Goal: mastering the language, the importance of Metacognition

As we embark on the last stage of the exam preparation process with our Y11 and Y13 students before they carry out their public exams, I stopped to reflect on what I expect my students to have achieved after 5/7 years of language learning.

My goal, as from Y7 has always been for my students to achieve fluency in the target language (mastery of vocabulary and structures to communicate effectively), while learning about the target culture, but also to make them independent and reflective learners in the process. Achieving these goals, I believe, will make them successful in their GCSE and AS/ALevel exams. 

How do we make our students independent learners?

Following Rosenshine’s principles, firstly by providing good models of language and tasks needed for their exam. This means, not only modelling language but also modelling how to tackle a 150 word task or a literature essay at ALevel. Silvia Bastow and Sonja Fedrizzi have written extensively about Modelling the thought process when tackling a written task. Inspired by these two educators, I created this video for my students before their mocks. 

We must also model the learning process in our lessons by carrying out lots of retrieval practice, interleaving topics and/or structures and providing structured/scaffolded practice. Most importantly, it is essential to explain students why we do the activities we do and how these tasks will help them encode information into the long term memory (learning), so that they get involved in and own their learning process.

The idea is that by talking about the activities we do in lessons, we model learning techniques that students can reflect upon and eventually apply themselves independently.  

This is a huge task that requires lots of reflection embedded in lessons. These are some of the questions I ask students in my lessons: How do we learn?  Have you been in a situation that you thought you had done lots of revision but did not do well? Why didn't you well? Is just reading material over and over again, good enough to learn vocabulary/structures? What alternatives do you have? What do we do in lessons to help you master the vocabulary and structures? What of these techniques can you try at home? How can you do retrieval practice/ self-testing at home? How can you practise listening, reading, writing or speaking?

This reflection is the first step to developing metacognition (the power to reflect on our own learning process, identify gaps and plan a strategy to fill such gaps and move forward). 

Metacognition leads to independent learning and is key to experiencing success, which is a great motivator in any learner. 

How to start the metacognition process to achieve independence?

Via powerful feedback and the setting of high expectations.  Feedback given to students should not be just a mark but a way to identify gaps in knowledge and suggest little steps to tackle such gaps, while providing the opportunity to reflect on performance with the setting of own targets. 

When setting targets and designing a course of action to tackle gaps and move forwards, students can then use the repertoire of learning modelled strategies used in everyday lessons. I like calling feedback, feedforward. This involves adopting a positive relationship with mistakes. Mistakes are good! They are the first step to learning.

In my experience, students tend to be overconfident when assessing their knowledge and skills and tend to revise what they are good at, which explains the feeling of "but I revised lots and still I did not do well". Feedback is a good reality check for students to learn what the real gaps are and what they need to test themselves on, using our modelled learning techniques. This means knowing how to develop/test the micro skills leading to a good performance in MFL: listening, reading, writing, speaking, grammar, vocab/structure learning, not just recalling vocabulary in isolation! At this point having a revision schedule, provides a clear path for students to set themselves targets and devise their own strategy, based on a trusted, modelled repertoire of techniques. I do this via Padlet

Power Tools to develop Metacognition in our students

These tools or techniques have been adapted from the wonderful book Powerful Teaching by Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain and I use  to embed Metacognition in my lessons. These tools are closely interlinked to Feedback and Retrieval Practice as starting points to reflect on our learning and moving forward:

• To provide planned breaks within lessons for silent self-retrieval practice . I do this by carrying our In my own words time. Somewhere within lessons I stop carrying out the normal tasks and ask: Can you explain this grammatical rule in your own words? Students may write the rule in MWBs or just share orally with a partner. Or, you have 5 minutes to write down, from memory, as many structures learned today and last week, again using MWBs to check for understanding.

• To plan self-reflection opportunities, after self-retrieval practice in lessons. You have 10 minutes to write down as many sentences/structures as possible from the topic of Free Time in Spanish. After the 10 minutes elapse. What could you remember? Could you share with a partner? Are you happy with what you could remember? Do you need to revise this topic again? How? Set yourself a target as part of your homework today. 

• To help tool one, I use Retrieval Cards  every other lesson with specific translations from English into Spanish, to be completed by students, based on past topics as well as recent ones. I normally use 10 translations. Students translate, in silence, as much of the 10 sentences in the Retrieval Card, from memory. Then, I allow students to look at their notes/sentence builders to look up those structures they could not remember on the spot. Students highlight the structures they could not retrieve on their own, and set up a target, as part of their homework, to revise these and tackle the gap. A few days later, I carry out a very similar Retrieval Card to see what has changed. 

• To use Metacognition Sheets after a unit/topic is taught. This is a normal self-assessment sheet: I know the verbs to describe my holidays but with space for students to actually write down answers from memory.  Then, again, I provide reflection time, alone or in pairs: could I remember lots? why not? what do I need to revise? Students then provide a personal target as part of their homework to deal with this gap.

• Write, leave and retrieve technique. After we go through several activities in a lesson, students write what they know, while it is still fresh in the working memory. Then they leave it, and after 10 or 15 minutes, I ask students to retrieve the same information. How much could they remember when it was not so fresh? What does that tell them? How are they going to close the gap?

These tools empower my students by sparking a conversation about their own learning and encouraging them to make a judgement of learning. 

I train students to differentiate between what they know versus what they do not know and provide them with a repertoire of techniques/steps for them to independently use to take ownership of their learning and do something about knowledge/skills they do not know or can't master yet!  

For MFL, the added complication is that students need not just to know content, like in other subjects, but to use such content spontaneously via different skills, hence the importance to practise the micro skills of listening, reading, writing, speaking and to model how to put the language together in an oral / written task. In other words, doing just Quizlet will not make students write/ speak in a MFL, they will need strategies to practise these skills. 

Metacognition allows students to prioritise learning and experience success so they are open to learning more! 

Metacognition is about not just getting information in their heads, but expect students to get information out from their learning, spontaneously, hence, helping students to encode information into the long-term memory: Learning independently.

It's coming home!: the new MFL GCSE Proposal, let's be positive!

Yesterday, the DfE published the outcome to the consultation for the revised GCSE Qualification for MFL. It can be found here.  I wrote my thoughts on the original proposal in this blog here, where I outlined what I liked about the proposals: 

• The rational behind the proposals, which is difficult to argue about: 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. An honourable aim, although, we all know that grading is the big elephant in the room when it comes to MFL in this country and no reform will be successful until, harshness in MFL is tackled and reduced!
• Glossed vocabulary
• Questions in English for the Listening and Reading papers
• The importance of phonics in the curriculum
• A reduction of the content that students need to master: less is more!

However, I had the following reservations:

• The use of a specific list of vocabulary, where 90% of its content would come from the 2000 most frequent words occurring in the language, which meant there was not a lot of content vocabulary which would allow students to talk/write about interesting topics, especially if we want to refer to cultural topics. The revised version has reduced that percentage to 85%, a minor improvement, and now talks about word families not just words, which gives some space for manoeuvre. 

• The notion of not having Themes/Topics and the clear emphasis on grammatical acquisition, at the expense of communication, which it is still there, was another thorny issue for me: if themes or topics are no more, productive skills must be based pretty much around grammatical productivity, neglecting communication in the process. I am pleased, this is not the case anymore, and in the revised document, allows for a limited number of broad themes or topics relating to the countries (culture) where the target language is spoken. 
• My final reservation was about seeing a distinctive pedagogical background in the review, imposing a structuralist approach to teaching MFL, extensively supported by NCELP. That it is pretty much still the case. Not any other GCSE specification suggests methodology but just content.

Steve Smith analyses beautifully the new proposal review in this blogpost here, a must read!

WHAT NOW? 

Well, it looks like the proposals are coming home. However, whether we agree with the changes or not, we need to put things into perspective. 

We all are professionals, who aim to achieve fluency and real communication in our students while developing a cultural understanding of the countries where the target languages are spoken. 

That should still be the centre of our curriculum language journey and we should not disregard the resources and language roads we have mapped out in our schools so far. 

Some points to consider in preparation for the new GCSE to be first taught from September 2024:

• The importance of phonics in the lessons, this is already happening in many, many schools. Such work can be done with a lexicogrammar approach to teaching, I certainly do. In fact, if you follow an EPI approach, modelling is all about phonics, while the use of dictations and reading aloud are key in language acquisition and integral part of EPI.

• Make sure that your KS3 SoWs include as many of the family word lists proposed by the DfE as possible. This does not require a lot of work but rather tweaking your vocabulary content in your SoW. If you use Sentence Builders, it will need just minor adjustments so that we can make sure that students are exposed to the appropriate vocabulary. Because a specific list of words has been published, this task is relatively easy to achieve.

• Grammar is key in the new proposal, but it is key in any language acquisition journey and SoW, and certainly the current GCSE relies on manipulation of the language, one of its best features. If you follow a Lexicogrammar approach, grammatical mastery is key to be able to manipulate the language and communicate freely moving away from Sentence Builders. I can certainly see this happening with my students now!

Overall, the message I would like to send with this blogpost, is that the new proposal should not change our approach to language learning and our goals should remain the same. We shouldn't reinvent the wheel, rather adapting what we do so that we tackle the new exam format and, for that, we need to wait for the Boards to come out with a new specification. 

At the moment we should enjoy the wonders of teaching languages and seeing our students become good communicators. 

SOS: maximising skills for the GCSE exam!

Just before our Xmas break and before I got Covid from one of my lovely daughters, we conducted our Oral Mock exams for MFL. After Xmas we will carry out the other papers: listening, reading and writing. It was a strange feeling as last time we did these oral exams was back in 2019! 

In this post, I want to concentrate on a straight-forward line of action, which I have followed in the past, when Mock results for some sets/students were at least one grade below Baseline Grades, based on Midyis predictions. In fact, although a SOS guideline, these are strategies we apply to all our Y11 lessons as from September, for a matter of fact! 

Maximising Listening

This is the skill our students tended to underperform in the trial and in the real GCSE exams, the Cinderella skill, like Gianfranco Conti calls it! We started tackling the listening skill at KS3 and I wrote extensively about it in this blog. However, these are the strategies you can adopt at GCSE:

• Dedicate a lesson every two weeks, exclusively to practise listening skills. We have three lessons per week so, one of those 6 lessons, in a fortnight, is exclusively a listening lesson.
• Look up random vocabulary in transcripts and reading past papers, which has appeared in previous years and you know you have not taught and create Quizlet courses. This is one of mine, I have two of these courses. Students learn this vocabulary over several homework tasks. It is amazing to see how some of the most random vocabulary keeps appearing in exams, year after year like: ancianos, sopa de marisco, productos lácteos or me enteré/me decepcionó in AQA!
• Use Exampro activities for AQA, if you have the subscription, on a given theme/topic, so you concentrate on specific vocabulary at a time. If you don't have a subscription to this site, I would recommend you do so! It is affordable and invaluable in preparing students for exam style questions!
• When practising listening, for example via Exampro tasks, do it as a way to learn the language not to test it! For this, we always start by giving students the transcripts first, looking up vocabulary, doing translation activities, filling in the gaps, ideally in previous lessons, or as homework tasks. During our listening lesson, we always listen to the audio while reading the transcript and then complete the task. We may do only 2/3 tasks this way and then we attempt them again without the transcript. On a second listening lesson, we will do them again, interleaved with previous topic tasks, without transcript. 
• Students do add, any unknown vocabulary appearing in the transcript to their own random Quizlet courses: the more vocabulary they know, the better they will be at recognising it in a listening but also reading task!

Keep doing this routine every two weeks and during your normal lessons, emphasise listening tasks via Dictation, Battleships, Rock Climbing, Faulty Echo etc.. as explained in my previous listening blog. Over time, start mixing up topics and themes and set up listening tasks for homework too.  

Maximising Reading 

Students tend to do better in this skill. Learning random vocabulary, as done per listening, and all topic vocabulary is key for success! 

I normally tackle this skill via homework tasks, as I personally like using lesson time for oral/listening activities mainly. Exampro proves invaluable here too!

The key for success for this skill is to treat it, like the listening component, as an opportunity to learn the language!  So, students are encouraged to add any unknown vocabulary to their Random Vocabulary Quizlet, when carrying out the activities. In fact doing this is part of the homework task!

It is important that students don't see this practice as a test/assessment but as a learning opportunity!  Going through the reading tasks/answers with students and stop, to model, as a whole class, the thinking process to tackle those tricky questions, it is vital and super important. 

Don't just ask students to complete a task: reflect on the process of how students came to a particular answer and why it was not another. The exam is full of "catchy" bits, so training students to recognise these and look up for intensifiers, synonyms, negative words etc.. in a text are crucial skills!

Tackling Writing

To get better at this, students need models of what a good writing task looks like and must know the structures/vocabulary/grammar extremely well! This is why using Sentence Builders throughout the GCSE course, not just at KS3, is so important: as these provide a wonderful framework to work with and manipulate the language as needed. 

All our Sentence Builders for GCSE can be found here . Of course, interleaving, retrieval practice and key activities throughout the GCSE course to help students learn these Sentence Builders and transfer them to the Long Term Memory, are essential.  To get ideas on Writing Tasks in general, as from KS3, visit this blogpost. 

• Present students with a model of a writing task. Silvia Bastow has written extensively on how to do this on this Blogpost  as has Sonja Fedrizzi on this other Blogpost. Inspired by these two wonderful educators, this is my model video on how to tackle the 150 word question in AQA:

• Dedicate a lesson every two weeks, to carry out a timed writing task in Y11.  This is the list of Timed writing tasks, which I created based on past papers to train students to carry out the AQA 150 word task.   Every two weeks, students for homework, prepare one of the tasks, taking into account the advice given on the right box:

     During our Writing lesson, they will carry out the task in exam conditions, which will be marked by me, using the AQA Mark Scheme and giving them specific feedback, which they need to tackle on the next task:

This technique, has dramatically improved the writing grades of our students in exams, prior Covid. As a matter of fact, we start using Timed Writings as from October Half-term up to Study leave in May.

• Retrieve, constantly in lessons, those verbs in present/past/future, that students need, together with high impact expressions to get the highest grades in the writing task.
• During lesson time, carry out Translation activities in a game environment! Genially games, as well as Carousel Learning tasks can be great here!

Maximising Speaking

As with the Writing skills, it is important to model how to tackle the different components of the Speaking exam. In the case of AQA, knowing how to do well in the Roleplay and the Photocard is essential, as these two components will provide 50% of the marks for the whole oral and they just require exam technique! To prepare students well for this, we have created this Oral booklet, based on past paper Roleplays and Photocards, as well as, example oral questions. 

• Spend as much lesson time as possible on oral skills. This is the only skill which is very difficult for students to maximise on their own! Similarly, it is the skill that will motivate them the most to study a language at GCSE and beyond!!! If they feel they cannot speak, they will give up on the subject. For that, you can use, some of the activities proposed on this blog, preferably from KS3.
• Using the Oral Booklet, model and practise, first in writing using MWBs, the Roleplay and Photocards. In Y11, these present great starter activities for a lesson! After practising as a whole class with MWBs, Students can practise the tasks, easily, with their partners as the oral booklet has on one side the student card and on the other the teacher's version. 
• To practise the General Conversation part of the exam, 50% of the whole speaking mark, give them model questions which students can start preparing in flashcards, little by little as from Y10, as the course progresses. I make it clear they cannot learn by heart all these questions! but having them in writing, gives them some confidence for their own revision on what a good model answer looks like! 

Make the link between the General Conversation in the Speaking exam and the Writing exam

• Help students practise these questions via home work tasks and connect the oral to the writing: make the next timed writing, as explained above, linked to the same theme/topic as a previous oral homework task. There’s a clear link between both exams and students need to understand such link!

  Students must realise that by revising potential oral questions for the general conversation they are, in fact, learning potential content for the writing tasks. Understanding this link breaks down the gigantic task of tackling four different exams for GCSE. Such concept is also reinforced by using multi skilled activities and the same type tasks to practise different skills, for example Battleships for listening, oral and writing. Students must understand that all skills are interwoven and must be practised interlinked with each other.

• During lessons, dedicate time to practise the general conversation questions in a game format. This is an example with Flippity: students click on the randomiser, play, Piedra, Papel, Tijera and must answer a question as it spins. To make the task more challenging, ask them to include a high impact expression, from the second column, in their answer. 

• Dedicate your lessons two weeks leading to the Mock and real MFL orals to just practise oral skills. 

• As with writing, make sure you retrieve, during your lessons, key verbs in different tenses and high impact expressions.

These techniques have made a big difference for me year after year and have helped my students maximise their grade! I hope it is useful for you. I would be super happy to hear what other techniques you use which are successful for you and your students!

My best (not free but worth every penny) apps and sites to support EPI

I have written a few posts on the apps and digital tools that I extensively use to deliver my lessons and support Sentence Buillders and the EPI methodology, led by Gianfranco Conti. However, so far the vast majority of these apps were free ones such as Flippity, Wheel of names, Genially, LearningApps, DeckToys, Loom or Canva. 

Today, I would like to talk about the sites and apps, which are not free, but that are essential in my MARS EARS approach to teaching Spanish and are worth every penny! Of course, budgets vary massively from school to school, but hopefully this list will help you decide which ones you could try and start using within your budgets.

Modelling and Awareness-raising

Sentencebuilders.com

This is the first stage of the learning process via a lexicogrammar approach to learning languages. Although most of the process will involve the teacher providing live models for students via a Sentence Builder, which can just be displayed into an Interactive Board, using various repetition techniques and activities such as Syllabing, Spotting the missing word, Dictation, Delayed Dictation or Sentence Puzzle, to mention but a few, the site Sentence Builders, can really add an element of fun for whole class activities at this stage.  

This site is super affordable and it is evolving by the day!  It operates around the concept of Sentence Builders. You can use pre-populated Sentence Builders, under Premium Resources, in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Welsh! or, and this is what makes the site so special, you can create, using the site itself, your own Sentence Builders, which you can share with your school or the whole community! Once created a Sentence Builder will look like this, and will generate endless online activities:

It is great for this Stage as you can display it on the board, do repetition as needed, as you would normally do with a PPT or Smartboard slide, but most importantly, after repetition, if you click on the little beret cap icon at the bottom (teacher tools) you will have many choices to display your Sentence Builder: with just initials, with just consonants, with the English translation, without, with the word shape etc.. and now the fun starts!!

After a few repetition rounds with all the words displayed in both languages, I tend to show the Spanish version, firstly, without vowels, then 50/50, finally just initials. I involve the whole class but doing choral repetition to start with and moving to cold calling after a few rounds, working in teams to get points! As this is the modelling stage, students just say the Spanish, but with the added difficulty of having to remember some of the missing letters. I love it, as it avoids me to create a PPT with different slides and it makes the lesson super engaging!  For information on how to use the teacher tools in the Sentence Builders site, have a look at this blogpost.

If you click on Random Spanish prompt, in the yellow box, the site will create random Spanish sentences, based on your Sentence Builder, which you and your students can read, incorporating Phonics into your lesson in context, and translate into English to help memorising.

At this point, I will point out grammatical structures, without explicitly explaining them: Raising Awareness, and will elicit grammatical rules already studied: For example for this Sentence Builder, about holidays in the past, I would ask students to transform the Spanish sentence at the bottom, to the present and would practise the verb IR in the Present tense, followed by "de": voy de vacaciones/ voy de compras/ voy de paseo or just the verb SER. The site will also allow you to print out your Sentence Builders or any Premium, pre-populated ones, which is great to make your own Sentence Builders Booklets! 

Receptive Processing 

This stage is very much linked to the previous one, as it involves to create high-intensity processing practice via listening and reading tasks, (controlled input). At this stage, the Sentence Builders website is great too, as it will create, automatically (once your Sentence Builder is created), a wide range of classic EPI activities such as Dictation, Delayed Dictation, Read and translation, Listening to Translation, Delayed Copying etc.

The site allows you to create your own classes, very easily, and will provide login details for your students. At this stage, I assign a pre-defined path of activities, based on receptive input, which students may carry out during the lesson, as all my students bring their own device to lessons, or as Homework Tasks. 

Structured Production

Sentencebuilders.com and Textivate

At this stage, where students will be required to produce their own sentences via careful planned scaffolded practice, based on the studied Sentence Builder, I use, the Sentence Builders site again. Now, I pre-select activities within the Translate to Spanish option, which will give a lot of  scaffolded opportunities for pushed output: from Word gap (click) to Type all (no clues). Students get points and immediate feedback and you can check progress from your classes section. 

Textivate, another super affordable site by the same creator as Sentence Builders, Martin Lapworth, is another great site for Structured Production activities. The concept is very similar to Sentences Builders, but activities are generated from a text you previously add to the site, rather than a Sentence Builder.

EARS (Expansion, Autonomy, Routanization, Spontaneity)

The Language Gym, Languagenut and This is Language

This is the latest stage of the process and the most difficult to reach! At this stage, the structures have been extensively learned by the students and are practised, interleaving past structures from old Sentence Builders and requiring students to start manipulating the language to create their own output. Scaffolding will still be needed, though! Activities such as creating presentations, freer translations, open questions with limited time constrictions, work well at this stage. Other classics include: speed dating, the spider game, group talk or speak bingo. 

At some point in this stage I will cover grammar via an inductive process, see this blogpost here and will use another of my favourite sites, The Language Gym. The Language Gym allows you to practise the language, via a wide range of pre-populated activities. The site is the digital version of the popular The Language Gym books, authored by Gianfranco Conti, Dylan Viñales and the Language Gym team! So if you use the books in your lessons, this site is a must, and again super affordable! Similarly, using the pre-populated activities in the site, although they don’t coincide entirely with my sentence builders, is priceless to start learning new vocabulary on a given topic, as I explain below.

At this stage, my favourite activity is the Verb Trainer. The verb trainer, does what it says in the tin! It will help students memorise conjugation of verbs. In the Language Gym you can, very easily, create classes and assign assessments from any of the 8 types of exercises above. I love the Verb Trainer because, it helps students drill verb endings in a fun way, especially if you carry the activity live, where all students compete against each other and provide some prizes, like my scratch Bitmoji cards!  It is a winner every single time and students will start using the Verb Trainer independently to revise different tenses, before oral and writing tests. You can practise up to 9 verb tenses, making it ideal from KS3 to KS5!!! My Alevel students use it too!

At this point, together with lots of productive tasks, I also carry out many listening and reading activities moving away from our Sentence Builder.  This process is important, as I want to train my students to learn more vocabulary than just that practised in our Sentence Builders, in preparation for their GCSE exam. I wrote a post on vocabulary learning and how I distinguish between Productive and Receptive vocabulary. Click here to read that post.  To learn Receptive vocabulary, which ideally I would expect to become productive as the students become better linguists and independent in their learning process, I use The language gym activities but also the following sites:

Languagenut and This is Language.  Both of these sites will require the creation of classes, which is very easy to do, and log in details and both of them will be based on pre-populated activities.

This is Language is a site designed to practise listening skills from authentic videos, recorded with native speakers, based on typical GCSE questions and topics for French, German and Spanish. I love it because it allows me and my students to practise exam-style listening content, in a very engaging way, far away from the boring, constricted exam listening tasks and audio files.  The site also allows students to practice grammar and vocabulary aimed at AQA and Edexcel, which makes it a great independent practice tool at KS4!

Recently, the site has also added a Speaking type of activity, which looks great! You can choose a topic, a type of question within that topic and before students record themselves with a suitable answer, they are encouraged to watch some videos with model answers and activities to inspire and enhance their pre-learned oral questions. I love this task, as it practises listening for oral productivity, a key aspect of the EPI approach. As part of the learning process, while carrying out the activities, students are encouraged to add any learned new vocabulary into their Random Quizlet and learn it as part of strategic homework tasks. 

My students really like This is Language and the videos! They are designed, as all the activities in the site, for KS3 and GCSE. You can choose videos per topic for KS3 or by board for GCSE, and within that per theme/topic. Once you select a topic you have a few videos to choose from. I love the fact that you have different accents to choose from, ranging from different regions of Spain to South America. The stars represent the difficulty of the listening, and once a video is selected and assigned, students can slow down the audio as needed in order to carry out some really good activities, which exploit the video resource fully!  

I have found that using This is Language in the last stage of learning on covered topics, expands my students vocabulary and trains them to listen to unknown, unprepared words/structures. The fact that they have access to the full transcript and they are encouraged to look words up, makes it a very powerful tool, which can then be used independently by my students in preparation to their GCSE or just internal exams. 

Languagenut can be used from Primary to GCSE level, with plans to extend it to Alevel! It is available for French, German, Mandarin and Spanish. I love it because we can use it from Y7 to GCSE, under the same subscription. It has a very wide range of pre-populated activities to choose from which are assigned to your classes. 

The activities I mainly use for students to learn new vocabulary via reading and listening, are those under Exam Skills. The texts range from different level of difficulties, which I can assign to specific students. Students will complete the activities and when encountering new key vocabulary, they will add it to their random Quizlet, as done with This is Language. Every so often, my students need to learn this personal random quizlet and when carrying out productive tasks, I always encourage them to use some of such structures/vocabulary. 

Languagenut will also allow students to practice writing and speaking, using the GCSE exam framework. This is great to promote spontaneity as students cannot prepare a given set of questions and writing titles, making it the perfect GCSE revision tool! Students can record their answers and submit them for you to listen to! 

I am lucky that my department can afford these subscriptions! However, there's something for all pockets and focus! When used within a planned sequence of lessons, all these sites can be extremely powerful in the MFL classroom to achieve fluently and develop independent skills in students!

Stretching ALL students in MFL, not just High Achievers!

In these post I will be focussing on how to stretch ALL students in the MFL classroom and in the process, any high achievers that you may have, but not exclusively them, especially if like me you use Sentence Builders. I have read lots of comments suggesting that the lexicogrammar approach or EPI, following Gianfranco Conti’s nomenclature, can be boring and not stretch students in lessons, especially those with a higher aptitude for languages.

Anchor in Challenge

I have experienced the opposite. ALL my students, including  highly motivated students with an aptitude to language learning, can actually fly using this approach. The reason why is that from a very early stage we plant the seed for more sophisticated structures, which nurtures my students' curiosity and makes them explore grammatical concepts earlier and start being creative with the language. Sentence Builders allows me to Anchor in Challenge.

How to stretch students

Curriculum Design

Make sure you design a good curriculum which allows for creativity and the exploration of grammatical concepts early on. 

On one hand, your students will feel special, clever as you point out that some of the structures they are learning are 7-9 grade structures, you are telling them that you BELIEVE  IN THEM and they CAN ACHIEVE. 

On the other, High achievers tend to love finding out how the language works and planting the seed to interesting grammatical structures is key to make them expore!

For example, our Sentence Builders in Y7 incorporates the structure me gustaría que mi madre fuera + personality adjective  (I would like my mother to be), which in Spanish would require the use of the Imperfect Subjunctive. 

ALL our students, independently of ability, can recognise and/or use this structure and they feel good! On top of that, high achievers are prompted to work out how we would say I would like my parents to be which would require them to use fueran (3rd person plural), which they often decode after applying the pattern from “tienen” (they have= adding -n to the 3rd person singular tiene), so applying that pattern they add “n” to “fuera”. When I carry out this metalanguage thinking skills session, I do it for the whole class: having high expectations.

Later in the curriculum, in Y8, the same structure reappears now under the topic of Where I live: Me gustaría que mi casa fuera and we introduce tuviera. It will be repeated in Y9 too in the topic of tourism: me gustaría que mi ciudad fuera/tuviera” 

Our curriculum, based on Sentence Builders, is very well thought out and is full of high impact expressions like this, which are analysed in lessons, engaging high achievers and making ALL students feel clever! 

Such structures are introduced and practised extensively, with more simplistic structures. However they are not introduced all at once. Remember  less is more, and at KS3 we can spend weeks with a single sentence builder until students are fluent with it.

These are a few of the structures spread over our Sentence Builders at KS3 and recycled at KS4:

Le gusta/nos gusta/les gusta, instead of just me gusta

Me gustaba, so students work out les/nos gustaba, as they have been introduced to les/nos gusta: IDENTIFYING PATTERNS

Me gustaría + infinitive 

Me habría gustado + infinitive pero no pude As with Me gustaba, they soon work out le/les/nos habría gustado

Se me da bien, so students start working out se le/nos/les da bien

Puedo/podemos + infinitive

Suelo + infinitive

Solía + infinitive, so students work out solíamos/ solían

Siempre he querido hacerlo, so students start modifying it to siempre he querido + any infinitive

Me hace sentir bien

Me hizo sentir bien, so students can modify it to me hace/hizo reir/tener miedo/estar contento

Si pudiera me gustaría, so students start analysing pudiera and take risks to say, si pudiéramos. 

Si tuviera la oportunidad me gustaría+ infinitive 

Me ayuda a /me permite + infinitive 

All these are complex but extremely frequent expressions in spoken Spanish which students naturally use to express themselves and if following a textbook, would only encounter in Y11 or Alevel, recurring to Google Translate in the meantime!

Using a random personal Quizlet

All our sentence builders are linked to our departmental Quizlets. However, at some point in the learning journey, we carry out extra listening and reading activities moving away from the structures in the sentence builders, once students are fluent in a particular topic. 

Students always collect this vocabulary, which we nominate receptive, in their Random personal Quizlet courses. They have a Random Quizlet course per topic. Student learn this vocabulary, so that they can recognise it in listening or reading tasks. However, I also encourage pupils to use it in creative responses to substitute vocabulary from the official Sentence Builders. 

Could you?

When carrying out retrieval practice activities or structured practice tasks, mainly with mini whiteboards, but also in oral tasks, I always encourage, by modelling myself, students to extend their answers, using some of the high impact expressions above in new contexts: INTERLEAVING. 

That is great, could you use "me hizo + infinitive" to extend your answer?

I also encourage them to use the receptive vocabulary which we encountered in listening and reading tasks, from textbooks or Exampro and away from our Sentence Builders.

Many do it instinctively after a few lessons! In these video tutorials I demonstrate how I do this with Wheel of names and Flippity:

Have a repertoire of enrichment activities 

These activities are not just for high achievers but, for anyone who would like to stretch themselves and enrich their MFL experience.

I used to keep folders in my classroom with reading activities, such as graders or the lovely Authentik Magazines. I still do! But I have now a lovely repertoire of enrichment and extension tasks on OneNote, under the content library, to be done during lessons, as decided by students if a whole class tasks is finished or as extra learning at home. 

My repertoire include:

Independent work in the Verb Trainer of the Language Gym. What about learning about a new tense?

Independent work using This is Language and Languagenut

Extra videos + worksheets

Short films in Spanish 

Netflix Series

Zig-zag listening activities 

Zig-zag reading stories

The Language Gym Extranjeros book.

Cooking  recipe book/you tube videos for students to create their own dish 

Learning Spanish with songs with a link to Lyricstraining. 

Anchor in Challenge

I have high expectations and expect from ALL students a level higher than that expected by National Curriculum standards: at KS3, I expect some work at GCSE level and at GCSE level some work at ALevel. 

This principle is particularly important in the case of stretching the high achievers. So I give them websites aimed at higher levels and they love it! Languagenut and This is Language is brilliant for this, although not free, as you can assign special assignments to specific pupils within the same class, or have a challenge assignment for the whole class.

In the case of Spanish these two free websites are invaluable for KS4 students:

Hola Carmela

Spanish Podcasts

The use of Golden Expressions (Idioms)

Apart from the High impact expressions, which normally include idioms, blended within our Sentence Builders, we give students from Y7 to Y11 our Golden Expressions sheet. I challenge students to learn two idioms from the Golden Expressions sheet every half term and use them within oral or written activities. When done, I use my famous Scratch cards with Bitmojis. See this Blogpost here. 

A copy of my Golden Expressions sheet can be found here. 

Planning a rich curriculum

This means any extra curricular and cultural activity which will inspire students. The key is to offer it to ALL the students. 

We use Poetry in lessons: the Gloria Fuertes poems are brilliant for this, as they are authentic but easy to understand for all students. They also provide a perfect opportunity for high achievers to expand their repertoire of vocabulary and be creative with the language. 

Encouraging creative writing following models from Stories and Poems can be extremely powerful! 

Organising a speaking/debating/board games in MFL club 

Theatre Viewings etc.. are also excellent opportunities to stretch your students. A wrote a blogpost, on extracurricular activities to enrich your curriculum some time ago, with many ideas to try! 

Project Based Learning

As I explain on this blogpost, the importance and the power of Project Based Learning in MFL to stretch students and open the door to cultural understanding.

Our MFL curriculum includes a little project every year during KS3: Picasso Project for Y7, La leyenda del Espantapájaros (short film) for Y8 and Coco the film for Y9. These projects are embedded within our curriculum and are carried out by all students with scaffolding and specific Sentence Builders, so all students are enriched. Higher achievers, particularly enjoy Projects, and very quickly start manipulating the language, if a solid foundation to the structures expected throughout the project, has been set up. 

My experience is that Sentence Builders are a great source to stretch ALL students as it provides a solid structure and foundation on what to excel, plants the seeds for more sophisticated grammatical structures and creative language, avoiding the use of Google Translate and focussing on communication and fluency. 

Example of Work, in exam conditions, from a Y11 High Achiever using Sentence Builders and a Rich Curriculum: How you prepare for exams and problems in your school.

Example of Work, in exam conditions, from a Y11 middle range student using Sentence Builders and a Rich Curriculum: How you prepare for exams and problems in your school.  Careless mistakes are highlighted but not corrected. Student needs to correct them.