John Bald/language and literacy

Beginners German Toolkit. Lesson plans updated June 2022.

This toolkit was developed for older primary pupils, but is equally effective for older beginners, including adults. As these plans have formatting that doesn't always sit easily on Typepad, I'm uploading each lesson in Word, as I write it. Please contact me if you have problems downloading a lesson plan.

Update  To present the idea of gender in nouns, I would now start simple sentences with neuter nouns only, eg Ich habe ein Buch, wir haben ein Haus, and then add masculine and feminine. The idea of gender involves a big change in thinking for English speakers, and putting neuter first, which involves no change in the accusative case, makes the first step much easier. There is then only one change in simple sentences with masculine nounse, introducing accusative, which needs a lot of explanation in itself.

Download Primary-German-toolkit-introduction-and-principles

Download German-toolkit-lesson-1-corrected

Download German toolkit lesson 2

Download German toolkit lesson 3

Download German toolkit lesson 4

Download German toolkit lesson 5

Download German toolkit lesson 6

Download German Toolkit Lesson 7

Download German toolkit lesson 8

Some Principles of Small-Scale Research Design.

The weaknesses of randomised controlled trials are described in several postings, beginning here. These large-scale studies are outside the scope of teachers, and indeed of individual university researchers, even at doctoral level. Thses notes, which take account of the experience of reading researchers over several decades, are intended to help colleagues plan practical and effective approaches to research in their own context I welcome correspondence, and am happy to help pro bono. I am a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching. 

1. The aim is not to establish absolute truth using the methods of the physical sciences, but to apply the principles of John Locke to establish the best available evidence, and where possible to answer the classic teacher's question "What can I do on Monday morning?" though on a longer time-scale. The closest medical parallel is not the randomised controlled trial, but the development of surgery, which has been based on individual observations, including the papers published in The Lancet by Joseph Lister in 1867. It is also impossible to have a blind trial in an educational context, as the teacher needs to know what he or she is doing. There is no scientific basis for a partially-sighted trial, and many recent oncology trials are open, rather than blind. The idea of a single, gold-standard research method in education is supported by assertion rather than evidence, and is an illusion.
2. The limitations of each study need to be identified as part of the planning, in something akin to a risk assessment. Some issues, such as follow-up to ensure that results are sustained and not washed out, need to be considered in all studies. Others reflect the methodology and goals of individual studies. There is no single correct answer.
3. Sampling may be:

• A class taught by a teacher, compared with a similar class taught by the same teacher, either in the same or a previous year. Any differences between the classes should be noted and taken into account in evaluation. If there is a need to compare classes taught by different teachers, this should be carefully considered, as other factors than the issue under investigation may be very important, and indeed invalidate results.
• A year group, compared with earlier year groups. Again, differences in teaching staff should be noted.
• A small group, compared with a similar small group given a different form of additional provision, and a third given no additional provision. Differences in teachers should be noted, and more than one experimental group used if possible.
• A case study. Comparison in this case may be to pupils with similar patterns of learning, or to the same pupil's earlier work.

4. Timing needs to be long enough to allow teaching to have the desired effect. I suggest an interim review after half a term, and a term and a year as likely to give a useful result.  Follow-up should be planned after one, two and five years.  This allows us to detect both short-term washout, and long-term benefits.
5. Assessment needs a clear measurement of starting and finishing points. It may take any form appropriate to the issue investigated. Standardised tests are not available in the field of languages, and existing frameworks may need to be defined more precisely for research purposes. It is therefore essential that assessment should be a key part of research planning, and that it should be described and explained as part of the research report. Assessment needs to be carried out in "clean" conditions - pupils must not have access to extraneous material from which they might copy or which might give them hints that would not be available to other pupils in the study.

An approach to assessing writing that I have used is to have pupils write all they can, from memory, words, phrases or sentences, in five minutes in a clean room, before and after. The work can then be scored on the basis, of words recognisable, words accurate, meaningful groups and sentences.

For listening, the system used in the British Picture Vocabulary Scale could be applied directly in French. The pupil has to pick  the correct picture from four, and the test stops after six errors. It may be possible to use the original pictures, or we might need new ones.

Speaking could involve responses to set, open questions, presented in context and related to the work the pupils have been doing. I have not yet tried to assess this.

Reading assessment is perhaps better established, and could involve picking correct responses in English (or the new language - discuss!) from a range.

Note: Problems that have arisen in the field of reading research include:

• short-term gains that are not sustained
• no follow-up, or inconsistent follow-up, of results beyond an intervention period
• unfair comparisons (eg by comparing the effect of extra provision solely against the work of pupils who have had no extra help)
• biased samples and poorly-matched control or comparison groups (eg gender-imbalance, unequal starting points)
• intervention periods that are too short to show any results
• samples that are too small to show statistical gains, but lack the detail to show qualitative ones ( Very small samples require an unrealistically large effect size to reach statistical significance.)
• assessment systems that do not test gains fairly, or that over-generalise benefits
• statistical manipulation in such samples that disguises the effect of the results of one or two pupils
• descriptions of teaching methods that are too vague to be used as evidence
• grouping together the results of large numbers of studies, in the hope that this compensates for flaws rather than accumulating them, then presenting the results as authoritative
• variations in the quality of teaching, either in areas studied, or in other areas (eg class management) that are not accounted for
• statements of principle that are not substantiated by evidence and are not capable of investigation
• leaving negative findings unpublished
• bias in editorial panels and peer review

In foreign language research it is also unfair to compare

• pupils learning English as a second language with that from learners of other languages, as English is so widely available to the first group, who also have stronger economic motives
• adult learners with children

and

• evidence from people learning a second language as residents in the country speaking it with evidence from those learning a language in school only.

Contact.

[email protected] 

References will be added prior to publication.

 

A level German, supplementary sessions. End of term report.

These pro bono - ie, free - supplementary sessions have run fortnightly on Saturday mornings from 9.30 to 10.30 during the term. It has been an interesting experience. Students who have attended have found the sessions useful – in some cases very useful – but have tended to dip in and out of them, usually because of other commitments, but sometimes because of connection problems. I have also been less than perfect in recording and posting sessions online. I can only apologise for that – I tend to get so absorbed in the teaching that I forget to press buttons.

 

Some students are not getting enough teaching hours at A level - two are having to get by on an hour a week! I'll add that current GCSE is not preparing students for A level. This is, of course, not the teachers' fault, and I hope - we'll see - that the reformed GCSE content will improve matters. If I were moving higher-attaining students on to A level, I'd want to try to provide supplementary teaching, esp on grammar, immediately after GCSE and before the end of the summer term. Otherwise, much of Y12 is spent doing what those of us old enough to remember, did at O-level.

 

The following points have emerged

 

· Students are not confident in their use of the case system. Dative is the prime candidate, but some need to practise the accusative. This may reflect the fact that German tends to start a year later than French in many schools, giving students less time to adjust their thinking. Students have appreciated the opportunity to discuss these issues, think them through and practise constructing sentences.

 

· Deepl is a very useful tool. It gives an immediate, and generally accurate, indication of the way that something would be said in German. Students can then build sentences with similar constructions. I advise them, whenever they say something in English, to think how they would say it in German and and check to see what Deepl would say, without taking the Deepl version as gospel. Going to Germany in one’s mind every day helps reinforce new neural networks.

 

· Deutsche Welle’s slow news site is extremely useful. The pace can be varied to suit the student, and each item can be used with or without a transcript. Anything not understood can be cut-and-pasted into Deepl, saving much of the time that I used to spend with my thumb in a dictionary in my first year of A-level French.

 

· Students enjoy the light relief from songs in German and Internet sites such as Jetzt geht’s um die Wurst and MFL clips with subtitles.

 

· 8x5 cards are an extremely useful way of making and storing notes. The card is big enough to contain a useful amount of information and examples, but small enough to slip into a book to be glanced at in spare moments. The cards make it easy to organise notes in all subjects, especially if the student has a card index box. I was recommended them by a history lecturer at University, and have used them extensively ever since.

 

· The award-winning Herr Gröttrup Setzt Sich Hin, by Sharon Dodua Ottoo, is an excellent resource for Year 12. It is presented in short sections, with two parallel translations on each page, and is free at this link. Some students have downloaded it and found it very useful for practice. A student on Saturday, for example, found it interesting to spot datives in the first paragraph. https://stillmagazine.org/.../STILL_Herr-Gro%CC%88ttrup... This is, incidentally, the full version of the story and not a sample. Sharon is a visiting Fellow of Jesus College, and there is more of her work on Youtube. Thanks to Professor Sarah Colvin for introducing me to it.

 

Sessions will resume on January 14 at 9.30. New and returning students are welcome. In the past I’ve often been asked for help around January of Year 13. It’s obviously much better to start earlier than that. The existing link will work, but please DM if you’d like to join or don’t have it to hand.

Powerpoint on German Case system, Nicola Allen

Download Powerpoint case system Nicola AllenNi

German Summer School 2021, First session, audio recording.

   Download Audio_only     

This may be clearer if used with the first slides of this ppt

Download Languages Show 2017

 

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 [email protected].  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.