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. 

 

Some thoughts on embedded differentiation

A couple of weeks ago, a mfltwitterati member, asked for advice on blogs about differentiation in MFL. Different lovely members of the mfltwitterati community suggested great publications and it made me reflect on the issue of differentiation.

I have the same high expectations for all my pupils, regardless of their ability. What I provide is different levels of support and scaffolding, embedded in all lessons, which guide my students through their individual learning journey. 

The anchor effect

I believe in the anchor effect, as exposed by Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby in "Making every lesson count": exposing my students to content always at a level higher of what is considered above national expectations, for EVERYONE.

This just  means having high expectations for ALL. I don’t like labelling learners in particular ability boxes: I believe ALL my pupils can achieve high goals and must aim high. 

Consequently, at KS3 I add elements of GCSE grammar that I expect all my students to master at some degree, and at GCSE we dip into ALevel. Students find this strategy MOTIVATING, as I place trust in their ability, and, as a consequence, they start adopting a growth mindset versus a static one, which is key for success in low ability students.

The Goldilocks effect

This means to challenge students at the correct intensity: I have one common objective for ALL and place the bar high, but at the correct level:

The expectations bar cannot be so high that some students may find it impossible to reach it, neither so low that it will demotivate and make students bored, after all, learning involves pain, which we call germane overload. 

The key is to plan tasks that are not too difficult, neither too easy but just right! In other words, to plan lessons with a desirable level of difficulty to create the perfect conditions for germane overload. 

Building blocks, scaffolding and embedded differentiation

Once I set up high expectations, my teaching will focus on careful planned activities and support aiming to achieve a long term goal: for example, to master a model text with key structures and vocabulary by the end of a particular unit. 

I plan all the micro skills and think of all the steps that will be needed for learners to achieve our long/medium term goal. My lessons are like building blocks and scaffolds aiming to reach that final goal. Sentence Builders are a great tool to do this as they provide a final, clear model for students and are easy to break up into small building blocks or little steps in the structured practice stage of language teaching and learning.

The power of questions  

Questions are powerful and are the engine of my lessons for embedded differentiation and retrieval practice purposes. I ask questions all the time: at the modelling stage of learning, but especially at structured production and automatisation stages. 

Cold calling and no opt-out

So everyone is alert all the time! If a student does not know the answer to my question, I move to someone else and I alert them that I will be back at them in 5 minutes. I always go back to those students who did not know a particular answer, and by then, they have worked out the answer: a particular structure, verb ending etc, because they heard it from someone else, encouraging active listening or because they actively looked for the answer themselves in their notes, encouraging curiosity! 

Say it again but better

This question technique is great to stretch those students that need to be stretched, in a simple way. That’s a good answer but how could we make it a 8/9 grade? Can anyone help?

Think, pair share 

Another great technique for easy embedded differentiation which allows students to reflect and use metalanguage with their peers. When I question is posed, I give students thinking time (remember that many students have issues with processing time), they share thoughts with partners and finally they get ready to answer a question as prompted by me.

Whole class responses

This must be one of my favourite embedded differentiation techniques, done via mini whiteboards, so I can check for progress at a glance, reinforce structures for those who need it while allowing high flyers, to extend their answers and show off their skills, differentiation at its best! 

For example, students may need to translate a sentence to practice specific chunks, but if found easy, they must extend the sentence using three tenses. I like this technique as it helps learners to reflect and decide where they sit in their own learning journey: shall I just stick to the translation or extend it?, while providing them with autonomy, which increases motivation. 

This technique allows me to differentiate in situ, with minimum preparation, and to put the ownership of the learning back at the learners, with my guidance. Suggesting alternatives to individual students, asking strategic questions in the process and encouraging students to look at each other responses, are all bonuses of this strategy and mechanisms of embedded differentiation. 

Providing different levels of support 

This is key for differentiation at all stages of the learning journey. My students have access to their sentence builders and grammar charts, if they are really stuck, and they are taught where to find these and how to use them, in our digital exercise book, Onenote. Key structures and expressions are displayed around the classroom with giant post-its on the windows with topical key structures in display which are changed periodically. 

When practising structures, especially during translation tasks, which we do a lot of, I use the initials of the required words in the target language for support. This is a very useful technique for translation tasks. Students may opt to ignore these initials, displayed in the big whiteboard, worksheets or digital apps but they are there to support those who decide to use them because they need them! 

When doing listening tasks, I plan lots of small tasks building up in difficulty: listening for individual words, listening while reading the transcript, filling gap activities with the transcript  and finally listening comprehension tasks without transcript. 

When doing oral or writing activities, students are encouraged to work from memory but they always have the support of their sentence builder and grammatical charts at hand if they need to.

Live modelling the thinking process 

After lots of structured practice activities, where support is given, via questioning and task design, students need to move to the more creative production stage. At this point, I do like live modelling a task as a whole class, so we go through the thinking process of creating such task. This could be a model oral answer or a 90/150 word writing task. Sonja Fedrizzi and Elena Díaz do this beautifully with tutorial videos for students.

We do write model answers as a class, using students’ ideas, developing autonomy, reflecting on what to add, the tenses to use while I ask strategic questions to specific students: how to make the text interesting or how to make it to a 7+ grade. This is another example that questioning is key for embedded differentiation and how differentiation happens naturally in all well planned lessons.

Templates are great for this and time for reflection in pairs is a vital tool too, as this will allow students to focus on metacognition (the way students plan, monitor and evaluate their own thinking). Adam Lamb, Silvia Bastow and Jane Basnett, all provide wonderful writing and oral templates in their blogs, to scaffold students' more creative responses. This is the template we follow to carry out this activity and which students are given to plan their writing/oral tasks, which is shared on Onenote. 

If you have come across Elena Díaz, you will know about her 20 keys to teach MFL. Using the 20 keys model also provides another great opportunity for differentiation and scaffolding. Jane Basnett, using the 20 keys model, has created this template for students. Click here

Spinning the plates

I Keep moving in the classroom when students are working in pairs or individually in my lessons and I step in individually or as a whole class as needed. In the current climate, Onenote is great for this, as it allows me to see what students are doing from my desk! 

I highlight mistakes, I direct students to the correct section of our Onenote for support, without giving them the answer. I make them think or check for understanding, with strategic individual questions. I may re explain to the whole class a concept that I can see is not well cemented. I may showcase a good piece work and analyse why it is good. I may have a chat with a particular struggling student and we set up a mini action plan to tackle a particular task. All these are examples of embedded differentiation techniques.

Removing support

It is important not to spoon feed students. The long term goal is to be fluent in the target language and remove any given support progressively and individually.

In fact, our main goal is to educate independent learners, that means leaving support behind, as in real communicative situations students will need to think on the spot! 

Despite having high expectations for all my students and focusing on challenge, I also accept that sometimes some students will not get there and that is fine. 

After all, many experts agree that 58% of academic achievement in pupils is down to genetics, leaving me only 42% to play with in my lessons. 

Still it is a very respectable percentage to instil high expectations and high goals in all students and making them believe that they CAN become fluent with the right amount of support from my part, which I remove, little by little and at different stages for each individual student. 

Differentiation, for me, means providing embedded scaffolded support to learning building blocks at all times to ALL.