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!

GCSE ORAL PREPARATION : the last push!

These days I am reading quite a lot about teachers who have just finished doing their oral mocks. We actually carried them out before Christmas, which means that now we are embarking on the last preparation tips just before the real thing, after the Easter Holiday.  

Whatever your situation, the window to perform the orals is nearly here and we, teachers, will use a significant amount of lesson time focusing on this skill, which students find so stressful, but key to score a decent mark to boost their final GCSE grade. 

We use AQA but the approach described below can be applied to any board.  

Practising the Role Play

Students can find this section of the exam very challenging as the prompts found in those Roleplays can be particularly odd. 

What works here is practice, practice, practice, so students can get as close to the 15 points as possible by being accurate and being concise! This is hard to understand as we always encourage them to extend answers! Well for the Roleplay, No! 

I always make a selection of past Roleplays and to start with (mid Y10 and beginning of Y11) I spend time going over the bullet points, analysing them and explaining what is “a detail”, which can be any piece of information! 

Example: ¿Qué hiciste el día de la excursión? 2 detalles: fui a un museo (detail 1) but instead of saying another activity, which requires conjugating a verb, hence risking making a mistake, students can just say por la tarde/con mi clase/ por la mañana/ con mi profesor (detail 2). It will score the same as saying: y vi muchos cuadros! 

I always start practising the Roleplays together as a class, with MWBs, so I can check for understanding and spot errors that we can comment on. This can take up to one lesson! 

At a second stage, after lots of modelling, students can move to practise the Roleplays in pairs. For this we have an oral booklet, click here, with Roleplays, Photocards (from specimen and past papers materials) and examples of general conversation questions. On the booklet, I include the Teacher’s sections, so students can practise easily in pairs or on their own, testing themselves! 

I also spend time practising how to ask questions. This is key! What’s the easiest way to ask a question in French, German, Spanish that would fit nearly any topic/situation? For me is, what do you think of? In both ways: the polite and familiar forms. Also, do you like…? Finally, depending on the Roleplay,  the question is there? is very useful! 

In my experience with these three questions students can answer the Roleplay well! What about having some starter, retrieval practice quick fire questions practising asking questions? This should be second nature! As the exam approaches, have a roleplay as a starter activity, to start with with MWBs

Practising the Photo Card 

I use a similar approach for this component to that used with the Roleplay but emphasising the idea that, in this section, they need to extend answers by giving reasons and providing examples using a different tense. 

We do this via MWBs with the whole class. We focus a lot on the first question: what is there in the photo? And use the PALM acronym (describing people, action, location, mood). Then, to stretch students we talk about imagining a little story using the structure: Creo que acaban de + infinitive (I think they have just….) or Creo que están a punto de + infinitive ( I think they are about to).

As with the Roleplay, having our oral booklet with all the Photocards and the teacher’s input is key! Once we do lots of modelling together with MWBs, students can then practise in pairs or individually with these. 

Tip: have a look at the questions used for the photocard by your exam board and include these questions, or similar ones, as part of your oral General Conversation model questions. These questions keep appearing in a similar format year after year, and by including them in your bank, students will be familiar with the questions even if they are surprise ones! 

Embedding the General Conversation in all lessons

This section is the core! We have a bank of questions, many taken from the Photocards, which students have been working on since the beginning of the GCSE course. Every time we finish a topic, students write model answers to that specific topic set of questions, and practise them in lessons with lots of games throughout the two year course! 

I make it clear they must not learn them by heart but it is good practice to have an idea of what can be said for each question, transfer the answers to flashcards and do active learning/ testing as from Y10 with our guide. We make sure these general conversation questions are embedded into our Scheme Work and all our lessons aim to reach fluency/communication having these as our final goal!

I like this approach as we don’t only tackle the oral aspect, but also the writing tasks, basically productive skills. 

To start with, especially to support weaker students, we practice the questions with MWBs: I say a question and everyone has 20 seconds to write the best possible answer they can think of. Then, we move to proper oral activities, mainly including games: snakes and ladders, connect for, Battleships or our latest addition, trivial!

To promote spontaneity, when practising these questions, you can ask students to answer the question using a specific structure. Check this Flippity activity. 

Finally, we have prepared a revision  Easter Padlet, consisting of slots of 45 minutes for three weeks, to be completed during the Easter vacation. The final push for them! For us the focus is the oral exam, which also includes the writing!!!

My experience, from 2018 and 2019 is that this approach works extremely well! 

Good luck to all Y11s who have to sit this GCSE ORAL EXAM!

Having high expectations: Encanto and Anchoring in challenge!

I have been very busy lately with mocks, teaching intensively and all the other million things that we, teachers, do, while fitting a couple of interviews in between (no right job yet!) However, today I wanted to share an example of having high expectations, what I mean by anchoring in challenge as from Y7 and how we can plant the seed of  different verb tenses as from an early age while incorporating communicative activities and a cultural twist/element to the lesson.

Below, you can find a lesson sequence to teach descriptions in Y7.

 

When I planned this lesson, students already knew how to describe their hair/eyes using “tengo” (I have) and physical appearance using “soy” (I am). During this lesson, for a mixed ability group, I intended to revise the same vocab but now making reference to the third person, while expecting students to refer to the past and the future.

Activity one, consisted of revising the vocab about descriptions that students already knew. For that, I created a Flippity activity with such structures, in Spanish. Students just translated them into English, using the “single name" setting in the Flippity activity, I used the cold calling technique for this. This was a quick fire activity based on retrieval practice. On a second round, I expected the students to shout: tengo or Soy, for each expression, as students tend to get confused between the two verbs! We also remembered the o/a option for adjectives such as delgado/a. 

After that, I explained that we would describe Maribel’s family in Encanto. To do that I asked if we could use Soy/Tengo and why not. I then showed them the following Sentence Builder. 

The Sentence Builder had the vocabulary students already knew, like descriptive expressions and family members but introduced: “tiene” “antes tenía” “me gustaría que tuviera”  “es” “antes era” “ me gustaría que fuera”. 

We did lots of modelling and repetition with “tiene” and “antes tenía” using the vocab on the sheet. I explained how the second structure, was already GCSE level, and I was teaching it to them because I had high expectations on them.  They felt special and loved it! That motivated them!

I explained how we can remember “tenía” by thinking of the number “ten” in English and “ear”, like in “tenear”= tenía. I showed this with gestures (showing my 10 fingers, followed by touching my ear):  dual coding. Then we moved to “es” which they already knew and “antes era” and I explained how we could remember this sgructure by thinking about  a “past era” in time! I modelled the structures with MWBs: dictations, and translation both ways. On this occasion, I just mentioned “ me gustaría que tuviera/ fuera” and how this was, specifically, a Y11 expression. I did a little bit of modelling too with the expression but it was there to stretch  the high flyers while having high expectations on all of them. I expect everyone to use it but we will need more lessons for this! Stealing sentences would work brilliantly at this stage too!

Next activity, to be done in a second lesson if necessary, was a Battleships oral activity for students to practise the structures we had modelled. They played in pairs and described La Familia Madrigal in the present and the past! High flyers were encouraged to make reference to the future. All students had the previous Sentence Builders with them so scaffolding was integrated. Note that I gave students the initials of the translations in Spanish to trigger memory. 

Finally, after a couple of minutes cold calling about “how do you say, I have, he has, he had, I am, he is, he was?” We played the Piñata game in teams (A and B). The game had the same sentences as in the Battleships game, reinforcement of structures, but now these sentences were in a different format. 

The Piñata Game 

A person from team A chooses a number from the board, before releasing what there is behind, I spin the wheel and someone from team A translates the sentence into Spanish. I reveal what is behind their chosen number: positive points, negative points, a robber (so they lose all the points) or swapping points with team B. Then we do the same with team B. I keep a tally with each team points. They love it!  The original template and game was created by the amazing Genially Queen, Marie Allirot.

By the end of the lesson/sequence of two lessons, students in Y7 could say small sentences using the present and past tenses! Many could make reference to the future, using the conditional and the imperfect subjunctive, too.  

This is the perfect example of what a lesson anchored in challenge and high expectations means to me. It will require much more imput to embed the imperfect/conditional/imperfect subjunctive into my students’ long term memory but with retrieval practice and the recycling of such structures in future topics, it will get done! On the other hand, the activities provided students with opportunities to communicate with real examples: the games, while relating to them adding the Encanto film as a context too.  As I said, more lessons will be needed to get to automaticity but the seed was well planted! In subsequent lessons, students can describe/create posters of the different characters, listen to the famous No se habla de Bruno song. My post is about maximising language with some culture references but if you are interested in carrying out a project on Encanto, these two websites, suggested by Barbara Montero, may  be useful. 

Un viaje encantador a Colombia

Discovering Encanto 

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.