John Bald/language and literacy

Make your own emojis - a brilliant idea from Mele Bustamente, US.

These emojis, made by pupils on paper plates, are a brilliant way of teaching vocabulary that can't otherwise be illustrated concretely. I'm going to use it this morning. Thanks, Mele!

Click on picture to enlarge. Enjoy!

 

Austria Day - celebration and a warm welcome.

Austria Day is held annually on the first or second Saturday in October. It offers a day of talks and networking opportunities for anyone interested in German, with a delicious Austrian lunch, for (this year) £10.  This year's seminars were on variations between Austrian and BRD German, and on Austrian food, for which the brilliant Lukas Mayrhofer was flown in from Vienna. Lukas' talk extended well beyond restaurant menus to consider the place of food in literature and history, and his sheer dynamism and clarity of expression was a delight for anyone with an interest in teaching.

This event should be in the diary of all German teachers who can make it, as well as university students who would like a day in a German-speaking environment and indeed anyone who has enjoyed a holiday in Austria, or who would simply like to brush up their German. Bring a friend - you won't be disappointed.

Angelika's German - independent teaching and translation in the South-West

Delighted to meet Angelika at this year's wonderful Austria Day in London. Angelika offers a comprehensive personal and online tuition service in German,at www.angelikasgerman.co.uk. If the site is still under maintenance, her email is angelika@angelikasgerman.co.uk.  Angelika's last two pupils, who came to her in Y11 because their school was no longer offering German, obtained A and A* at GCSE. 

How to teach, and not to teach, German.

This posting first appeared on Conservative Home, 22.11.16. The points it makes are not, however, party political. I do not see how anyone, anywhere, could support the ignorant and fraudulent approach I describe.

My pupil – call him George – has had German on his school timetable for five years, but he has not been learning German. Instead, he has been “exposed” to German he doesn’t understand, with no explanation of the structures of the language, leaving him with no idea of how to say or write anything whatsoever in German. For his GCSE “controlled assessment”, he writes down German words, in something like the order they would appear in English, and emails them to his teacher. She rewrites them in German, including accurate verbs and word endings, and returns his email, in sections, for him to learn by heart the German he has not been taught, and reproduce it in his school-based examination, with the help of thirty words written on a cue card.

I’ve seen a whole class in the midlands mistaught German using the same method and a London teacher, at the Austrian Embassy’s recent open day, told me she was required to correct and rewrite controlled assessments no fewer than five times. One result is that the assessment does not in any way reflect these pupils’ knowledge of the language. Another is that they know that they have learned nothing, and want nothing further to do with languages, whatever fake grade they happen to receive.

Thanks to Michael Gove’s examination reforms, this scam will no longer be possible from next year, but we also need, urgently, to replace the errors in teaching that have led to it.  The All Party Parliamentary Group for Languages  received a warning last month from Richard Hardie, former Chairman of UBS, that we had an acute shortage of linguists with the levels of skill needed to draw up contracts and deal with foreign regulators. Other business leaders identified a particular problem with German. As Germany is our largest trading partner, and as German has suffered greater decline than any other major language, the implications following the referendum are obvious.

Enter the Teaching Schools Council, a body set up to co-ordinate school-based teacher training, but until now not widely known outside its own membership.  At the request of Nick Gibb, the Council has set up a working party, chaired by Ian Bauckham, a German specialist, Executive Headteacher of the Bennett Memorial Diocesan School and a Trustee of the National Foundation for Educational Research. Its members included two former presidents of the Association for Language Learning, the Professor of German at Oxford University, and Dr Emma Marsden, of York University, whose thesis provided important evidence of the effectiveness of teaching grammar. It investigated widely, with an external review of research, round-tables with specialists and school leaders, and visits to successful schools including Michaela Free School, Comberton Village College, and two Harris academies. I was a member of the group, whose report was launched at the British Council on Thursday, and presented to the APPG on Monday last week.

The report recommends systematic teaching of vocabulary, grammar, and the sound-letter correspondences of the new language, informed by the brain research of the Medical Research Council.  At the launch, Ian Bauckham recommended that pupils be grouped according to their learning needs, and the report stresses the need to bring out the talents of the most able pupils, to equip them for work at A level and beyond. It is the antithesis of the mixed-ability policies produced by Labour quangos over the last half-century, and still prevalent in university-based teacher training.  This gives it an importance that extends beyond language learning. With some important and honourable exceptions, Michael Gove and Chris Woodhead were right about the Blob, which still controls too much of teacher training and research, even in the academic elements of Teach First.  The academic clout behind this report gives the Teaching Schools Council the means to develop a fresh approach, fully informed by research. One of our members, Dr Rachel Hawkes, has written good textbooks for Spanish and German.

And it is not too late to help George. The report’s teaching techniques are easy to understand and to use. Last summer, they enabled a GCSE pupil to move from a borderline C to an A grade in a matter of weeks, and this year they helped an A level candidate who had A* in other subjects to secure an A after a six months, both in French. George has learned the basic structures of German, beginning with common verbs and the linguistic features the teacher had inserted into his work, and is beginning to enjoy some elements of German usage based on his personal experience. The British – George, my other pupils, and myself included – are not “bad at languages.”  We simply need to teach them properly. This report shows how.

 

Two cases of mis-teaching rectified in months.

Misteaching takes many forms, but they all result in failure, frustration and misery. In the English-speaking world, misteaching usually takes the form of hopeful reliance on incidental learning, introduced as a reaction to the teaching typified by Dickens' Mr M'Choakumchild, based on his own experience at school in Camden Town. In much of continental Europe, the old ways persist, with, for example, a heavy emphasis on exercises in English that prevent people from learning to speak the language. The late Francis Holmes, who taught me French, was acutely aware of the problems involved in drill and skill methods, which, he said, prevented "even the bright ones, those who could handle the subjunctive," from learning to speak. His solution was to run supplementary exchanges between schools in Essex and Paris, with lessons in the morning and shared free time in the afternoon. It worked for some of us, but not all, as many of the English pupils kept together in their free time and spoke very little French. We learn from mistakes - on my first trip, I ordered a Perrier, thinking it was Perry, and un exprès, in the fond belief that it was beer.  

What all forms of misteaching have in common is a failure to understand how the human brain functions, and how to develop it. Much progressive education is based on the idea that failure should be eliminated, and that the way to eliminate it is to redefine success, so that academic achievement is no longer its main criterion. Kenneth Clarke's recent memoir, Kind of Blue, has a succinct account of his encounters with progressive officials at the UK's frequently rebranded Department for Education and Science in the nineties. Their centrepiece was mixed ability teaching, which relies above all on incidental learning, as it is impossible for a teacher to focus personally on the range of needs in a class in which some pupils are reading Dickens, while others can't read the texts easily managed by children of six and seven. The grinding approach - M'Choakumchild, unlike Gradgrind, was misguided, rather than vicious - was taken apart by Truffaut in Les Quatre Cent Coups, and I saw it in Germany in the early nineties. I was asked to help a nine year old with his German homework, at which he was failing, largely because he was given endless exercises in German grammar without any explanation of its purposes and function. Unpacking the terminology - he was a German national - enabled him to make sense of the work and begin to succeed. The approach is consistent with current research findings on the formation and extension of neural networks in the brain. Whatever does not promote this process does not work.

The way to correct misteaching, from either source, is very simple - unpack, explain, and practise. 

Two recent cases, with apologies for the clumsy phrasing in the interests of preserving anonymity:

M, in the Spanish school system, had been assessed as dyslexic in England and Spain, and could not read in English at all. She was not dyslexic, but did not know how to adjust her thinking to move from the regular Spanish system of Spelling to the English system, in which the letters tell us most of what we need to know, but not everything. In about half a dozen lessons over the internet, in which she chose to read a book appropriate to her age, rather than a primer, I taught M to adapt to English spelling so that she was pleased when letters helped, but not surprised when they didn't. Whenever she met an irregular or unusual word in a text, I would move to another with the same pattern, explain its origins, practise it, and have her father revisit it between lessons so that she understood. M's father brought the family over from Spain to take my wife and me out to dinner to celebrate, and yesterday he sent me an email saying that P was now doing much better, and didn't need any more help for the moment.

S required an A in a modern languages A level for university entrance, had top grades in other subjects, but had been "taught" the language to GCSE with little or no explanation of the finer points of its grammar, in the spirit of the "tolerance of error" advocated by the late, well-intentioned, Eric Hawkins. This had produced an A* at GCSE, but left S with no preparation for A level. Moving to a new sixth form, S was required to pay attention to things that were beyond his/her understanding, because they had never been explained. The teacher marked work thoroughly, but did not explain why things were as they were. Rectifying this in the months before A level got S the required grade, but after a good deal of anxiety that should have been avoided by accurate teaching in the first instance. A sixteen year old I'm currently teaching has the same problem in German. Approaching GCSE without any introduction to German grammar, the pupil writes what s/he thinks is German, emails it to the teacher, who enters the correct inflections and improves the phrasing. Pupil then learns by heart these, to him/her meaningless collections of letters, and reproduces it in what is known as "controlled assessment", without understanding a word. Once again, the approach is to unpack and explain everything, and pupil is much happier as a result.

I recommend Rachel Hawkes' Stimmt series of German textbooks as a way of avoiding such problems in the future. The reading problem will not be solved by a textbook, but by improving teachers' understanding of English spelling and how to teach it.

 

 

 

German. A personal account, with some implications for teaching.

This is not the journey I would have chosen, but it has taught me a lot, and I hope the experience can make it easier for others to learn the language.

I  recently posted an account of a trip to Germany with a 13 year old pupil from a "secondary modern comprehensive school" in Lincolnshire. She was getting two hours of German a week, one of which was too often cancelled. During her trip, she made friends with two German girls from a Gymnasium, who were having five hours of English per week, and who were able to have a conversation with me in English. My pupil was still working on basic vocabulary - knife, fork, plate - and struggled. Given the teaching she was receiving, this was hardly her fault.  The complete posting, with a note on current issues in German and French education, is here.

The German girls said that their German lessons were harder than their English ones. This is due to the insistence on grammatical accuracy in a language that is grammatically more complex than any other major European language. The features that cause most trouble to English speakers are:

• Gender, including neuter.
• The need to tie in nouns and accompanying words, such as adjectives, by changes to the ends of words (inflections).
• The case system, in which short words such as to, or by, and possession, are indicated by inflections in words.  Ich liebe meinen Vater, but Ich liebe meine Mutter.
• The inconsistency of short companion words - der, die, das, dieser, diese, dieses etc - between genders, so that Die blaue Donau becomes, An der schönen, blauen Donau.
• The variations in verb forms, including tenses and the Sie and du  forms of address - with further confusion in the use of sie as a plural
• The system of inverting verb and subject, and placing verbs at the ends of sentences, in various sentence forms.
• The mid-European roots of many words, so that vocabulary cannot always be learned via the link to Greek and Latinate forms that are the same in English.

As an over-enthusiastic pupil in the mid-sixties, I was introduced to German in a two-year crash course, taught by a teacher whose main subject was French, and who was perhaps the most hard-working and conscientious person I've ever met. We worked through the textbook. Latin helped with the case system, though the case systems of Latin and German are not identical, but I did not develop fluency and understanding of the ways in which companion words altered according to context. They did not do so in French. I passed with a D, as I recall, and it did not occur to me that it was unrealistic to expect the same standard in German in two years that I'd managed in French in five, and indeed Latin in four. Neither did anyone explain this. The head of German - not my teacher -  was kind enough to tell me, the day after I'd taken the GCE, that I'd been writing "a right load of rubbish" during the exam. I was quite sure he was right.

For some reason, not understanding something irks me, and I returned to German three times. The first was as a student in Paris. I bought a book entitled "The Basics and Essentials of German", which summed everything up in 116 pages, equally divided into grammar and vocabulary. I studied the book, but could not get the system of inflections into my head. I was clearly just not good at German, and returned to my preferred zone of French - this was not a comfort zone either, as I had to work hard at it, but at least I could manage it, including, slowly, Proust.

My second revisit was to a German evening class at Goldsmith's College, taught by the excellent Helen Winter. Helen's teaching was very well adapted to the work and lives of her students - there were frequent references to Die Wecker and Das Wirtshaus - Wo findet man Studenten?  In einem Wirtshaus - and it helped, but the goal for my fellow students was O level, and I could find no A level evening class in the whole of London. The consolidation was valuable, but I got no further.

Third time was with Hans -"der kann's" - Lange, who is now teaching in Thailand. I was by now working as a schools inspector, and had a gap in work caused by yet another reorganisation with Ofsted. Hans uses a conversational style, but with a slow pace that ensures that students understand. We would have a two-hour session at his house, and he had an interesting technique of being slightly provokative in what he said, so that you were stimulated to argue with him. At the same time, I bought and studied Hammer's Grammar, German books and watched films. I finally got the hang of German grammar, and began to understand its methods of constructing vocabulary by putting words together, with recurring themes and prefixes - eg Umfrage, Umlaut,  Umwelt, Umschulumg. I have not spent enough time in Germany to become as fluent as I became after a year in France, but I can read with a good level of understanding, and have passed the tipping point, at which I know enough to be able to use it cut down to size what I don't know.

So, what are the implications for teaching?

1. We need to be honest. Learning German is challenging. I asked a pupil once what he thought this meant, and the reply was, "It's hard, but you can do it."  This principle applies to learning any new language, as it must be able to convey the thoughts of all of its users, which may well be complex as well as simple. Attempts to over-simplify the language, for example by not teaching case endings at GCSE, lead to frustration, confusion, and the unacceptable rate of dropout between GCSE and A level.

2. We need to teach spoken and written language together, so that children can use all channels of communication to build understanding. Umlauts need to be explained as shortcuts that avoid adding an extra letter to words. Other elements of German spelling are phonetically regular, which makes them easy to understand. ICT makes it much easier to demonstrate the connections than it used to be.

3.  Presenting people with two many difficulties at once overloads the brain, prevents neural connections from forming, and leads to frustration and failure. This was the problem with my crash course, and with my first attempt to revisit the language as a student. It is clearer if each variation from English is unpacked and explained. At an early stage, this should include forming positive and negative sentences - straightforward - and the accusative case, which only requires a variation in the companion words when the noun is masculine. Presenting what is sometimes known as "the grid" as a single step is too complicated. Genitive is straightforward once the idea of possession is understood and the learner understands that German speakers approach it in a different way. The really difficult case is the dative, which needs careful explanation and a lot of practice.

4. Once we have taught the formation of a positive and negative sentence, we should teach pupils to say things they would like to say in German, and build up this capacity systematically, explaining grammatical features as they occur. This should take place alongside systematic learning of grammar and vocabulary.

5. While the proportion of shared words between English and German is lower than that between English and French, there are enough of them to be of great value, and we should make the best use of them. Research at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit has shown that these words are recognised more quickly than those which have no connection with English.

6. The roots of German vocabulary and the principles of constructing words need to be studied and practised alongside its grammar.

7. Practice should be made easy and enjoyable. Most people don't enjoy tests, but everyone likes a quiz, particularly when you can gain an unfair advantage by practising beforehand.

8. Pupils should practise writing in rough, on boards or scrap paper, so that they can make mistakes in an unthreatened context, and see what they need to adjust in order to write accurately. They should keep a record of things they have learned to write and say accurately, and we should use this to build capacity. The Common European Framework provides an effective framework for extending competence.

9. Alongside grammar and vocabulary, idiom should be explained and understood. Idiom includes all features unique to a language, and shows us how native speakers actually use the grammar and vocabulary that are its core. Understanding and using idiom leads to a warmth of communication with native speakers. Da liegt der Hund begraben.

10. The German girls in my posting had to work hard to learn their own language, and to practise it constantly at home and at school. For them, Übung ist das halbe Leben. So it is for any English speaker who would learn German. German courses in secondary schools must not be cut short if we expect learners to enjoy the language and to continue to learn it.

 

 

German - Clicker Set, Time, manner, place.

This is the first series of Clicker grids I've made, and the idea is that each element is on a separate grid, so that pupils compose sentences by inserting them in the correct sequence. These are screen dumps of the grid, which operates using the program Clicker 6 (Cricksoft.com)  With the program loaded, clicking on the bottom right moves to the next grid and there is an optional speech engine that will read the sentence back when you click on the full stop at the end. I will demo to any interested teacher via webex. Having composed sentences, the children write them from memory. They do not copy, ever! No charge, and for the record,  I don't have shares in Clicker 6. NB - the screen dumps here are slightly fuzzy. The originals are crystal-clear on the screen.

A couple of wrinkles to make this type of grid. Select template in the Clicker 6 menu, and once you have a blank grid, click on it to uncluster the cells. This lets you resize and move them. Create new grids in the series by duplicating. To move to the next grid, right click on the full stop box, go to choose and select move to next. Repeat, go to send and insert send no text. The same will work for any multiple grid. Pictures or video can be inserted into any cell using drag and drop.

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!

 

 

"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.