John Bald/language and literacy

Free Spanish Schemes of Work, Y3-9, Dr Rachel Hawkes.

Dr Rachel Hawkes  has generously published a complete scheme of work for Spanish from Y3 to Y9, with a stunning array of attractive resources that enable children to build up their knowledge, skills annd understanding in small steps, with plenty of practice. Very highly recommended, not least for the downloadable Libro de Estudio, which provides a continuous record of each child's work.

Readers might like to consider Dr Hawkes' toolkit alongside that on this site.  The main feature of my toolkit is the early introduction of writing via finger tracing, so that children never copy. I'm still sure that this is the best way to do it, but Dr Hawkes has some excellent use of pictures to allow children to record understanding, and uses modelling to enable them to construct their own sentences.  

Overall, this site is brilliant - a free goldmine. I've started digging, and suggest you do too.

Lost in a Fog: how not to teach languages. Updated 19th June

To SOAS for the ALL London branch's excellent morning conference - certainly the best forum for London languages teachers to meet, and great value at £15 for members. The main theme was using the new (aka "target") language in the classroom. There were lots of good ideas for doing this, but I found myself disagreeing with this quote from Keith Johnson's Language Teaching and Skill Learning (1996):

One learns to land in fog by landing in fog, not by landing in clear skies.

Anyone sending a novice pilot to land in fog should advise them to write their will first. 

In teaching terms, there are at least two paths here. The path of the toolkits on this site, and of Michel Thomas with adults, is to make the early stages of learning very clear indeed to learners by linking them to what they know already, and by making each adjustment in thinking very easy in itself. The skies are as clear as the teacher can make them.  

The second established path is to "expose" them to language, in the hope that a lot of practice and encouragement will enable them to use it. There has to date been no attempt to compare one approach directly with another, but all I can say from experience is that the second results at best in short exclamations, and does not achieve the goal of enabling the learner to express their thoughts clearly - if with the mistakes we all make when we are learning - in the new language. For a fuller discussion of the issues, Dr Colin Christie's PhD thesis is downloadable here.

It does not do to underestimate the importance of these two alternatives. In order to speak in a new language, we need to be able to call up the words we need, and put them together in a way a native speaker can understand, in real time. This is demanding, and is not generally achieved in school language learning. Michel Thomas approached the challenge with adults by beginning with slow and accurate sentence formation, using shared words (aka cognates) for vocabulary, a very few verbs in a wide range of tenses, and pronouns instead of nouns wherever possible, so that pupils could focus all of their attention on grammatical structures rather than learning vocabulary. The approach set out in Dr Christie's thesis does not explain grammatical structures. The examples of pupils' language that he gives are almost all short, formulaic exclamations such as "Changez le prof", and there is some evidence of a small number of pupils dominating the exchanges. There is no hiding the contrast and even conflict between this approach and the full understanding which I see, and the late Michel Thomas saw, as essential.  

In his talk on Saturday, Dr Christie mentioned a Year 9 pupil, who said he could do nothing in French. Dr Christie said that what the pupil meant was that he could not say what he wanted to in French. The pupil was right, and he was wrong - if we are not teaching people to say what they want to say, we are not enabling them to communicate. Dr Christie's path leads to failure, frustration and ignorance. It is a scandal that it remains a key element of teacher training. 

PS. In a conversation after the Reading conference, reported below, Professor Theodoris Marinis told me that he had been able to detect differences in brain functioning after learning new languages by means of brain scans. Further details as soon as the work is published, but this appears to be the first time that the idea that learning languages changes brain functioning has been demonstrated directly. 

More bad news from universities on languages

Guardian has a piece on the continuing decline of languages provision in univerisities. The biggest loss appears to be Salford, but there are now just 56 universities offering honours degree courses in languages. This raises several questions, several of which are discussed in postings on this website. At the very least, this evidence reinforces the case for a comprehensive review of teaching methods so that young people enjoy languages, know that they are making progress, and don't want to drop out.

Rachel Hawkes, Comberton Village College

Rachel Hawkes' weblog, here, generously shares lots of practical teaching ideas, including conference presentations that would otherwise cost a lot of money to see. Recommended.

French Revolution, and the gift of time.

The approaches to French set out in postings below are having a remarkable effect on learning in the primary school I'm currently working with most. By focussing on understanding key concepts in the early stages, teaching writing and speaking together, and using questioning techniques that involve the whole class, we are finding that, after a little more than two terms, pupils:

• understand gender in nouns, and apply it when writing about themselves (eg girls usually add e to an adjective in a sentence such as je suis poli(e)
• hold a simple sentence in their mind and write it without copying
• recognise French personal prounouns and are beginning to know the way verbs change with them
• recognise the difference between tu and vous in classroom commands and respond accordingly
• understand the use of ne and pas to make a negative
• recognise shared words between English and French, and begin to make sense of translations of their class rules.

The gift of time in primary languages allows these key elements in understanding to be consolidated over time, and for children who don't understand something first time round to practise. The pressure of time is one of three main sources of failure in secondary schools - the others are going too fast for children to understand, and copying. For the first time since I began teaching French in 1973, I think we have a solution to the problem of failure that has beset us for centuries.

 

 

 

Take Mali - Vive le français, langue mondiale!

French is an international language, spoken by people of many races and cultural backgrounds. Take Mali provides an important focal point for this dimension of French studies by bringing together video and resources covering a wide range of Malian society and work. Take Mali is not a self-contained course, but a series of units that will make sense to children at different stages of the 7-14 curriculum - only a few sections, including some of those on the school and games - are aimed at beginners. Elsewhere, the French is quite advanced (though it comes with full transcripts) and careful preparation will be needed to use it in lessons. However, the detailed teachers' book will help with planning, and interested older pupils could be encouraged to explore the materials on their own. A strong recommendation for all UK schools offering French at Stages 2 and 3.

 

Teaching Schools Alliance Modern Languages Conference, Manchester, October 2011

This power point presentation was given to the Training and Development Agency's conference for the Teaching Schools Alliance on 11th October.  Download Language Learning and Brain Activity. TDA Oct11.  A list of references for further reading is here.

Not a bad day's work...

To Hackney, for a short professional development session on French with some of my thoughtful, determined and well-organised colleagues who are holding the line for civilisation. A quick reorganisation of my main slide on suggestions for the very first lesson, and we are away, just twenty minutes to discuss what we have achieved in our first term - introducing pronouns, positive and negative sentences with être and avoir, identifying masculine and feminine, songs and practice with Languagenut, and beginning to say anything we wish to. French is not a bolt on to the school's work, but fundamental to its core values of helping children to make the right choices, and to see that hard work and concentration will pay off. A very happy atmosphere, and I am rewarded with a warm round of applause. This will not make it any less tough when the children return next week. Bon courage à tous.

Then across London to work with a ten year old whose reading problems have not been completely resolved by synthetic phonics. The basic techniques outlined by Sue Palmer in her description of work with her daughter, slightly reorganised so that the same guidance can be used for reading and spelling, produce their usual effect, and the observing parent describes the outcome as "fantastic". A colleague has observed the whole lesson, from the time I greeted the young man to the time I left his home, and will send an account to Sir James Rose, who did not receive the evidence I sent him about this teaching, and who is now very interested in it. 

On the way back to the tube, I bump into a very senior figure in the education world, whose name I can't give here. He had also had dealings with the last government on a range of issues, and said that civil servants had become so close to ministers that they simply excluded anything that was not in the party line. They were no longer behaving as civil servants. The ministry says that my work may have been lost en route to a researcher. I can't believe this. Someone must have made a note of it, and, if it had been sent to an (unnamed) researcher, someone must have expected a response, and would have chased it if none had been received. This would have shown the loss, and I would have been asked for an other copy. It's embarrassing to lose things, but this is what I and newspapers I've worked with have done when it happens - the penalty has usually been a sarcastic comment from the sender, followed by a new copy.

My own belief is that the work was deliberately suppressed by someone in the ministry, or by someone else connected with the inquiry, as it goes against both the government line and the views of the voluntary organisations that have been given a disproportionate role in public provision for dyslexia. This is the way New Labour did things. As Mandelson once said, it involves the creation of truth. He later retracted this statement, saying you can't create truth. But he was right the first time. The price of artificial truth in this instance is tens of millions of pounds wasted on training and provision that is not based on full assessment of the available evidence, and much puffed up self importance from what New Labour termed third sector organisations that don't know as much as they think they do. The whole truth, or as close to it as current evidence will take us, is now available, and it is not too late to put right the mistake.

Débâcle. GCSE languages entries.

 CILT has a usefuls table of entries in French, German and Spanish, since 1996. (the full table can be downloaded here).  

French entries have fallen from 347,960 in 1996, to 318,963 in 2005, to 154,221 in 2011. The fall in French entries since 1996 is therefore 56%.  Such is the legacy of New Labour on French.

Spanish entries have risen from 42,553 in 1996, to 62,489 in 2005, to 66,021 in 2011. This is a fall from over 67,000 in Spanish in the previous two years, so the growth in Spanish has stalled.

German entries have fallen from 134,286 in 1996, to 105,259 in 2005, to 60,887 in 2011. The fall of nearly 10,000 entries between 2010 and 2011 is proportionately the largest of these three languages.

These are national statistics, and so include the private sector, which has close to 100% of pupils taking a language. The fall of almost 200,000 pupils a year taking French, and 60,000 a  year taking German, since 2006, is catastrophic, and not seriously ofset by the gain in Spanish. Overall,  entries in the major European languages have fallen from 524,799 to 277,597, a loss of 247,202, or 47%.

The falls in entries for geography and history make this a compelling argument for Ebac. These subjects are all better represented in the private sector. It should be a matter of pride for those of us in the public sector that we do not offer children fewer opportunities than they would have if their parents were better off. Science has begun to pull its socks up. So should languages.

 

 

Your Child's Right to Learn a Language

All children have a legal right to study a language from 11 -16, but a parliamentary answer to Nick Gibb MP revealed 25 secondary schools that are not offering this. This is illegal, and probably not the full picture, as the government can only reply about schools it knows about.

If your child is not being allowed to learn a language, I am happy to help on a no-cost basis.  After you have written to the headteacher to point out the situation, if you have no positive response, email me and I will advise on the next steps. These should include involving the local media.