Embedded grammar: The Eureka Effect!

As you probably know, I have been working with the talented Dr Gianfranco Conti and Dylan Viñales on a new Spanish Grammar book aimed at foundation level, underpinned by EPI methodology and a lexicogrammar approach to teaching MFL. The book is called  Spanish Verb Pivots, title which reflects the core of the EPI methodology and which, Gianfranco has explained really well in social media and in the book itself. 

I thoroughly enjoyed co-writing this book with such gifted practitioners but what I enjoyed the most was the opportunity to implement in a systematic way, how I have been approaching grammar in my lessons for years. 

I don’t teach grammar in isolation, I did at some point, and I quickly realised it was useless, as practising a set of rules over and over again could lead to excellent choral conjugation of verb paradigms but made no difference in reaching  fluency, hence leading to frustration! 

Instead, I soon realised that grammar should be taught embedded in the lexicon we teach via chunks. For that I use my own sentence builders. We practise those chunks constantly during lessons, we analyse patterns, I plant the seed, quoting Dr Conti, on grammar to come, students become fluent on a particular topic, and then, only then, I teach grammar explicitly. At that point grammar becomes a dejá vu feeling and most likely to be automatised. 

Grammar is embedded in the language, so let’s deconstruct it, yes, but only once students have internalised target structures/vocab, so that they can develop creativity. 

An example: The past tense in Y8

This is how I teach the topic of holidays in the past in Y8, always after having learned to talk about holidays in the present, which will lead to the learning of the Past tense in Spanish.

Modelling stage

At this stage I introduce the following Sentence Builder via choral repetition and showing the Spanish written graphemes and the English, so there's no confusion whatsoever on what structures mean! Thinking about the new GCSE, this Sentence Builder, already incorporates High Frequency words: such as the verbs intentar and encontrar. The Sentence Builder aims for students to learnn the I form of the past tense, including irregular verbs and be fluent with them.

We carry out lots of modelling activities as outlined in this blogpost here. At this stage I work mainly with MWBs to check for understanding. I also allow students to have their Sentence Builders with them: scaffolding. Lots of input activities take place throughout the Modelling stage, which will last a couple of lessons. 

By the way, I only teach, depending on ability, a row at a time in the Sentence Builder above. For example, I would not teach opinions and reasons, at the same time as all those verbs in the Past Tense to avoid cognitive overload.  

Similarly, when doing listening/translations/dictations, I always make sure I interleave past structures and vocabulary: embedded retrieval practice! This stage finishes with the explicit learning of the chunks for a spelling test. Quizlet, Memrise and even better, the Sentence Builder site are great tools to assist students in this learning, which I do as homework tasks.

Structured Practice Stage

Following the MARS EARS approach to lexicogrammar teaching, after 2 modelling lessons per row, I would expect students to start producing some sentences with guidance. I always do this as a whole class to start with with MWBs and orally. 

Digital tools are great at this stage, such as Flippity, Wheel of names, or Sentence Builsders site, as well as some old classics, like any Battleships, Oral Ping-Pong, pyramid translations, board games or just any information gap activity! Have a look at this blogpost for ideas. 

At this stage, we can start looking at grammatical patterns in the sentence builders! Homework tasks may include more extensive reading, as well as guided written practice: tangled translations for example. In this blogpost I give some ideas on how to revamp and maximise the digital activities we use in lessons as homework tasks, saving lots of time. 

Fluency stage

The hardest stage! Which, paradoxically, seems to be ignored. This will take three/four lessons and it is similar to the previous stage but I expect students to come up with their own answers to specific questions under time constrictions! 

Speed dating, stealing sentences with initials, board games with questions or the beginning of a sentence, flippity with a question and a expression to be used in the answer are some of my favourite activities here! A summary of the activities at each stage can be seen below:

Somewhere in the fluency stage I teach grammar! 

Inductive grammar: The Eureka Effect!

As students have had so much practice with the structures I want them to learn, I expect my pupils to work out the rule of the past tense for all persons from a text that we analyse. Remember, they already know the present and the I form of the past tense extremely well! This is the Eureka effect of this approach!

Students work in pairs to come up with a rule, we check it, we agree on it and then I explain it, explicitly, again. They take notes and then, as if it was a sentence builder, I follow the same process of modelling, structured practice, fluency tasks, again but referring to Grammar. 

Modelling Grammar

This involves carrying out the same tasks done at the Modelling Stage, when learning our sentence builder,  but now using the we, he/she, you, they persons of the past tense: dictations, reading activities, listening tasks, translations. At this stage a homework task will involve to learn the six verb endings for -ar and -er/-ir verbs in Spanish and a test, which just will inform me if students understood this grammar point but which is not a reflection of student success in Spanish! 

Practising Grammar

Again, we carry out the same tasks as in the structured practice stage, but now focussing on the grammar point we are studying: the past tense. 

This is where learning grammar can be great as there are lots of games I can incorporate at this point! Basically, any game like connect four, snakes and ladders, stone/paper/scissors, Jenga, four in a box, you name it, works here! My students love grammar because it is fun and they experimented a Eureka feeling, which leads to motivation and "a can do" attitude. Remember, we don’t just conjugate verbs but we embed the past tense into communicative utterances! More traditional worksheets work very well here too, with an element of competition! 

Being fluent with Grammar

This is the Holy Grail of MFL! If students  are fluent in grammar, by default if taught via a lexicogrammar methodology, students should be fluent in the target language! Easier said that done! 

This will involve a few lessons and lots of interleaving over the years! But at this stage, I expect students to be able to narrate, in a simple way and quickly, what they and other members of their family did during the holidays! All the fun activities from the previous stage work, but with a time limit. 

This stage must be reinforced by carefully planned homework tasks that will allow students to be creative, while still having time to think about grammatical rules: Creative Writing tasks are ideal at this stage. 

So, grammar is clearly embedded in the learning process and it leads itself to have a Eureka effect. 

It can be explicitly taught but not at the beginning of the learning journey but towards the end and not as end on its own, but as a tool to be able to communicate fluently in the target language. 

Similarly, any grammar point will neeed to be revised many times and in different contexts to be fully assimilated: free time by saying what students did yesterday or what happened in a film; school by saying what students studied yesterday etc… 

I would like openly to thank Dr Gianfranco Conti and Dylan Viñales for the opportunity to allow me to work and learn from them during the creation of Spanish Verb Pivots. It’s been such a pleasure.  

Coco: A sequence of lessons, anchoring in challenge!

In this blogpost I am focussing on project based learning and how we spent 6 weeks in Y9 studying the film Coco. We did this right after the Easter Holidays leading up to the May half-Term. Previously, we had studied the topic of TV learning to describe different types of TV programmes, comparing them, saying why students like/ liked some and not others. The idea was to link such vocabulary to a real film, while learning about South-American culture, Mexico and the Day of the dead. Students have two lessons per week in Y9 and this sequence of lessons was intended for a top set but it was slightly updated for all abilities. 

We started by watching the film Coco in Spanish with English subtitles. For that, we payed for the film in Youtube. 

We created two sentence builders. Sentence Builder 1 is what we called Levels 1 and 2 and focusses on what is the film about and how to describe the plot. 

Sentence Builder 2, was a short one and we called it Level 10 and focussed on giving an opinion about the film.  ( Levels 3-9 were not covered in the 6 weeks of teaching, due to lack of time, but it included descriptions of clothes and relationships among members of the film).

We also created a Memrise course to go with the unit for students to learn the chunks that we were covering in lessons.  For Memrise Course, click here. 

The sequence of lessons can be found in this Genially below:

 

The film and all the activities presented in this Genially were carried out within 12 lessons and involved tasks following the EPI/Lexicogrammar approach by Dr Gianfranco Conti, with my own variations and use of digital tasks. 

The sequence starts with modelling activities when a Sentence Builder is introduced, including repetition, dictation, delayed dictation, finishing the sentence after me etc.. with the use of MWBs and lots of praise and merits for every 3 correct answers (my students always keep a tally in their MWBs and at the end they collect their merits). This motivates all students as they want to do well to get their merits at the end of the lesson.

The planned sequence, involves students learning the vocabulary, little by little, using the Memrise courses, in a Flipped Classroom scenario, so when the Sentence Builder was introduced for the first time, students were very familiar with the vocabulary. Spanish being a phonetic language is great for this!

For many lessons, after modelling, we practised the vocabulary in many different ways, until students mastered the Sentence Builders, and believe me they did!!! We carried out, translations via LearningApps, Textivate, Oral Ping-Pong, Battleships and more traditional translations where students were working in Pairs and competing with each other!

I recycled the Wheel of Names activities as starter/plenaries and whole class oral/written activities as needed! By the end of the 12 week period, students could carry out the final writing task from memory and talk for around 2 minutes on Coco. 

The sequence also includes a cute listening activity which I created with Snapchat, inspired by Naziha de Londres. I love this type of video, listening activities because I can vary my vocabulary, speed etc and personalise the learning experience!

Finally, students learned about Day of the Dead in Mexico and carried out a Poster using Spanish and English where they wrote about Coco but also what they had learned about the Day of the Dead.

Why I love it!

The sentence builders are, deliberately, quite complex as they allow me to introduce Direct Object pronouns easily: "su tatarabuelo los abandonó" or "su familia lo obliga a ser zapatero". We dedicated a lesson towards the end analysing these Object Pronouns and comparing the two sentences above with "merece la pena verla"  Why lo/los/la? why in the case of "verla" the pronoun appears after the verb? What is the rule? This grammatical point will be reinforced after half term when we introduce our last topic: food and we learn "lo comí" etc.. Similarly, we revised the past tense, which students had already learned, and I introduced the future "si promete que no será músico".  

Furthermore, students learned about Mexican culture, watched a real film with a purpose and learned sophisticated vocabulary at GCSE level! They loved that as they felt "clever": anchoring in challenge! The sequence also allowed students manipulate the language and conjugate verbs in different tenses while giving their real opinion on something relatable to them!

Embedded Phonics: nothing revolutionary, it is what learning languages is about!

I have wanted to write a post about Phonics for a long time, especially after the announcement that a new GCSE was going to be launched, focussing on the NCELP three Pillars of Grammar, Vocabulary and Phonics. It struck me that the new GCSE was implying that, currently, we did not teach enough, if at all, Phonics in the MFL classroom. 

Well, if we teach languages and we teach listening/speaking, irremediably, we are teaching Phonics!

The way I teach Phonics is through an embedded approach, rather than a Synthetic one, which seems to be the case for NCELP.

What is Phonics?

Phonics is actually a teaching method (as apposed to Phonetics which is the science of studying speech sounds) which consists in learning how the different graphemes in a given language correspond to specific sounds, which we call phonemes when referring to linguistics or a language in abstract.

Having this knowledge is key for any language learner as it is the foundation of pronunciation, hence communication in the target language and, equally important, it allows learners to understand the spoken language, by making a correlation between the sounds they hear to specific graphemes, and ultimately meaning.

Phonics and lexicogrammar

As you know, I follow a lexicogrammar approach to teaching languages, which works wonders for all different ability levels, inspired by Dr Gianfranco Conti. I have heard criticism to the Lexicogrammar / EPI approach implying that it does not teach Phonics, neither Grammar nor individual Words. I can assure it does! 

I teach Phonics embedded in all the stages of the learning journey. When preparing our Sentence Builders, my team and I always make sure that we include a wide range of words containing key sounds in Spanish, and at some point, as we do with grammar, this is explicitly pointed out. However, we don’t teach such words//sounds in isolation as a synthetic approach would do.

This way, our students will have being exposed and extensively practised, all the sounds specific to the Spanish language and its correspondent grapheme within a year starting in Y7. Yes, I teach Spanish, so doing this is so much easier in this language than in French, as Spanish, as German, is a phonetic language.  

For example, in Y7, students learn phonics from their first lessons, when they learn how to say their name and how they are feeling in Spanish. Our Sentence Builders will include names such as:

Alejandro, to teach the sound/phoneme /x/ which corresponds to the grapheme  j 

Hector, to teach that the grapheme h in Spanish is mute and does not correspond to any phoneme, we just don't pronounce it!

Ramón, to teach the phoneme /r/ and later on, in the topic of Free Time, correr, to explain how the phoneme /r/ corresponds to the grapheme r at the beginning of a letter or rr between vowels.

Me llamo, to teach the phoneme /ʎ/ or Tengo sueño, when teaching ¿Cómo estás? to teach the phoneme /ɲ/ . 

How do I teach Phonics?

Embedded in all the stages of the learning language, through lots, lots of modelling activities and structured practice tasks, as part of the memorisation and, ultimately, automatization of the language, to achieve fluent communication. 

Below you can find a selection of some of my favourite activities that I use at each stage of the learning process, many inspired by Dr Gianfranco Conti’s and Steve Smith’s book Breaking the Sound barrier. There are more but this is just a selection.  

Some of my favourite activities at the Modelling stage:

Repetition in different ways/voices to model pronunciation: chanting, singing, angry. 

Dictations, normal dictations, gapped dictations, delayed dictation (same as a normal dictation but students have to wait around 10 seconds before they are allowed to write the words/ sentences they hear). I do this, initially, with short chunks to, increasingly, using longer sentences and chunks combinations.

I start a word and students finish it

Descriminatory games where I say two words with a distinctive phoneme and students need to decide which represents a specific cleaning: hago patinaje versus hice patinaje or haré patinaje. Which one refers to the past? This is important, as phonemes are the smallest linguistic unit which has an impact on meaning.

Bad listening, where I give students a text, I read it with subtle differences and students need to sport such differences.

Battleship listening, where I give students  battleships grid, filled with small sentences, I say about 10 of the and  students write the coordinate of my sentences.

Pyramid listening , where I small chunk which progressively gets longer as we advance in the pyramid and students need to transcribe what they hear.

Faulty echo, where I say words with the wrong pronunciation and students must identify where the mistake lays.

Basically, I expose my students to lots of listening activities in the Modelling stage, so that they become familiar with different phonemes or sounds, making a direct correlation, via the sentence builder, to their correspondent graphemes and therefore to meaning. 

For an exhaustive list of listening activities, visit this blogpost. To do this successfully, it is important to personalise these listening tasks and not just carry out listening activities via a given textbook audio to test meaning only,  but to use listening tasks, via my voice, live, as a learning tool, to focus on the correlation of graphemes and sounds/phonemes. 

Before using commercialised listening tasks, I also create my own listening material, which allows me to continue personalising my listening activities, when using longer audio passages to focus on meaning. For this, I use, any online recording app, like Mote, Vocaroo or I use speaking Bitmojis, and Snapchat videos! 

Below, you can find a short video, under a minute, for my Y9 students on the topic of Coco.T The video will be the basis of a listening task: fill in the gaps, questions, summarising, translating etc..

In other words, Phonics is strongly linked to listening and it is tackled when we carry out listening tasks heavily based on vocabulary from our Sentence Builder.

After modelling, for at least a lesson, sometimes two lessons, at the Structured Practice stage, I plan lots of reading aloud activities. The idea here, is for students to practice the sounds that they have extensively listened to and have already made correspondence to graphemes and meaning, in the previous learning stage. 

Some of my favourite activities at the Structured Practice stage:

Stealing Sentences

Reading Battleships (same as listening battleships but students read the sentences now and play the game in pairs, where they need to find out the coordinates of their partner’s.

Oral Ping-Pong

Pyramid translations 

....and any choral reading aloud activity, performed as a class or in pairs using Wheel of names, or Flippity, which will allow students to practise the pronunciation of words, hence, doing Phonics. 

There's no need to say that phonics or saying words in good/correct pronunciation, will continue in the Spontaneous and Routinisation learning stages. 

Do I teach  Phonics explicitly and in isolation?

Explicitly yes! At some point in the learning journey, sometimes as early as at the Modelling stage, I will point out, explicitly, the correspondence of sound/phoneme and grapheme. Sometimes later. This is super useful when new words, with the same sound, appear later in the course and I ask students to predict how to pronounce them based on their knowledge of  phonics and the corresponde of phoneme/grapheme.

In isolation, no! My experience is that students forget words when taught out of context. My experience is that learning Vocabulary(Meaning)-Grammar-Phonics all at once (Lexicogrammar), via our Sentence Builders, reduces cognitive overload and facilitates the transfer of structures/vocabulary to the long term memory.

To sum up, I teach Phonics as I teach Spanish and I teach how to pronounce words and students consistently learn how to link sounds to graphemes. So, nothing new from the new GCSE, neither worried about a Dictation task as part of the new GCSE assessment, although I will argue the communicative value of such exercise in an exam! I teach Phonics because I teach Spanish via a Lexicogrammar Approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Dictogloss? 

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

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

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

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

Follow up

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

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

GCSE Oral Preparation: Spicing up the Photocard Practice!

Happy Easter!  This is a second part to my previous post on GCSE oral preparation, which included some tips and activities for Y11s to practise the oral exam. Since I wrote that previous post and inspired by Naziha de Londres on Twitter and Russell Stannard on Youtube, I have created the following Padlet activity to practise, in a fun, relatable way, the photocard element of the GCSE exam.  

I have looked for catchy, short TikTok videos on the three different Themes for AQA, downloaded them and add them to a Padlet. 

The idea is for students to choose a video, watch it, and answer the questions, very similar to those found in the General Conversation and the Photocard, by recording them themselves with Padlet. As I have chose the Canva option in my Padlet, when students add their recording, they can link it to the video they are talking about. 

I like this approach because, not only students can practise the GCSE questions in a fun way!!! BUT they can hear everyone's answers as well. This is KEY: to learn from each other and perform some assessment for learning among students by applying the oral AQA mark Scheme. 

Of course, this activity can also be carried out using other apps, such as BookCreator, Flipgrid or just OneNote!  I just chose Padlet, as students do not need to log in to access the activity and everyone can have access to everyone's input.

I hope it is useful!