New MFL GCSE Proposals: some thoughts!

As you know a couple of weeks ago we woke up to the news that GCSE content for MFL was going to be changed and the new proposal, currently under consultation, was published. I have mixed views on the proposal as a whole. These are the main points that struck me straight away:

• A specific list of words, 1700 for Higher and 1400 for Foundation on which the exam will be based, without distinction between receptive and productive vocabulary. Some of those words include irregular forms of verbs so the list is actually narrower. 
• Only 2% of the words in the exam can be outside this list and will be glossed. 
• 90% of vocabulary on this list will be based on the most frequent words in a given language. 
• Emphasis on phonics, which will be reflected in a reading aloud exam element and dictation.
• Listening extracts will be at no faster than moderate pace.
• Explicit teaching of grammar is expected, although grammar knowledge, a priory, seems reduced from the current GCSE. For example, the Pluperfect Tense and the passive in the Future, Imperfect and Perfect forms has been omitted, together with the Subjunctive and juxtaposed object pronouns. 
• Receptive and productive knowledge of grammar will be tested. 
• Culture will be inherent in the way we teach but will not be assessed.
• The oral exam will include a Role Play and answers to visual stimuli, although a more general conversation, non scripted, seems not to be present. 
• Questions in the Reading and Listening exams will be in English. 

The rational behind the proposal seems valid and Rachel Hawkes explains it very well in this 60 minute screencast video.

It is difficult not to agree with her in many aspects. Her rational is: the current GCSE is too inaccessible as it has too many topics, too many words to master and too many words that need to be inferred by context, meaning that it advantages bilingual candidates and high ability students with better literacy skills. The proposed GCSE aims to close this gap and make languages accessible to all as it removes guesswork and rewards hard work: if you know that list of words you will be fine! The proposal aims to promote individually generated and more varied written and spoken outcomes, giving individual words their value back and discouraging a reliance on unanalysed chunks, promoting manipulation of language. 

What I like!

The importance of phonics in the curriculum. I agree that Phonics improves writing and speaking, helps with vocabulary learning and, I welcome that it will be explicitly assessed in a test. Decoding words is very rewarding for students and extremely powerful when learning structures, so this will promote phonics teaching in the classroom. 

Questions in English for the Reading and Listening tests.

Glossed vocabulary 

A reduction of the content that students need to master: less is more! Although I have reservations, I agree on a reduction of the corpora that students need to master to get the highest grades. In the current GCSE there are far too many topics that I tend to rush through without having a chance to really allow students to embed structures properly. Also, I don’t like the current distinction of receptive and productive vocabulary, which has been eliminated from the proposal. I hate when high ability students perceive MFL as too difficult and choose other subjects for ALevel, which will allow them to achieve UCAS points more easily. 

However..... 

My initial thoughts to see a specific list of vocabulary were of joy as it seemed to promote the less is more concept: Let's learn less content but learn it really well and become fluent in it, incorporating a corpora of key, important structures to be mastered and used in all contexts. However, there’s a catch, 90% of those words come from the most frequent words, meaning there are a lot of prepositions, conjunctions, common verbs but not a lot of content vocabulary that allows you to speak of more varied and interesting topics, especially if we want to speak about culture, as we should, and if we want to inspire students and broaden their views of the world. Also, how do these words relate to the interests of a 15 year old? is there a frequent word list for different age ranges?

Although, a priori, not having prescribed topics seems like an opportunity to design a curriculum around a communicative approach, grouping words around functions, for example, and focussing on useful content that students could find useful if travelling to the target countries, that is clearly not the intention as I started reading through the proposal, in fact the word communication is not used at all! That worries me. We use a language to communicate in real situations!

This made me think that surely, the proposal does not expect us to teach random words and grammar in isolation from each other and expect students to become creative with it? There must be some specific contexts in which to teach this list of words in conjunction with grammatical structures. These contexts are not clear and it worries me that schools will create their own contexts for this, increasing workload and creating disparity among schools. 

This takes me to the next point, if themes or topics are not anymore, productive skills must be based pretty much around grammatical productivity. Students cannot be asked to write about the benefits of school uniform, for example. Written/oral utterances must be expected to be driven by grammatical knowledge and broad questions: what you did yesterday or plans for the future. This narrows the scope of questions tremendously and makes accuracy the inner force of the curriculum, rather than communication. This worries me. 

I am also worried about the emphasis on individual words and declarative grammar knowledge in isolation. The proposal clearly pushes for a structuralist pedagogy. This worries me as GCSE content should never prescribe a teaching methodology. It clearly discourages chunking when the lexicogrammar approach, based on chunking, is proven to lead to fluency and increase motivation in students as it promotes communication from day one and it helps memorisation of structures thanks to parsing. There seems to be a misunderstanding of the lexicogrammar approach, which is working so well in so many schools: this approach does teach grammar explicitly but only once students have embedded a particular set of lexical and grammatical structures. In fact, when applied properly, grammatical knowledge in students massively improves with this approach. Consequently, this emphasis on individual words and declarative grammar seems to be out of tune with what I am experiencing in my day to day lessons. 

 

Finally, I am concerned that the oral exam does not include a general conversation. I loved that part in the current GCSE. It was the opportunity to see real interaction and spontaneity! The reason why some schools have resorted to rote learning, devaluing the power of this task, is because of the pressure to include as many tenses as possible and show complexity at all costs, which is unnatural! I would also need to learn some of my questions if I need to give mini speeches, including a certain number of tenses, opinions, idioms etc if someone asked me where I live! It is not the task but the criteria at fault. I would get rid of the role play, as it does not allow for spontaneity and real interaction.

Those are my initial thoughts so far. I recommend that everyone attends the scheduled ALL webinar after the Easter break to debate these issues and have an informed view on the proposal. My main concern, is the pedagogical shift that underpins the proposal which may stop creativity in the classroom for us the teachers.

IT tools applied to Rosenshine’s Principles

Digital tools can make a difference to great teaching! In this webinar for ISMLA I explained how to use simple IT tools that can make a big difference to the learning experience of our students.  WE CREATE MAGIC! 

Webinar Video 

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:

Teaching in Times of Covid: Providing Feedback

I have just spent my Saturday morning attending the Linguascope Annual Conference, this year online, and I am buzzing with ideas and inspiration!  So many great teachers in the MFL community! Similarly, this week I have been thinking about how I am providing feedback to my students online. I wrote a post on Feedback, which you can visit here  a few months ago, but on this post I just wanted to focus on online feedback.

I see that many teachers are using MS or Google Forms to minimise marking, or platforms such as Quizlet, Quizizz or even Blooket to collect performance data from students, which I think is brilliant, but how do we comment on this performance?

I think, providing feedback and making a personal connection with our students is essential in the current climate. Students are working more independently than ever on set tasks and it is so important to reassure them on their work and make sure that they take pride in the work the carry out and for that, feedback is essential.

These are some of my solutions!

1. Give verbal feedback when possible. Not just because it is fast for you but it is lovely for the students to hear your voice too!

If you are using Onenote, this is a must! It is incredibly quick to provide feedback about anything the kids are doing and they really appreciate your voice talking to them. If you do not use Onenote, consider using Flipgrid, where you can record your feedback, which can be shared via a QR code or a link.

 Also Vocaroo is brilliant for this!  What about using a Vocaroo link with a Congratulations Certificate? I sent this certificate last lockdown and I have a list of students for a new certificate to be sent next week. I created it with Canva.  Daniel Warren also uses Canva Certificates for her students. I email them to students and their parents. 

Qwiqr is another option for video, audio, text or web feedback, linked to a QR code that you can share with your students via email, for example. Adding a Qwqr, Flipgrid, or Vocaroo QR code or link to your Canva certificate would make it extra especial!

2. Use pre made stickers using your Bitmojis. Kids love this! You can give Merits, Alphas or whatever system your school uses to provide feedback. I have a lovely repertoire of these Bitmojis in Onenote which I just copy and paste as needed. 

3. Use personalised stickers from Onenote which you can prepare with a rubric. In my video on Top tips to use on Onenote, I show where to find them and how to insert them. Click here for the tutorial. 

4. Use the Window + V shortcut!  This allows you to copy many stickers with different pre-set comments and when clicking on Window + V, all your copied options will be there for you to select the one you need to. I learned this tip, literally last week, from Becky Jones, who shared this Youtube tutorial on twitter.  I think this a game changer to be super quick! Tutorial here from Becky Jones. 

5. Finally, encourage your students to interact with your comments!  Have they understood? What are they going to do to move forward? Close up the circle with their commitment to set themselves targets!

6. Use live verbal feedback and encouragement via Teams. This is the easiest and most obvious way to keep students motivated. Use Teams to give individual feedback in Breakout Rooms, go over a particular piece of work with a particular student, and have that special 5 minutes time with your individual students every so often. Also, give and encourage your students as a group!

Teaching in Times of Covid: Minimising and controlling the use of Google Translate

I haver read a lot in social media about the use of Google Translate by students during online teaching and how its use is becoming a real issue for Reading and Writing tasks while teaching online. In fact, this is a problem that MFL teachers face even in normal lessons: many teachers conduct writing tasks in lessons and not as homework, to prevent their students from using Google Translate. In the case of Reading tasks, sharing a photo of a text, rather than the word document, makes it more difficult for students to paste that text in Google Translate, but what about writing?

WHY DO STUDENTS USE GOOGLE TRANSLATE?

In most cases students use it because they want to say things  beyond their ability/level. Over the years, I have made the mistake to set up as homework, an open ended task or project, which has become a catastrophe as students were not linguistically fully prepared for it, or it was far too abstract, so they turned to Google Translate, defeating the purpose of the task and hindering their linguistic ability!

 This turns to occur at KS3 and KS4. It seems that when students want to be creative and impress us they turn to Google Translate! How ironic! 

How did I deal with this issue? 

By modelling language and thinking, first, of the written/oral task or tasks I would like my students to be able to carry out by the end of a unit and start working backwards: planning the language, the structures and the activities which will prepare them to complete this open ended project or task. Asking students to write a fairy tale, poem, film script, film review, thoughts about lockdown, or a comic without careful planning the linguistic content that they will need to master, in order to complete the task, it is an invitation to Google Translate and a waste of time. This is particularly true, the lower the linguistic level in our students, say Y7-Y9.

WE CANNOT ASK STUDENTS TO WRITE CREATIVELY TOO EARLY IN THE LEARNING PROCESS, ONLY WHEN IT IS RIGHT!

HOW TO MINIMISE GOOGLE TRANSLATE USE

Firstly, I don't think we can prevent Google Translate use completely, unless we carry out writing tasks in lessons, which I think is a pity:  I like using lessons for interactive, collaborative activities and oral tasks as much as possible!  Unless doing Timed Writing with Y11s, a test, or collaborative writing in pairs/groups, I tend not to use lesson time for individual writing tasks.  

Once I have in my mind the final task or tasks that I want my students to be able to produce and I decide the language they will need to do so, I provide students with a wide range of scaffolds in their learning journey so that throughout lessons they embed and assimilate as much language as possible, which they can use and manipulate relatively confidently in an open task, so they do not feel the need to use Google Translate to be creative. 

How?

Firstly, through the use of Sentence Builders. Since I started using these three years ago, my students turn less and less to Google Translate. That is a fact.

I think of some final tasks, in relation to a topic, and I create a Sentence Builder to help students create such tasks at the end of a unit.  

I present the Sentence Builder content, in Covid Times, via a pre-recorded video, modelling pronunciation and asking students to repeat after me (they do record themselves using the Audio Insert feature in Onenote). Then, we would spend many lessons practising these Sentence Builders through listening, reading and translation activities.  

Currently, using spiral.ac allows me to carry out many of the listening activities I would do in normal lessons: Dictation, Delayed Dictation, Finish the sentence, Translation both ways, Manipulation of Sentence Builders to different tenses etc...

At a second stage, LearningApps, Textivate, Flippity, Wheel of Names, Quizizz, Carousel Learning, Genially and Deck Toys tasks, help me enormously to make students practise the structures I want them to master in order to become schemas of their long term memory!  This process, especially at the moment, can be lengthy!  That's why less is more! Only when I have evidence that students have pretty much assimilated our Sentence Builders, I would set a writing, creative task.  On a post on how digital tools can support Sentence Builders click here.

The task will be based on the Sentence Builder studied  and/or on previous ones, with elements of creativity, which would have been also rehearsed in the previous structured practise stage of learning. When given the task, students are encouraged to use their Sentence Builder as much as possible and they also have access to a grammar section in their Onenote, to make reference to different verb endings. It works! Most of my students DO NOT use Google Translate because they can use some set structures from memory, although spelling mistakes may occur, and have gone through a planned scaffolded learning process of the needed structures.  

Jumping to the creative stage of learning to early tends to lead to the use Google Translate.

DO I FORBID THE USE OF GOOGLE TRANSLATE?

No, I don't. I think that Google Translate, if used properly, is a fantastic resource!  I wish I had had something like that when I was learning English! 

My students are allowed to use Google Translate to say something that they genuinely cannot say and they really want to LEARN how to say it!  This MUST only be a few sentences, never a paragraph, and they must highlight it in their writing task. 

When I read their work, they are honest about Google Translate use. In many cases, although Google Translate is getting better, the given translation, especially if an idiom, is wrong! That is a powerful message for them!!! At that point I will write the right translation in their writing.

What do they do next?

All my students have a personal Random Quizlet for vocab they encounter in reading, listening, oral or writing tasks. When students read or listen to my feedback from a writing task, they are given time, or it is part of their next homework, to include their new, chosen Google sentence in their Random Quizlet and learn it as any other vocab. Doing this, gives them more chance to reuse the structure/ sentence they wanted desperately to say, gives them ownership of their learning and makes them proud!

Still, I have some students who abuse the system, but they are the small, small, minority, the vast majority do use Google Translate responsibly!