John Bald/language and literacy

A Level Languages. More Very Bad News.

Official government figures released this week, with 2013 for comparison:

Language	2013	2014	Percentage change
French	11272	9078	-19.5
Spanish	7651	6617	-13.5
German	4242	3714	-12.5
Chinese	3376	2549	-24.5

Such is the legacy of fifty years of error. Pupils are not taking A level because they think it's too difficult, and it's too difficult because languages are still not properly taught up to GCSE. The fall in Spanish and Chinese, which have been promoted as the hope of saving languages, gives particular cause for concern. The long term trends, analysed by Teresa Tinsley, are bad enough, but this year's figures show they are getting worse.

The solutions are on this site, and freely available. 

Lesson 3, French and German, 10 and eleven year olds.

See below for lessons one and two.  Lesson Three, with one  pupil, aged 11, and two pupils (learning French), aged 9 and 12.

We revised the content of Lesson 2, and Suzi had had a nice comment from her teacher in her school diary for doing extra work. We began with the pronoun song. Suzi had some sentences and vocabulary to learn, so we looked over the sentences and I explained how they were written as they were. We then made some simple sentences with the new vocabulary, and I was grateful to a friendly head of department for picking out a couple of errors. Here is the result

Ich bin Schottin und ich habe einen Bruder und keine Schwester. Ich habe viele Haustiere. Ich habe zwei Hünde, einen Hamster, viele Fische und zwei Kaninchen.

Ich finde Deutsch etwas schwierig, aber nicht zu schwierig.  Ich mag Badminton spielen. Ich mag Geografie nicht, weil wir zu wenig machen. Ich hasse Bohnen, aber ich liebe Alles außer dem Schmerz. 

The big change from current teaching in the former national curriculum and in most schools is the emphasis on complete accuracy in writing and speaking, and in practising until this is achieved. 

It is made possible by using simple and familiar content with meaning to the child - she doesn't have a dog, but two dogs. She really does have one brother and no sisters. The bridge between language and reality is actual, and not imaginary. So it's easy, and we find a dative introduced at this stage, and in one gender, because it is needed to say what she wants to say. We finished the lesson by starting to look at the weather in German, and I sent this picture by email, for Suzi to try to puzzle out.

 

 

 

The approach with French was similar, but taking account of the different changes in thinking that are required - spoken language must flow, written language must be precise. New sentences icluded:

J'aime faire la cuisine, notamment les cookies.

Je ne vais pas à l'école

Je n'aime pas les choux de Bruxelles.

J'aime jouer au ping pong.

J'aime jouer au basket.

Vous faites la cuisine.

I explained the contraction of à le to au in the last sentence and the girls understood. We also discussed the origin of the circumflex accent, verbs, and the "name" of a verb (infinitive).

 

Powerpoint for seminar with assistants and PGCE students, sponsored by Institut Français and Consejería de Educación

This powerpoint is the basis of a series of seminars for PGCE students and forengn language assistants on the teaching of languages to children with special educational needs. This forms part of the qualification European Pack for Complementary Teacher Training.  At the end of the powerpoint are references from which the main resources mentioned, Clicker 6, Take 10 and Taught By Song, can be obtained. Questions and correspondence are invited. 

Download Fr and Spanish seminar, revision4

Download Not now Bernard powerpoint

 

In the zone - teaching children about time and tense.

Teaching children to locate their writing clearly in time can be complicated, as there are several ways to do this.  The most important are:

• A starter word or phrase related to time.  Next week, I am on holiday. Once upon a time, there was... Today is my birthday. 

 

• The form of a verb - Marley was dead, to begin with. (Dickens, A Christmas Carol)

 

• Context. O'Dowd goes in command. (Thackeray, Vanity Fair.)

Very often, the first sentence we write sets a time zone of present or past. Future is less common, as we don't know what will happen in the future and so tend only to visit it briefly.  The zone may be set by the form of the first verb - Jack is, or was, waiting for a bus. It may also be set by a starter word or phrase. Yesterday, for example, puts us in the past zone, Tomorrow in the future. There is usually a comma after the starter word or phrase.

A good way of teaching this may be to put it in the context of Ros Wilson's and Alan Peat's work on sentence construction. Ros Wilson's idea that "If they can't say it, they can't write it," can be used to have children construct sentences in the past tense - variations on Alan Peat's "exciting sentences", and to use starters/time phrases (dubbed, confusingly, "adverbials" by academic linguists) to move from one zone to another. Straying out of zone without one of these signposts causes the reader to lose track of time, and so causes confusion.

I'm happy to collaborate with any teachers interested in developing the approach, in English or in other languages.

"The intellect is developed quite naturally, without being forced." A compliment unpacked.

This, from a parent in Falkirk, is as fine a compliment as a teacher can receive, and gives an insight into the principles behind successful teaching. It is easy to explain, and, once the principles are understood, easy to put into practice. Here's how:

Once we understand that learning is based on the formation of networks in the brain, we can use discussion and analysis of children's written work to see what they do and don't know and understand, and what they may be able to learn next. We use this knowledge to design materials and teaching - it does not always need to be written down.

Around what children already know, we can choose from many routes. Some will involve practice to strengthen existing netwoks - part of this is developing memory - and give children quicker access to what they know. This is important in mathematics, where children need to apply their knowledge in solving problems, and in English, where they need to be able to spell quickly and accurately in order to concentrate  on what they want to say.

Some will introduce new material, and this gives important choices. Some will simply add new material, such as facts or data. Some will open up new networks. In languages, learning vocabulary on a thematic basis is an example of the former. Learning patterns in the construction of words, and developing an understanding of words shared with the learner's first language is an example of the latter. It includes facts and data, but also leads to new networks. Just learning, say, the words for the contents of a classroom or a pencil case, has no application beyond itself. Seeing how a word may have moved from one language to another, with some alterations, or how a verb pattern may keep recurring when we want to say different things, builds networks which extend themselves - as we use more verbs - and also reinforce themselves, as the same patterns keep recurring.

Working with individual children, we can, unless we are obliged to follow some government "strategy", make a judgement on what the child needs to learn next, and exploit their own interests as source material. We are constrained in this only by our own knowledge, which we need to keep extending. With classes, we have the difficulty of hitting more targets at once, but this can be made manageable by grouping children according to their learning needs, and tracking progress by building it into a scheme of work.

All of the teaching here, including the German, is based on these ideas.

 

German Via Skype and Webex. Lesson 3.

6.30 pm, after Suzi's tea, and to fit in with other activities. Parents' comments on first two lessons very positive - "She's loving it," and "Thanks, it means a lot to us."  Notes on lessons 1 and 2 are here.

We started by singing the verb song, with actions and a couple of little dolls to indicate masculine and feminine. Suzi had learned the numbers to 25, so we moved to telling the time. I started by explaining the link between clock and die Glocke, with the early clock in Winchester cathedral operating by striking a bell, as it had no clock face or hands.

 

We moved to telling the time, with me calling out times in German and Suzi working out what they were. If she got one wrong, I repeated it. We went round the clock.  Suzi often stopped me while she took a note. This is roughly the sequence we used. 

Es ist ein Uhr

Est is zwei Uhr.

Wie spät ist es, bitte?

Es ist zwei Uhr fünf, zehn, zwanzig, fünfundzwanzig

Ein Viertel 

Es ist Viertel nach drei           Viertel Pfunder...

Es ist Viertel vor drei

Es ist halb fünf.  Half past four, not half past five.

Est  ist Mittag.     Es ist Mitternacht.   It took Suzi two or three tries with some prompting to work these out. We'll practise over the next few weeks.  

Suzi has a new teacher at school, and had written some sentences in an exercise book. We discussed some of these, and made some simple sentences. Lillie insisted on using ß and not ss.

Kein Problem         Ich habe ein Problem.         Ich bin ein Mädchen, und bin zwölf Jahre alt.

Ich wohne in Hartsholme, daß ist in Lincoln.

Mein Name ist Suzi. Ich heiße Suzi.  Wie schreibt man das? 

Wann hast du Geburtstag? Mein Geburtstag ist der zwölfte Februar.

Ich habe einen Bruder, aber keine Schwester

They had been working on animals and the family has two dogs, so I explained the plural and we practised pronunciation with umlauts:

 Der Hund    Die Hünde  Wir haben zwei Hünde.

Der Hahn. Die Hähne.   (Suzi had forgotten what this was.) 

The dictionary gave me an amusing idiom -

Danach kräht kein Hahn.  No cock crows about this, equivalent to It's no big deal, or nothing to write home about. Suzi thought the words were in a funny order, so I explained how this came about. We had looked at subject and verb in an earlier lesson, but it still took her three goes to find the verb in

Kein Hahn   kräht.

Subject       verb

We were using webex by now, and I was typing this into Word, in these colours. We went back to the original idiom, and I explained how subject and verb were inverted after what I called a starter word.

Danach        kräht  kein Hahn.

Starter        verb      subject

Suzi knew what a pet was - 

Das Tier     Das Haustier.

and we now stopped, as she was getting tired. Lesson 4 follows on Monday.