John Bald/language and literacy

A parent's view of Falkirk Lesson 7.

I just wanted to send a quick 'MERCI!' for yur lesson this morning.  Even though the sound was not ideal we both learnt so many interesting and helpful things.  I really think that your approach is the most advanced I have come across.  I managed to go through six years of French at secondary school without understanding the meaning of words.  All we did was rote learning and it was useless when I arrived in Paris to study, some years later.  

 

As one of my favourite anthropologists, Claude Levi-Strauss, taught, to understand a culture one must understand its language and both are function as 'bricolage', a way of recombining facets of universal consciousness in new ways for the advancement of that particular culture.  It is this psychological bricolage that I believe you offer because you seek to build up cognitive links which wil enable students to retrieve and recombine this knowledge and linguistic grammar in new ways.  It's absolutely the only way forward because it goes to the very roots of cultural development.  It enables us to understand why French is spoken differently, with diverse styles and flows of linguistic combination but also how these are linked to English (and how much vocab) which builds a sense of continuity with the past and a sense of shared liguistic heritage.  I feel that this is very important psychologically for children as they learn that they, and the subjects they study, do not exist in isolation but are part of a fascinating web of cultural life in which we all share.   Surely this is an example of REAL One Nationism, or even One Worldism which joins and embraces, not fractures and dissipates.  

 

We like your approach so much that we now use it in everything we teach, from history to science to mathematics.  We understand the language, the grammar of the subject.  Then we can play!  For example, we have spent considerable time building a thorough understanding of mathematical algebraic terminology.  Then we add the method.  Then the children can solve any equation, any sum.  When I read about the classical trivium it appears to follow similar principles - grammar, logic, rhetoric.  It just seems that we have moved away from this method over the years and not for the better.  You cannot analyse what you do not know.  And you do not know if you cannot understand the core of a subject which in turn requires comprehension of language.  Maybe this is too much of a challenge for teachers as it requires a deep subject knowledge and personal development many do not have.  But clearly 'things' are not moving in the right direction.

 

I'm sorry you face such vitriol on a daily basis but I am not surprised.  We live in a world of mediocrity, after all.  The Guardian is no exception.  But I must say you are always very gracious.  I would have become some sort of evil internet troll by now!  When I talk to friends and family, particularly those involved in the Arts, they unanimously lament the passing of real cultural interest.  That's why I try to take the girls to concerts, galleries etc.  Not to learn but to love.  To elevate their souls.  And for the really great coffee at the RSNO...

 

Postmodernism wasn't all it was cracked up to be.  As a friend once remarked, "You know Roland Barthes was run over on the Place de la Concorde.  He WAS deconstructed!"

 

Bravo, John.  Please keep on annoying people for the foreseeable future.   

Falkirk Lesson 7, 25th February

Despite a break, difficult sound conditions over the internet, and the indisposition of one of the pupils with a ricked neck, we started Le Petit Prince today, after just six lessons. The pupils had, though, been practising reading Pas Maintenant Bernard, and are receiving excellent support form their mother.

As usual, anything that they happened to be doing or saying in English is used as a way into French, and the pupil with a sore neck needed a hot water bottle. I've never had cause to use such a thing in France and had to look it up.  It is une bouillotte, with some alternatives - a stone one, my Harraps tells me, is un cruchon. Also as usual, I unpacked and explained every detail. Below is note of what we'd discussed.

After explaining the idea of time zones, and particularly the past zone, I read the first paragraph of the book and explained every detail of it. Pupils will study it, and we´ll go over it again next week. It contains imperfect and perfect tenses, with present introduced in paragraph 2. 

Note.

(Q. If le petit prince had a sister, what would she be? And a big sister? P had to work quite hard to make all of the companion words match the gender of the noun)

 Le petit prince.    La petite princesse.  

Le grand prince.  La grande princesse.

Oir.    Oyez.   J'ai oui.  -  Oui!    (Origin of French for Yes)

Entendre         entente cordiale       Cordialement   ment  =  ly   Amicalement   un ami/une amie Exactement

Oui     beau      la beauté         la belle

Bouillir     bouillon        bullion    une bouillotte

Avec les aquarelles de l'auteur  (aquarium -water- watercolour)

 

Voir   Tu vois?  Au revoir.  ( Adieu.Adíos).      Voilà     Voici

Histoire  history  

Victoire victory

Une avalanche  (le boa avale sa proie)

 

Interlude: Henry VIII's crown, and another hit for Lucy Worsley.

 Lucy Worsley has a talent for engaging people with history by bringing it to life, and I've just found this brilliant reconstruction of Henry VIII's crown, based on a 1631 portrait of Charles I standing behind it. 

In the mid-eighties, I covered the restoration of the Mary Rose for The TES, and found it looking more like a heap of railway sleepers than a ship. Children are not interested, for the most part, in bare buildings. They need to see and experience things as closely as possible to what they were. Click the picture for a link to Maev Kennedy's excellent Guardian piece and a video showing the reconstruction.

PS. They've also got one of Henry's day to day hats.

All Party Parliamentary Group - Manifesto for Languages.

For the whole of this parliament, Baroness Coussins has led the all-party parliamentary group for languages in an attempt to focus national attention on the crisis in language teaching and learning. The group has produced a manifesto with the following points:

• A long term commitment to transforming the reputation of UK citizens as poor linguists, reluctant to value languages other than English. Languages are as important for our future as STEM subjects. Leadership is needed to ensure they are given similar recognition.

• High quality language learning for all children throughout the UK from age 7. Support for teachers and trainers to develop their linguistic and professional skills and lead the recovery.

• A goal for every child to have a high quality language qualification by the end of secondary education. The reform of GCSEs and A-levels must encourage and reward progression to higher levels.

• Active encouragement for business and employers to get involved in tackling the crisis. Support for schools and employers to work together. Tax breaks and other incentives for business to train and recruit home-grown linguists.

• A commitment to maintaining and developing UK expertise in modern languages and cultures in university language departments. Maintain the status of languages as ‘strategically important and vulnerable’ subjects and continued support for the Year Abroad.

The key point is the third. Language learning beyond greetings and ordering drinks requires a clear understanding of the written as well as the spoken language, as everyday speech will not bring the learner into contact with the full range of structures and vocabulary that they need in order to understand and express ideas. The movement for mixed ability teaching prevents this, as it is not possible for a teacher to concentrate on and explain more advanced elements of learning, such as the German case system, when some pupils are not able to understand them.

These lower-attaining pupils are no better served by lessons pitched at the middle, and drop out. "Differentiation", in which the teacher tries in effect to teach three or more lessons at the same time, has so far produced no benefit other than wearing teachers out.  It is not possible for very nearly any of us to teach three things at once - the human brain is simply not set up to do it. The outcome is frustration for all concerned, followed by failure and drop out for over half of the pupils. The quangos supporting this approach, chief among them Anthony Crosland's CILT, have now gone, but the thinking behind them remains, and continues to do damage. 

This issue gives the political Left a problem. At present, advanced language learning is increasingly dominated by the private sector, and even there it is in crisis, as pupils, teachers and now examiners believe they can get better grades in other subjects for the same work. Languages can only be taught effectively if children are grouped according to their learning needs.

 

Falkirk Lesson 6, 11th February.

Le Petit Prince had not yet arrived, but the pupils had had brioche for breakfast, so we talked about Marie Antoinette, - Qu'ils mangent de la brioche - and sang the verb song with manger. I explained why we kept the e in nous mangeons, to keep the g soft, and it turned up later in the lesson in mangea.  I have a vivid memory of learning this at school, and being pleased at getting it right, but no one explained why the letter was needed, and I only understood why when I started teaching people to read in English, and met the pattern of e, y an i softening a g - most of the time - and c, virtually all of the time.

It took 10 minutes to teach the pupils to tell the time, including minuit and midi, and we agreed that they would try to tell the time in French consistently over the next week. We then read the version of Pas Maintenant, Bernard,  Download Not now Bernard powerpoint concentrating on pronunciation, and introducing the simple past tense in the context of the story - Bernard alla dans le jardin, Le monstre monta l'escalier, regarda la télévision (remembering that the acute accents "stretch" the sound of the e, so it is not pronounced like television) etc. This took about 30 minutes, and we all enjoyed it.

Finally, we used the ppt of the weather from the French toolkit, again explaining each French expression, and concentrating on pronunciation. Three things to practise for next week - time, weather and Pas Maintenant, Bernard.

Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching. Lancaster University, free course.

Thanks to Dr Emma Marsden of York University for passing on this letter. I've signed up, and it's easy to do so by following the link.  The site has a wide range of free courses on other topics.

Dear Colleagues, 

We are pleased to announce a free online learning course on 'Dyslexia and language teaching’  (https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/dyslexia) which runs from 20^th of April – 17^th of May 2015.

This exciting new course is offered by Lancaster University in cooperation with FutureLearn and takes place over four weeks entirely online. It is aimed at English language teachers, teachers of modern foreign languages, teacher trainers, educators and trainee teachers who are interested in how they can accommodate and cater for the needs of students with dyslexia in foreign/second language classrooms.

In this course, which is based on the award-winning materials of the Dystefl project (www.dystefl.eu), you can find out about the nature of dyslexia and how it affects the learning of additional languages. You can explore a variety of useful techniques, including recent computer-assisted tools that you can take into the classroom to help students with dyslexia in acquiring another language.

Lead educator Dr. Judit Kormos and well-known experts Anne Margaret Smith and Dr. Joanna Nijakowska give practical guidance and advice on enhancing the phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge and reading skills of dyslexic language learners.

The materials and tasks in the course can be applied for various age groups of dyslexic students and for a variety of language learning contexts including the teaching of English as a foreign/second language and the teaching of modern foreign languages. 

Enrolment is now open (https://www.futurelearn.com/register) and we are looking forward to welcoming you and your colleagues as one of our participants. Please feel free to distribute this course information to other interested colleagues, teachers, students and share it on social media and the word-wide web.

Dr. Judit Kormos

Professor in Second Language Acquisition

National Teaching Fellow

Director of Studies MA TESOL Distance

Department of Linguistics and English Language 

Lancaster University 

Lancaster LA1 4YL 

United Kingdom 

Phone: ++44-(0)1524-93039

http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/Judit-Kormos/

http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?k=9781847696199

French to Falkirk, Lesson 5. Time Zones.

This lesson was experimental The pupils said they couldn't get Zim Zam Zoum out of their heads, which was of course the idea, and an other nice tribute to Taught By Song.  I picked up the masculine/feminine distinctions in the first song - Je suis français/française - and we discussed the purposes of the cedilla (Eg cela and ça). We reviewed the use of companion words (gramatically, articles/determiners and adjectives) to work out the gender of a new word. We sang the verb song, with aller, and got onto the main substance of the lesson, time zones.

Last time, I had explained the origin of the term "tense" in the old French word for time. It is anything but a transparent term, and its everyday meaning conveys its effect - it creates tension. So, as an experiment, I tried the term "time zone", which includes both separate verb forms, and what linguistics specialists describe as "aspect" where context and emphasis indicate time as well as changes in the form of the verb.

The zones we thought of were these, with their English equivalents:

Le présent           I am learning French      I learn French        J'apprends le français.  French.      Face      

Le passé              Ccomposed   (composé)      I have learned French.      J'ai appris le français.

                          Continuous    (imparfait)    I was learning French.      J'apprenais le français.

                                                                  You were learning French.    Tu apprenais le français.

                                            (l apprenait   nous apprenions, vous appreniez, ils/elles apprenaient_   

                           Simple                                          I learned French                    J'appris le  français

 

Le futur           

with going                                 I am going to learn French             Je vais apprendre le français.

                       

with will ( word form in French)   I will learn French                       J'apprendrai le français  

The goal here is not to have the pupils remember the endings and forms, but to have them understand how time is indicated, and then to practise. We agreed that a good way to practise and consolidate all we'd learned so far would be to read Le Petit Prince. The pupils have an English translation, which they will read before next week's lesson, when we'll start on the French. We might have a parallel - La Petite Princesse?

 

Freiheitsglocke, Helfer der Menschheit.

P. found the last lesson helpful, as it gave a preview of time, which was taught in class.

Not a full lesson this time, due to family illness, so I sent two stamps for her to investigate:

The goal here was to make the link between o'clock in English and die Glocke, as the oldest recorded clock in the UK, in Salisbury Cathedral (below,rt) , did not have a face, but just a bell, so two hits on the bell was two o'clock.

 

          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Next stamp, a harder one, was;

 

P. worked this out, with help from the internet. Building on Freiheit, we considered the similarity between that and Menschheit, and added Schönheit and Wahrheit. All feminine, so we added die Arbeit and die Geschwindigkeit, also feminine.

So, why der with a feminine word? The answer is that this is the way the Germans say of or to with a feminine word.  As a learner, I found this one of the trickiest things to learn in German, as it is so clearly counter-intuitive.  I didn't mention the word "case" and won't until I'm sure that the word's function in this context is clearly understood. Presenting all cases at once, and expecting people to calculate between them like a kind of talking computer seems to me to make learning German more difficult. Building up to this through an understanding of the ways they help us to say things in German seems a better way, but this remains under investigation.

Viel Vergnügen!

 

 

Three principles of language teaching and an example from the fourth lesson to Falkirk.

It has recently been suggested that there are eight principles of language teaching. I think there are three:

1. Learners must understand their work fully from the beginning. To do this we make links with what they already know in their own language (eg shared words) and give them materials, such as colours, where meaning is self-evident. We do not introduce more material in the first lessons than the pupil can fully understand.

The idea has grown up that children do not need to understand their work fully, and that frustration in the first lessons is normal. This is a big mistake. It leads to confusion, panic, frustration and failure. We don't teach children to play an instrument by immersing them in music or taking them to a concert. They need to understand what they are doing, either instinctively or through careful demonstration, explanation and practice.

2. Spoken and written language should be taught together, and their relationships explained. This ensures that all channels of communication contribute to learning, and gives pupils time to build up their understanding of grammatical structures. This approach is easy to use via Clicker 6 with speech engines. It builds the literacy skills of lower attaining pupils, reinforcing their understanding of phonic patterns and shared words, and exploits those of higher attaining pupils. It is therefore in the best interests of all.

3. Teaching should focus on vocabulary, grammar and usage at all stages. As illustrated below, this ensures that children have the words and structures they need in order to say what they wish or need to say, and that they are introduced to the ways in which speakers of the language use them. The starting point is the language as it is, both in formal and informal contexts.

Children need to understand that languages are human constructs, with human traits, virtues and foibles. Once they do understand this, and that they are not expected to know everything at once, they can approach the work with confidence, knowing that they will not fail.  As the French say, "Ce n'est pas la mer à boire."

Example,Fourth Lesson to Falkirk, pupils aged 11 and 12.

In the first three lessons, we looked at differences between French and English pronunciation, and made some positive and negative sentences. We sang the simple action song with pronouns, and began to look at shared words, gender, and the ways in which French verbs work.

In Lesson 3, we looked at these shared words, collected by Henri Seguin of Canada, and reinforced the idea of gender in words such as intelligent, élégant.

-age:    bandage, image, page, message, usage, voltage, passage

-ance: chance, balance, finance, alliance, tolérance, ambulance,

-ence: confidence, évidence, intelligence, providence, licence

-tion:  nation, action, attention, adaptation, administration + hundreds, all feminine

-al:       animal, normal,  signal, cardinal, final, original, national

-ial:      racial, social, spécial, commercial,  colonial, initial

-et:       alphabet, buffet, budget, cricket, ticket, violet, secret

-ect:     intellect, direct, correct, aspect, respect, suspect

-in:       Latin, cousin, assassin, bulletin, florin, mandarin

-ain:     gain, grain, refrain, train,  quatrain, certain, vain

-ent:   accent, récent, innocent, précédent, incident, président, différent, intelligent  (Vous êtes très intelligentes!)    ! = point d'exclamation

-ant:   vacant, élégant, éléphant, extravagant, descendant

-ive:     offensive, initiative, tentative, co-operative, intensive

-ine:     discipline, machine, morphine, Vaseline, routine, sardine

-ible:    possible, compatible, sensible, invisible, terrible.

 

Acute accent (accent aigu) An e in French is pronounced minimally, if at all. The acute accent stretches the sound, so that it is almost like having an extra letter in the alphabet.

Then an example of usage, from a Frenchman recommending his favourite spot for lunch in the Loire valley: 

Si vous cherchez un restaurant, c'est très correct, et ce n'est pas cher du tout. 

Then some more on verbs. 

Verbs are so important that each one has a name.  Grammatical term - infinitive. 

In English, the name always starts with to   to be, to have, to play, to sleep.

 

In French, the name is one word only.  Donner   Prendre   Finir    To give, to take, to finish. Lots of verbs have these endings, er, re, ir, and they are called Regular because the endings are very consistent.

Some verbs have different forms. These are either very common, or very rare. Stephen Pinker thinks that these make them resist pressure to use the same form of other verbs.

Être    avoir       to be, to have.

 Verbs reinforce our idea of time zones - here and now, what has happened, what will happen. I demonstrated some basic patterns using chercher, and we will do more on time zones next week.