculum is not too easy, neither too difficult (as there must be some pain in learning) and allowed us, not the publishers, to decide our own balance of structures and grammar to teach our students. 

The interleaving aspect of the approach and embedded retrieval practice are also key to its success! 

Our high Impact expressions, including Imperfect Subjunctive structures, are repeated throughout the whole KS3 course and are meant to plant the seed for assimilation of more difficult structures, that traditionally are not learned until GCSE/Alevel. However, why can't a Y7 student say " si pudiera me gustaría cantar como los ángeles" (If I could I would like to sing like the angels. Use of imperfect subjuntive in Spanish and an idiomatic expression)  under the topic of Free Time or " me gustaría que mi madre fuera menos estricta" ( I would like my mum to be less strict, which requires the use of impefect subjunctive in Spanish) under the topic of describing personality? 

The key here is to recycle such structures in as many different topics as possible! " me gustaría que mi rutina fuera más tranquila" in Y8 or "me gustaría que mi ciudad fuera más moderna" in Y9. 

Less ability students love this approach because it gives them a structure and, as Sentence Builders reduce cognitive load and we do not study too much content, they can remember more and have the time to assimilate these chunks well.

High ability pupils fly in this approach because they can start being fluent very quickly and start manipulating the language freely by adapting the key structures. I had a Y9 student who taught himself the imperfect subjunctive as the seed of curiosity was planted in him via the sentence builder and wanted to find out more! High ability pupils will also spot patterns quickly and start applying grammar freely, with our guidance. In other words, for these students, the Sentence Builders constitute a springboard to the wonderful world of grammar and word manipulation.

Project Based learning and Culture

I believe these are an essential intrinsic aspect of the language journey, as they present a great opportunity to develop Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness, in Liam Printer's words, thus motivation! So we must harness this opportunity, but in a planned manner. 

Our curriculum allows for some project based learning linked to specific Sentence Builders:

Y7 students complete a project on Miró, where they will study his pictures in English and will learn a Specific Sentence builder to describe these. Students then create their own Miró's inspired pictures and describe them orally or in writing in our own Art Gallery. This allows to learn to express feelings and more abstract language.

Y9 students study Coco for 6 weeks. This allows students to study el Día de los Muertos and talk about family relationships, clothes and festivities using the film as a background, which will spark discussion, albeit in English but we do not mind!. The final project requires students to create a film guide on Coco, explaining the plot, what happens in the film, giving opinions on it and thinking what will happen to the main character in a second part of the film, using the future tense.

Schemes of Work

We do not use weekly SoWs but termly. We decide what to cover in a term, linked to a Sentence Builder page or two pages, then, each teacher, plans how long to spend on each subtopic/ section of the Sentence Builder. 

Why? because every teacher is different and most importantly, each class is different! a top set may be quicker at embedding our Sentence Builder and will carry out more creative tasks while a bottom set will need more activities in the Structured Production stage. 

I cannot dictate what to cover each week! What happens if the teacher is absent? Panic! It is better to plan in the long term, having, interleaving at the core of such planning. We share resources, yes, but each teacher will need to plan and adapt those resources to the needs of their students. Having said that, all members of the department will follow the MARS EARS approach. The system would not work otherwise!

Our SoWs do not dictate what to do but  guide the teachers through the MARS EARS approach and give them a wide range of activities to choose from to carry it out . In other words, our SoW is like a teaching manual with many suggested ideas/tasks to carry out in the classroom, many of which I took out from Breaking the Sound Barrier and the mfltwitterati community.

I don't like giving teachers PPTs to follow but equip them, after reflecting together, with the tools needed to carry out the MARS EARS approach, which has its foundation in a pre agreed set of Sentence Builders.

For an example of our departmental KS3 SoWs in Spanish click here. 

A compilation of MARS EARS ideas at a glance: