Vocabulary learning = Vocabulary sticking

While I am in the middle of this TAGs process, which I am finding so time consuming, I decided to have a break and reflect on T&L, especially on how we make sure that students learn and most importantly, remember vocabulary over time.

Vocabulary is key, not just for the productive skills but also for the receptive ones. In my experience, those students who know the most vocabulary are always the ones that perform the best in public examinations. 

How can we make sure students learn and widen their vocabulary repertoire? These are some practical ideas that work for me and my students.

Making productive vocabulary stick

I think it is important  to establish the difference between productive and receptive vocabulary. 

This is interesting as the current MFL Content proposals advocate for not such a distinction. I think this is a mistake. In my lessons, we use Sentence Builders. Depending on the Year group, we can spend up to 6 weeks working on a particular Sentence Builder at KS3 or about two weeks at KS4. Below an example of a Y10 SB.

This is the productive lexicon that I expect students to know inside out and use confidently by the end of a unit in oral and written tasks. To achieve this goal, modelling and practice of the structures in lessons are key but also vocabulary/structures learning. Every Sentence Builder is linked to different sets of Quizlets for KS4 or Memrise for KS3. These courses use the structure of the Sentence Builder so, sometimes students learn words, but others a whole chunk, like in the example above. Learning the whole chunk “no había hecho nada”, helps students to embed the structure into the long term memory and later in the course to manipulate it, when we spot patterns, for example by inferring "they had done nothing"  ("no habían hecho nada". However, by learning the chunk, from day one, students can use the Pluperfect tense fluently while we plant the seed for the use of another tense.

Students learn the Sentence Builders as homework tasks only after these have been extensively practised in lessons and we test this learning via quick vocabulary tests. These tests are carried out weekly and are marked by the students themselves. They always involve testing from English into Spanish, regardless of ability, and consist of 10 chunks or small sentences created from combining bits from the sentence builder, rather than testing individual words!

For example: That day I was worried because I had failed my exam

To help students learn the sentence builder vocabulary, in context, so that they can create sentences from it, I combine the use of Quizlet with Textivate. 

Textivate is a great tool which allows students to practise structures, hence learning them, via the creation of short sentences and/or paragraphs, encouraging them to treat vocabulary and grammar (lexicogrammar) as part of a continuum, which reduces cognitive load and improves fluency. In Textivate the teacher creates their own activities based on their own texts and/or words or chunks. In my case, students work on their Textivate activities either in lessons or as homework as a tool to learn vocab! Textivate example on vocabulary of Environment Y11

Created by Martin Lapworth (the creator of Textivate and TaskMagic) in conjunction with Gianfranco Conti, the SentenceBuilders site is another great way to help students learn our Sentence Builders! In this site, you can select pre populated Sentence Builders, or create your own one, extremely easily, and select assignments for students, based on a wide range of activities aimed to help them learn and memorise key structures, integrating skills such as listening, reading or translation! The range of activities available is impressive and include all the favourite activities from the EPI teaching pedagogy. I use this site, like Textivate, in the classroom but also as homework tasks to help students.  Please, click on Jerome Nogues’ video to see a review of this new site and how to navigate it.

Functional versus Content vocabulary

By functional vocabulary I mean essential structures that come over and over again and we want our students to master from day one but also, great “high impact” expressions that we introduce as from Y7 and we recycle through the whole language learning journey in all contexts, so they stick! 

“Me hace sentir bien” “me gustaría que mi madre fuera” “me ayuda a relajarme” “si pudiera me gustaría” “suelo” “puede ser “ “puedo” “después de” “nos gusta” “le gusta” “iba a” “quería”  are some of these structures, to mention a few. It is important, when designing the curriculum, to decide on our Functional Vocabulary/Structures to ensure that they are introduced little by little, in as many Sentence Builders as possible from Y7 to Y11. These structures normally involve giving opinions, justifying or sequencing ideas. This ties up with Elena Díaz’s 20 Keys nicely. 

By content vocabulary I mean specific topic vocabulary, although, this must also be recycled in different contexts as much as possible! 

Retrieval Practice

For structures/vocabulary to stick, they need to be encountered many times, experts say a minimum of 6 times. Students may score 20 out of 20 in a vocabulary test. However, we have all experienced the situation that weeks later such vocabulary has partially or totally been forgotten. Here comes the power of retrieval practice and interleaving topics. This requires careful planning into a SoW but also from the teacher in their day to day lessons. 

How can we incorporate structures from two weeks ago or a month ago in our lessons, mixed up with new material? This can be done in the shape of starter activities where students need to recall old vocabulary, hence helping them to transfer information to their long term memory using Retrieval Grids for example, but also by incorporating such structures in our main planned activities for a lesson. For example when carrying out an information gap activity, during the Practice Stage of learning, students may  be required to talk about past topics at the same time as practising structures from current ones. When modelling new structures I always include content from past topics! 

Carousel Learning is great for this! Carousel Learning is another tool, which you populate with your own questions (or sentences in the case of languages) from all topics, via a spreadsheet. The tool allows you to create mini quizzes whose content you select from your range of topics and questions previously downloaded into the site. Doing this for homework and/or in the classroom is a powerful retrieval practice tool, as you can include a selection of sentences from as many past topics as you want!

Key questioning via short oral quizzes with the use of mini whiteboards is also powerful for retrieval practice and learning vocabulary and structures for the students, while it allows teachers to check for understanding at a glance, see strengths and where there are gaps, to inform your planning accordingly. When doing these quizzes, I always use sentences, so students are forced to use structures in context and mainly translations from English into Spanish. 

Receptive Vocabulary and being independent

How can we tackle this? From Y7 I ask students to create their own Memrise or Quizlet courses for each topic, which we call “My random vocabulary”. Every piece of vocab that appears in reading, listening activities, past papers or pre populated sites such as Languagenut or This is Language, my students add it to their Random Quizlet/Memrise sets.

Every so often students are given the opportunity to learn this vocab. They choose what to learn so the vocabulary/structures vary from student to student, which gives them independence and autonomy. Normally, I don’t expect students to produce this vocabulary in writing and speaking tasks, but to recognise it in a reading or listening situation. 

However, many of my students transfer much of this vocabulary to the production category as they choose to use it over and over again in oral or written tasks. This is my ultimate goal: to encourage students to be independent, learn their own vocabulary and reuse it freely. 

It is not an easy task at all but it can be achieved! Of course, especific exam boards Quizlet vocabulary sets fall into this category too. I also create Quizlet courses with the most used expressions that I can spot in the reading and listening GCSE papers.  This has made a huge difference in some of my low attainer students when facing the Reading and traditionally difficult Listening exams.

Discussing strategies!

Finally, although it should be on the top of the list, we must discuss learning strategies with students and teaching them how to learn! I use lot of technology but I have to recognise that some students will not like that approach and I need to give them alternatives.

The looking, saying, covering and repeating method can work extremely well with students as well as creating their own physical flashcards. It is important to have a departmental strategy to learn vocabulary and as Danielle Warren does, to send such a strategy to parents so they can also be involved in the learning of their children. We are planning to do so as from September! 

By applying these strategies and learning vocabulary in context (lexicogrammar approach) with the use of technology and planning/interleaving its practice, students learn vocabulary and this starts becoming sticky! 

15 Onenote Tips to maximise your students' learning experience and SAVE YOU TIME!

I love Onenote. It is such as great tool that allows me to carry out blended learning seemingly, saves me time, allows me to connect with my students easily and to bring my teaching to the 21st century. 

Most importantly, Onenote helps me take my subject, MFL, outside the classroom and maximise the learning experience of my students outside my four teaching walls! 

Ultimately, Onenote contributes to develop independent learning skills in my pupils, my ultimate goal!

On this post, I am assuming, you know how to create a Class Notebook within Onenote and you have one already set up. This post will focus on how to use your Onenote once this has been created by sharing with you my 15 top tips.

1. Think carefully on how you are going to structure your Content Library. 

Ideally, this should be a departmental approach. How many sections are you going to create? What will be their names? This should match your teaching methodology and Schemes of Learning/Work. In my case, I have a section for each topic I teach called: Lessons + name of topics, another section for Grammar, Blooklets, Sentence Builders, Revision Work and Subscriptions to external sites, such as Languagenut, This is Language, The Language Gym or my Quizlet folder. See my example below. 

Remember that the Content Library cannot be edited by students but anything in it can be seen by them, so if you do not want to release the content of a lesson, I would advise you to store it in the Teacher Only section of your Onenote, just below the Content Library.

2. Have a page for each week's lessons. Within my lesson sections, I create a page for a week's worth of lessons rather than a page per lesson. Sometimes there is too much content so I create a second page for an individual lesson and make it a subpage of the main week. This way, it is easy to find your lessons and it minimises your work considerably!  I store my lessons in the Teacher Only section and paste it in the Content Library when I want to distribute them to students.

3. Have a template for your lessons which you can store in the Teacher Only section. In my case the template includes a picture of my Interactive Classroom, which I created using Canva, which personalises my Onenote and makes it more colourful and attractive!

4. Populate the sections of your Content Library, little by little, with reference materials that support your subject, treating it as an area for the ultimate independent learning experience for your students!  What will your students need to support their learning and provide scaffolding? In my case it is grammar explanations, links to sample oral questions, oral booklets, translation booklets, our Sentence Builders with direct links to Quizlet courses. Any materials/booklets you would give to students, can go here, including self-assessment areas! You will save lots of time and paper in photocopying! Think of this section as the door to Independent Learning and teach your students to use it and become independent. TOP TIP What about using this area for your own video tutorials on modelling or explaining a difficult concept? You can use LOOM.

5. Use your Onenote as your teaching planning tool! I don't use a Teacher Planner anymore, as my lesson plans are in my Onenote: per week, per group, with all links to PPTs, Word Documents, external links to quizzes, Youtube Videos... It saves me time as all is in one place, which anyone in the department can share, so you can reuse each other's resources by tweaking content to match individual classes. Most importantly, you can reuse lessons from previous years too just by copying and pasting your old pages.

6. Use Page Colour when populating your page and different fonts/bolding/highlighting bits to make your lesson content attractive to learners. I also, advise you to use the Tags option on Onenote for students/you to tick tasks which have been accomplished, or classify tasks within a particular skill. MAKE YOUR LESSON ATTRACTIVE!

7.Remember that any Microsoft file will embed into your Onepage, as well as some external files, such as Genially or Youtube videos. That will make your lesson interactive and will allow your students to access such material nicely during your lesson and outside the classroom!

In the case of URL based material, such as MS Forms or Youtube videos, just copy and paste the URLs into your Onenote. In the case of MS files, just Go to Insert, file, choose your file and then, "Upload to Onenote and insert link".  

TOP TIP  Take advantage of this opportunity and think outside the box! You can also Insert external Links, as well as links within pages in your Onenote (remember the Content Reference Library?), so an opportunity to think outside the box: How can you use other external apps such as LearningApps, Flippity, Wheel of Names, Quizziz or Genially to maximise learning? I add links to all these apps directly to my Onenotes. I explain how I exploit these apps in blended learning in this blogpost.

8. Use the Snipping Tool app to select sections of a textbook, website etc.. that you want students to work on and paste the content onto Onenote. I use this all the time and it is extremely useful for a particular reading or listening activity!

9. TOP TIP!! If you want students to respond to questions, etc.. Create a Table for them to write answers on. Look at my example above, where I pasted a section of a digital textbook into Onenote with Snipping Tool, for a reading task, and then created a Table for students to write their answers in. I always change the colour of my Table to make it stand out!

10. Do not reinvent the wheel! Use all your PDFs, Word Worksheets interactively in Onenote. For that, just insert them but, instead of choosing the option shown in Tip 7, choose "Insert as printout". This will insert a copy of your document as an image (an image per page). Once this is done, right click on your image and set it as background. That way, students can either write on it directly, with a digital pen, or just type their answers! This is very useful in the case of Exampro materials, where students just type in their answers directly into the worksheet. 

11. Give feedback by Inserting an Audio, or ask students to give you oral answers to questions! This will save you lots of time when Marking!!

12. Use the Stickers within Onenote to provide feedback! They are under Insert and you can add your own text. Once created, you can save your sticker in the Teacher Only section to use later! 

TOP TIP  use the Windows+V option to access your clipboard of copied images when marking, which allows you to find your recent copied feedback stickers, for example, and just paste them when marking, without having to go to the Teacher Only section to find the sticker you need! Why don't you try to use your Bitmoji as a sticker for Feedback? See example above too. 

This is my presentation from a TILT Webinar a delivered last March on Feedback using Onenote, with lots of tips!

13. Distribute your pages to your students weekly, that's why I tend to create a page of lessons per week, so I only need to distribute one page per teaching set. This means that students get a version of your distributed page in their own section for them to edit and work on. 

TOP TIP if you make a mistake or change your lesson plan, you can delete a distributed page easily and you can also distribute pages to particular students!

14. Use the Review Student Work function when marking. This is under Class Notebook on the top of your onenote and it allows you to go through work really quickly! It only works with pages that you have distributed, not created by students, so if you want to use this function, make sure you distribute the page where you want students to work. In my case, it will be their lesson page.

15. Finally! When setting up your Class Notebook, think about the sections you want to see in your students' areas.  Structure this for them and explain to them how they are going to work, which sections to use for what and the rationale behind! In my case, I have a section for each topic (lessons), a section for Sentence Builders and a section for Prep/Homework. Students can always create their own independent sections, which I encourage them to do, but with a rationale. However, you can only distribute pages to previously created sections by you.

For a video demonstrating these tips this is my Onenote Tutorial 

ENJOY ONENOTE AND THE BLENDED LEARNING EXPERIENCE IT PROVIDES!

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.

Blended Learning made easy

Following my presentation yesterday in the UKedChat Conference 2021 on how to have impact lessons via Digital Tools, I have started creating a series of short videos demonstrating how I exploit a Digital Tool in my lessons in a blended learning scenario. 

If your students do not bring their own device to school, remember that many of these activities can be carried out with a mobile. I know there are rules about mobile use in the classroom, but after the digital revolution we are living, I firmly believe that mobiles should be allowed in lessons when it is required by the teacher, maybe that's something you can talk to your SLT. We have certainly changed rules regarding using mobiles in lessons in specific scenarios. 

MOST OF THESE ACTIVITIES WILL TAKE YOU  ONLY 5 OR 10 MINUTES TO PREPARE!!!

Blended Learning Demo 1 How to maximise Flippity 

Blended Learning Demo 2 :How to maximise Wheel of Names

Blended Learning Demo 3: How to use Boardgames with Genially

Blended Learning Demo 4: Quiz time! Quizizz and Carousel Learning

Blended Learning Demo 5: How to maximise Flippity with the randomizer

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.