John Bald/language and literacy

Culture, Language and Progress in the Primary Classroom. Durham University, Lingua Conference, 27th Feb 2019. Outline.

Language never exists in a vacuum. The basic linguistic structures introduced in the early stages of learning a language are in a context that can either engage pupils and so make them want to learn, or, through lack of substance, bore them. This paper will show resources that identify and present key cultural elements in French, German and Spanish in ways that support the early stages of language learning by inviting pupils to visit the country in their minds, and to share the thoughts and feelings of people of their own age and they live, eat, work, go to school and enjoy holidays. There will be illustrations from Zim Zam Zoum, A Green Mouse, children's books in different languages, and BBC's Being Spanish. Materials will be selected to extend and reinforce language learning, and not to expose children to language that they may not fully understand.

French Teaching and Translation in Ewell, Surrey

Anne Le Romancier has set up a teaching and translating business  in Ewell, Surrey.  Here is an example of what she offers.

LE CAFE FRANÇAIS

Le Café Français is on once a week in Ewell.  I pick a topic for us to discuss (chosen among your own pre-discussed preferences) and around “un café et un croissant” we have a friendly conversation.   Those get-togethers are a relaxed and friendly approach to learning French among like-minded people who enjoy all things French .  All levels of French welcome so everybody can get something out of it.  So come join us and have a go 

REGISTER YOUR INTEREST BY E-MAIL anneleromancer@gmail.com

Le Café Français is soon to open new groups across Surrey.  We are keen to answer the need of the local communities and can create groups in your area provided there is a group of 5/6 participants coming together.

Rockalingua - a super resource for the early stages of learning Spanish.

www.rockalingua.com is a collecton of animated Spanish songs and associated resources that are likely to be very helpful to primary teachers and those in the early stages of learning Spanish in secondary school. Written and spoken language are presented together in a bright, upbeat tone, with plenty of opportunities for practice and reinforcement. Additional materials include a picture dictionary, games and simple worksheets. Access to the songs and videos costs $47pa, with full access to the associated materials at $159. Additional options are available, and there is a 60 day money back guarantee that is, in effect, a free trial. Some of the best resources for the early stages of Spanish that I´ve seen, with the option of either signing up to the whole works, or, as I´d be inclined to do, use the songs and videos as reinforcement for my own approach. Recommended. 

Rockalingua

Rockalingua is an online collection of videos, games, worksheets, and more, designed to make learning Spanish fun and easy for kids around the world.

ROCKALINGUA.COM

Nathalie Paris - excellent presentation on using children's books as part of language teaching.

Pppt here on the use of children's books, presented at language world conference by Nathalie Paris.  Useful for CPD and initial training. 

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!

 

Clicker 7 - a unique and brllliant bridge between spoken and written language, in English and other languages.

In the early years of this millennium, I reviewed Clicker (www.Cricksoft.com) for The Guardian, and the publishers have kindly kept me supplied with updates. A review of Clicker 5, from 2008, includes this:

Clicker 5 itself remains the best ICT resource available to EAL teachers. Sarah Bailey, head of Queensbridge school, Hackney, in London, says that its "scaffolding and constant modelling with visual reinforcement" are so effective that teaching assistants use it to reinforce basic literacy skills from reception to year 2 "at least three times a week".

Clicker 7, the latest version, is astonishing. The voice recognition has been developed to include surprisingly accurate reading in French and Spanish, and the additional materials in the modern languages package provide excellent practice in grammatical features - eg Cinderella in French for feminine endings - and pronunciation. It takes a little practice to set the program up for language learning, but once it's in place it's plain sailing. I've uploaded this video to youtube - the sound is a little low, so you may need to  turn yours up.

As I said of the earlier version nine years ago, this is the best piece of software available to EAL teachers, and also to modern languages teachers. Its author, John Crick, is a modest man, but we need to say to him what Robert Schumann said of Chopin - "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius."

 

Ofqual report on native speakers and A level languages. Some initial thoughts.

The report is one of the most complex I've seen, for a range of reasons. First, it is difficult to identify exactly who is a native speaker. Next, there is a statistical method of "informing" A level grade boundaries on the basis of average GCSE grades, which does not take account of the particular problem of progress from GCSE in the language. The current GCSE syllabus has been discredited for its lack of attention to grammar, and the widespread cheating in controlled assessment. Next, we have the problem with self-declaration as a native speaker, and the fact that only a quarter of schools contacted provided a reply. Experience tells me that schools would not reply to a questionnaire if they felt it might be to their disadvantage, so I don't trust the statistical base. It would have been better to rely on the DfE's own figures - available for around 60% of the entry - than to go for self-reporting, that took a lot of time and money, and resulted in a 25% response.

In German, 17% of entrants are identified as native speakers, and are taking around half of the A* grades. This is serious enough to put potential Oxbridge candidates off taking German A level, and Cambridge is finding it hard to meet its recruitment target for state schools.  A table later in the report estimates that a native French speaker is five times more likely to achieve an A* than an English speaker. These estimations, though are only part of the information we need. Pupils are getting lower A level results in languages than in other subjects. Why? Some people say grading is severe, but that is a matter of statistics rather than the candidates' actual knowledge of the language. We are suffering from the knock-on effect of the weaknesses of GCSE, which often mean that proper language study begins in Y12.  The current reforms to GCSE are an essential step towards restoring language teaching at A level.

The following paragraphs from the report (p4) show  that the issue goes beyond German

Model 1 shows that after accounting for prior attainment, gender and school type, the association between whether students are native speakers or not and overall performance is statistically significant and quite large, ranging from nearly 44 UMS marks for Spanish, to nearly 56 UMS marks for German. This suggests that whether students are native speakers or not has a significant effect on performance, with native speakers outperforming their non-native speaker counterparts. The effect of gender and school type are also statistically significant, with girls and independent school students outperforming boys and state school students. However, these effects are much smaller.

Model 2 shows that for each language, there is also a significant interaction between mean GCSE score and whether students are native speakers. The interaction term is negative, indicating that as the mean GCSE score of a student increases, the difference in performance between native and non-native speakers decreases. In other words, the role of being a native speaker is larger for students with lower prior attainment. This is summarised in Table 11, which reports the effect of being a native speaker on UMS marks for students with a mean GCSE score of 5 (representing a typical grade C student at GCSE) and a mean GCSE of 7 (representing a typical grade A student at GCSE). 

It is not surprising that non-native English speakers do not do as well at GCSE as English native speakers. This suggests that their relative advantage at A level is even greater than the raw results suggest.

Eliminating Copying in Language Teaching - it works! Letter from a teacher.

Since 1980, I've been campaigning against the practice of copying in schools. Switching the eyes back and forth between the original and the child's copy interferes with the development of understanding, and is anti-educational. I've just had this from a teacher who tried it.

Dear John

 

Some time ago I was in contact with you regarding the possibility of carrying out some research.  The sticking point as I remember for me was your insistence that children should not be copying off the board.  Again if memory serves me well I did not at the time understand how, from a practical point of view in an ordinary classroom with 30 challenging youngsters, it could be achieved.  I just wanted to up date you with the fact that I did not forget what you have written about copying from the board, and my pupils no longer copy from the board apart from the date and title which they are obliged to do in the school I now work in. 

It has been a good decision and freed up time for more productive activities.  I have moved to a school where I am the only teacher of French and so have a certain amount of autonomy as to how I teach French.  It is a high school so the children begin in year 9 and much of my work is building confidence.  Thank you for your blog it really makes me think and change my practice for the better .  I am just about to look at the material on teaching phonics (French).  I already do this but feel I need to so more extensively.

Kind regards

 

S.

 

Assessment in language learning - the key skill, and how to focus on it.

As we learn a new language, we adjust and extend our thinking from the structures we have learned while learning our first language. These involve, in the initial stages, big changes in pronunciation and in our understanding of the use of letters to represent sounds in words. The primary toolkits on this site show how these can be introduced and explained in the first few lessons - and in particular in the very first lesson, where colours illustrate most of the main changes, in a context that is self-evident.

To communicate using the new language, however, we need to know how to put our words together to make a sentence, and to understand sentences that we hear or read. This can be achieved by building up sentences based on personal experience and preferences, and gradually extending these to encompass as much of the scope of the language as a learner wishes, or is able, to know. This sentence construction uses grammar for communication, rather than as an end in itself.

The techniques in the toolkits, if possible supported by the teacher's own resources using Clicker,  enable each child to learn to compose and understand sentences, without the illusions created by copying. The approach is very easy to use, and builds assessment into the teaching, so that there is no extra work for the teacher. Any system of assessment that does not focus on sentence construction is giving a false picture of a child's ability to understand and use the language.  I'm happy to discuss this further.

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.