My Languages

Understanding Languages-Why Teachers Need to Listen and Learn

2012-01-14T16:47:00.001Z

In this week's MFL colum in the Times Educational Supplement, I tackle the perception of languages by non-specialist colleagues and what can be done to demystify our job.

Some subjects are scarier than others to non-specialist teachers. Languages are definitely in the scary category for many teachers, but a lot will depend on personal experiences, often dating back to their own school days.

Isn't it funny how most adults-whether they are teachers or not- and teenagers lose all common sense when they are presented with something they know is "foreign"? Anybody above the age of 9 will become more and more hindered as they grow up by the assumption that they WIL NOT understand.

They will forget they have a language of their own with which they can establish comparisons and make inferences from. They will ignore the visual clues, the cognates, the sound-alikes because let's face it, it is foreign and they cannot possibly understand this. That is why I believe before we even attempt to teach a foreign language, we must make students realise that it is not a threat to their identity.

Many adults behave in such manner and would rather deliberately mispronounce words rather than be seen to try to emulate the sounds produced by a native speaker. Speaking a foreign language then becomes a bit like karaoke singing: a high-risk business with strong potential for the participant to end up looking ridiculous.

It is therefore hardly surprising that some of my primary or secondary colleagues feel uncomfortable having to teach or supervise the learning of languages, particularly if their own experience was less than successful at school. So let's demystify!

Being supportive and non-judgmental is a good start but pointing at useful techniques and resources is key. This should be an exchange as both participants have as much to learn as each other.

All teachers have a reasonable repertoire of cross-curricular learning and teaching strategies so no need to re-invent the wheel. After all, languages are a medium, they can be learnt through any content...

Guest Blog Post: Essential Memorisation Techniques for GCSE

2012-01-07T19:59:00.009Z

Most of us learn successfully through a mixture of seeing, hearing and doing. When it comes to succeeding in GCSEs, we also need a mixture of techniques to help us. Here are some top tips on essential techniques for GCSE success:

Tips on effective note-taking

Students need to be able to take effective notes so they can re-read and reflect on the essentials of a lesson. This enables them to deepen their learning and fill in any blanks with further study. Some well-organised notes are also essential for effective Stage 2 preparation in MFL GCSEs.

However, students often find note-taking a challenge, so here are some suggestions:

*Ensure your lessons are structured in a way that is conducive to effective note-taking;

*Encourage students to use a mix of old-fashioned pen and paper, ICT, post-it notes, highlighters in class as well the recording facilities on their phones at home;

*Emphasise that it is not necessary to write down every word-only what they have trouble remembering from English into the Target Language;

*Encourage them to use plenty of space and write down main headings and subheadings as they go along so they can fill in the details later or try to remember them

*Some students might prefer more visual note-taking techniques such as mind-mapping or diagrams, which show how each idea link into another.

Tips on memorising

Memorising through endless repetition or singing can work with auditory students. Saying the text to be memorised to a tune or a rhythm can also help.

Visual memorisation aids are also useful and can include:

*Silly stories or unusual pictures, as a prompt to remember ideas;

*Study posters, perhaps incorporating a mind map, as a way to memorise the structure of the questions to be memorised;

*Study cards, to help memorise individual facts like key vocabulary and structures.

Tips on exam recall

We can help our students with simple techniques to help steady the nerves and aid recall during exams. This includes the opportunity to practise basic exam techniques such as:

Reading the questions

*Sticking to the question and answering each part in full;

*Drawing students' attention on common mistakes;

*Weighting and allocating appropriate time to each question.

Practising with past exam papers is certainly not cheating (but do check your exam board’s policy on reproducing and distributing old papers) and will help students to understand the level of detail required in the exam as well as to familiarise themselves with its format.

For the exam itself, you may like to suggest that students take a few deep breaths to settle their nerves before turning over the exam paper. Students may also find it helpful to boost their confidence by noting down familiar mnemonics, key words and structures before starting the Listening and Reading papers.

Like other recall techniques, mnemonics can be applied across subjects. They are as useful to GCSE students as to executives on English corporate courses in London, so it is well worth teaching your students how to use them.

Go over these essential tips for GCSE success with your students before the exam-when students starts getting nervous, it is always useful to go back to basics to settle them.

Sustainable Promotion for Foreign Languages

2012-01-07T00:15:00.005Z

I was delighted to share today in the Times Educational Supplement's MFL column some of the best strategies our language faculty has used over the years to promote languages with our students.

Instead of just looking at presenting a very wide range of strategies, I wanted to reflect on how effective different strategies had been in encouraging taking a foreign language as an option at GCSE.

Some activities are really enjoyable but not necessarily have an impact on the uptake and despite using exit questionnaires and questionning students, the key reasons that make a student take the leap and opt are still a bit of mystery.

Some of the best strategies included:

*Involving students in the organisation of trips,

*Trips to local restaurants or tapas bar to facilitate discussions about how speaking another language can help in other careers like catering,

*Inviting speakers to show how languages are used in the world of work,

getting involved in cross-curricular project,

*Linking with schools abroad for students to get the personnal satisfaction of communication for a real purpose,

*Regularly celebrating student achievement to make students realise that fluency is not the ultimate aim at KS3 or 4 for that matter...

In our on-going promotion campaign, languages teachers would be well-advised to warn students against the following reasons to opt:

I like the teacher

Lovely but very dangerous-everybody will have warned the students about it, but it still happens although it can also be more maturely expressed as "I know I will do better with this teacher as I get on with them". Still, a long term aim and career plan might be safer to secure student's commitment over the two years leading to a GCSE exam...

My friends are doing it

Not a great idea but it is a fact that a lot of students seem to opt in frienship groups. Some realise early it was a mistake but unfortunately some take longer and then feel trapped on a course they are no longer interested in. Opting in friendship groups can mean good group dynamics in class but it can also create a classroom climate that constantly needs steering away from the socialising mode..

My parents want me to do it

It is always a great asset to have strong parental support but it is sometimes a real problem if the choice to opt was not made by the students themselves. We all know that the correlation between student commitment and good results is very strong and students who are involved directly in the decision-making tend to be a lot more committed.

To avoid these 3 main pitfalls and really get students to carefully consider their options, it is also essential to have an honest on-going conversation with students about their aspirations, interests and achievements. Securing a choice for the right reasons is certainly the step in the right direction towards commitment and success.

ALL French Online: Tips and Tricks for GCSE, Friday 10th December

2011-12-11T14:01:00.002Z

The video conference was organised with Flashmeeting and was attended by Esther Mercier , Dominic McGladdery, Michelle Cairns and my colleagues Alison Watkinson and Vanessa Parker from The Radclyffe School. The replay can be viewed here.

The exchanges referred to the two exam boards used across the schools represented, EDEXCEL and

AQA. Teachers across the land have had issues with both boards as regards the severity and the unpredictability of grading in Languages. EDEXCEL was also recently in the news as part of a governmental investigation into examination boards although this is not MFL-specific.

Although Edexcel offers for MFL compares well with that of other examination boards, I pointed out that my perception had been irrevocably tainted by our school's bad experience with the Applied French in 2009.

More recently, Edexcel caused a lot of disruption in schools by changing marking criteria for the Writing Controlled Assessment, which affected work already completed by Y10 and forced teachers to add more Controlled Assessment tasks in Y11 to redress the balance. There was also some confusion regarding the 200 words minimum for a C grade.

Our AQA examination analysis also highlighted than more words than what was stated seemed to have been required for higher grades. As this is not currently a written rule, we all felt that more specific guidance in terms of minimum outcome was needed for different grades.

Predicted A* Students sitting the Edexcel GCSE also seem to be expected to use subjunctive, which is more than is required for AQA AS level... Although this is not explicitly stated, it appeared through the use of conditional perfect / subjunctive phrases in the higher grades corrected sample tasks.

Students are encountering difficulties with the AQA rule that "what is done at home stays at home" and "what is done at school stays at school". Meanwhile, Edexcel allows students to take preparation at home back and forth. Although this makes it more flexible for students and teachers, there are issues with the use of google translation, similarity of the work produced and the fact that teachers cannot be 100% sure it is students' own work even though they sign a form to say it is.

With AQA-they can do the stage 1 preparation at home in “bits” but this change as soon as the actual task is given to students (bullet points).

To prepare students for the speaking Controlled Assessment, using text-to-speech software such as http://text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/ or Voki.com can be very useful as it makes the students more independent. Students can listen to the text-to-speech version to memorise it and it can be uploaded to the school's VLE. Students may also record themselves on their mobile phones to learn their answers.

As regards the preparation for writing, I feel strongly that getting students to memorise a possibly inaccurate stage 2 preparation in class is not the best use of class time. Although peer support is allowed and can help students to focus on their task, it can also be a great source of distraction.

I was interested to find out about differences between AQA and EDEXCEL as regards the use of the Task Planning sheet: Up to 5 pictures are allowed for Edexcel as well as 30 words including conjugated verbs, whereas AQA allows 40 words with no pictures or other visuals and no conjugated verbs at all. A recent decision-see p14-to include past participle as well as infinitives will also make it challenging for students who already struggle with using the present perfect...

It was noted that memorisation of the tasks was found difficult even by the higher ability harder-working students. Memorisation was also affected by the students' ability to concentrate over what constitutes quite long periods of time, with the usual pattern of a decent beginning that slowly deteriorates for both writing and Speaking assessments…

Speaking for 4 minutes minimum in a foreign language is extremely challenging and this is compounded for Edexcel by the fact students may have to do a one minute presentation and ask questions to be awarded the higher marks.

I was surprised to find out that the format for the Speaking Assessment is NOT standard across the exam boards as there is an element of choice with Edexcel. There are 3 different possible types of tasks for Edexcel with different marking schemes applicable to them: picture-based task, presentation/ discussion and open interaction (conversation).

It was noted that there can be a strong negative impact on pronunciation and intonation if students speak too fast, hence the need to practise whith a version of their speaking task recorded at an appropriate pace.

How many tasks should we be doing?

This seemed to vary quite a lot, depending on the exam board used, the time allocated for languages and students' ability. Teachers aiming for 3 speaking and 3 writing tasks admitted that this took over their teaching time possibly at the expense of developing listening and reading skills. There were also issues with "back-to-back" speaking and writing Controlled Assessments on similar topics which narrow the range of the topics taught and can also affect performance in the Listening and Reading exams.

There are undoubtedly some communication problem with the boards when they decide to change or modify rules. Although the changes are usually mentioned on the exam boards' websites, it is unrealistic to expect language teachers to check large websites every week "just in case". Specific email alerts should be sent to all language teachers to inform them immediately when a change occurs. In addition, the fact that it is very difficult to enforce changes half way through a course means that boards should be very mindful of the implications of changes for classroom teachers and limit the publication of changes to certain times of the year e.g. January and June.

Can the board find out if you do the same topics for speaking and writing?

That question was asked many teachers on language teachers forums like MFL resources and although we all thought that it was unlikely that the exam boards would physically be able to check, we all agreed that this would lead to further narrowing of the syllabus and be detrimental to students in the long term.

AQA's recent changes for re-taking the writing were discussed-the title needs to be different and the outcome too. There should be no overlap of outcome between tasks as technically a student cannot be credited for overlapping content.

For the Writing task, a healthy piece of advice was to not over-complicate the bullet points, leaving it to the more able to develop further. This makes all the more sense as the bullet points in the AQA Writing tasks are just for student support and not linked with the marking scheme.

Some schools are rumoured to mark the preparation before students learn it for stage 3. This constitutes malpractice and does not guarantee that students will still be able to remember accurately what they have learnt.

Tenses are an issue: time lines can be given for the same verb for practice

AQA has compounded the problem with verb endings as the task planning sheet only allows verbs in the infinitive. Training students to use verb tables effectively is therefore essential to allow them to develop more independence and accuracy as students will not just rely on memory. Effective use of dictionary is very important at Stage 3-but it is as important to teach students when to use it as it is when not to use it

Sixth form issues were discussed as the current GCSE format does not encourage students to develop effective learning skills. 11-16 do not focus on skills enough and time pressures lead to a lot of spoon-feeding and rote learning of set phrases for the exam. Some students end up with no knowledge about tense formation and this makes effective transition to ALevel very difficult.

Writing frames can be used during preparation at stage 1 and at stage 2 as a reference but they need to be designed in a way to avoid students to all produce very similar outcomes. Writing frames need to be basic to allow students to add a lot of their own language and personalise the piece to an appropriate level.

There is a great difference of expectation for the writing-AQA writing is being marked NOT moderated hence stricter and sometimes unpredictable application of the marking scheme in some cases.

Re-marks

A lot of schools asked for re-marks in September 2011, a lot more than in the past-particularly for writing. Some scores went up but not always enough to make a difference overall, particularly for C/D candidates.

It may be worth considering entering Controlled Assessment marks early as the marks to UMS tend to be more generous for the smaller January co-hort. (need to check 40% rule for banking modules)

More and more samples are being published on the AQA websites to be used for moderation but it can be difficult to find information and documents on the website and the same thing goes for the Edexcel website. Maybe the ALL French online group could use the ALL French online wiki to highlight documents of particular importance/ interest.

As note-taking and good organisation skills are essential for students to do well at Stage 2, the idea of students having an "exam book" or "big book" with all corrected work in it as well as useful handout seemed a very good idea. Students can also highlight phrases that they may like to use in their Controlled Assessment to help them find them quicker when they are doing their Stage 2 preparation.

I also found Jen Turner’s idea of getting previous Year 11 to make virtual post-it notes for the new Year 10 very useful. Look at her "post-it walls" here for the Reading exams, here for the Listening exams and here for the Controlled Assessments.

I am also looking forward to Jen's session on how ICT can support students for Controlled Assessment at the ILILC2012 Conference at The University of Southampton in February 2012.

Last but not least Language World, ALL's National Conference will take place in Manchester from 29 to 31st March 2012 and I am also looking forward to meeting more languages teachers to discuss and find out more about topics like assessment at GCSE.

You are not yet an ALL member? It is not too late to join! Join ALL and be part of the largest network of languages teachers in the UK.

ALL French Online-Come and Share your GCSE experiences!

2011-12-07T23:20:00.002Z

Are you a UK Languages teacher and NOT a member of ALL, the Association for Language Learning? If so, why not?

At a time when it is getting more and more crucial for langage teachers to take their own professional development in their own hand, ALL offers wonderful opportunities for formal CPD as well as informal peer-to-peer support.

If you are a teacher of French and, like the rest of us, you are still trying to grapple with the new GCSE, come and share your experiences with ALL French Online in our first online meeting using Flashmeeting for Friday 9th December 8-9pm.

To support the group, I have also set up a wiki http://allfrenchonline.wikispaces.com/

You are all invited to join the wiki, edit it and add resources linked with our first Flashmeeting: Tips and Tricks for French GCSE.

If you are not familiar with Flashmeeting, do not worry as it is really easy to pick up. All you need is a microphone, a headset or a webcam. Do contact me if you want to try it before the meeting. To enter the meeting you just need to click on http://flashmeeting.e2bn.net/fm/4b542e-14294

You can register as a user-but please note that this does not automatically give you the right to set up meetings-or as a guest, but your name will not appear on the list of people present if you choose to enter as a guest. Some more information about flashmeeting can also be found at http://flashmeeting.e2bn.net/quickstart.html

To get us started, I suggest the following Agenda:

1. Quick introductions-please include whether you are currently teaching GCSE, what language you teach and what examination board you use

2. Lessons learnt from last year's GCSE co-hort

3. Useful activities to prepare students for the speaking and writing CAs

4. Tools and resources to help preparing for the Listening and Reading exam

Looking forward to meeting you and thank you for checking here how else your subject association can suppport you.

MORE PRACTICAL WAYS TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ PRONUNCIATION

2011-11-27T12:02:00.001Z

I was delighted to be able to share a few strategies to improve students' pronunciation in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) this Friday as I view good pronunciation as one of the most effective ways to boost students' confidence in their own ability as linguists. Indeed, if their accent in the foreign language is not at least understandable, performance in exams and in a real life context will be poor and lead to demotivation.

As mentioned in the article, practising pronunciation is a challenging activity for teenagers who often perceive it as a threat to their own British identity at a time of their lives when they are not too sure about their identity anyway. Using puppets or drama techniques like role-play can help but what else can be done to help students improve their pronunciation in the foreign language?

Phonics Phonics Phonics

Teach basic pronunciation rules through examples and regularly re-visit key sounds through starter activities. Use mirrors and discuss with students how some sounds come through their noses or from the back of their throats. Focus on how foreign language speakers stress certain words and do not pronounce specific letters e.g. “s” for plural in French or “nt” at the end of verbs. For Spanish and German, show how "regular" the sound patterns of language are and get students to decode and pronounce sophisticated words they have learnt in other subjects.

Practise Practise Practise

Provide opportunities for students to practise individually, in pairs and small groups. Tongue twisters and rhymes are great for starters, with students listening to a model and then practising in pairs to encourage self and peer correction.

Make practising pronunciation into a game. Play vocabulary games like noughts and crosses with two teams or in pairs and make accurate pronunciation one of the criteria for scoring points. Encourage students to correct each other’s pronunciation and step in if needed to clarify pronunciation rules. Some students could volunteer to be "pronunciation expert", in charge of reminding the class of a specific sound e.g. i always sounds "ee" in Spanish, "oi" always sounds "wa" in French...

Use poetry, riddles and rhymes to make students more sensitive to pronunciation patterns. A simple exercise where students have to match rhyming words can really get them to reflect on pronunciation patterns.

Music is a wonderful tool to get students to look at language in terms of sounds and rhythms. Get your students to sing difficult words, they will slow down and their pronunciation will improve instantaneously.

Songs and raps in the target language can be used effectively as pronunciation models. Students listen to the song or rap, the teacher identifies a repetitive structure as a model and students write their own lines and practise them. The raps or songs can then be peer-assessed with a focus on pronunciation.

Using Technology such as Voki, the speaking avatar site, can provide a good model in the target language through its text-to-speech facility. Students can also give their avatar a voice by recording themselves and get their pronunciation assessed by their peers verbally or through comments. Other sites like Blabberize can enable students to make a photo "speak" and will also motivate them to try different sounds and voices.

Get students to practise at home by recording speeches using Audacity, the free audio recording software, or listening to model answers and making notes about the pronunciation, like where silent letters are or which part of the word is stressed. Making them aware of inflection, the patterns of stress and intonation in a language, is the most difficult unless students are quite musical. Students could just demonstrate whether they think the intonation is going up or down.This can be very good to get them to realise that in Spanish, for instance, the penultimate syllable is often stressed whereas in French it tends to be the last syllable, which explains differences in how the language sounds.

Finally, getting students to improve their pronunciation will not only mean better exam results in languages but also students developing a more positive self-image as linguists. This should also lead to improved self-esteem and impact on their overall school achievements.

What strategies do you use in your classroom to make your students more aware how the language inflections, rhythm and specific sounds?

AQA Course: Feedback on 2011 GCSE Examination in Modern Foreign Languages, 11th November 2011, York.

2011-11-13T01:19:00.002Z

I attended this course in York hoping to find out ways to improve GCSE results through understanding better the pitfalls of this new exam. However, the frustration shown by the majority of the teachers present, particularly as regards the severe and /or erratic marking of the speaking and the writing Controlled Assessment, unfortunately hijacked parts of the training.

2011 Examinations compared with 2010 Examinations

It was stressed that the grade boundaries had to change considerably to mirror the changes from a very small cohort to a full one in 2011. The concern was that very little support was provided to allow teachers to give a reasonably accurate predicted grade for the first co-horts going through the new GCSE examination.

Daring to be more creative

As could be expected, a lot of teachers “played safe” in their choice of topics and relied on topics that had been also part of the previous specification. Some tasks with a more imaginative setting/ content were suggested including:

Being in a celebrity relationship (Context: Relationship and Choices)

Pressures and problems at school (Cross-context) for speaking

and, for writing:

Free time and the Media (Context: Free Time and The Media)

A job application (Context: Current and Future Jobs)

Differentiation

Some examples of speaking tasks linked to the same topic-holiday-were also given to show how bullet points could be differentiated for higher ability students e.g. Where do you normally go on holiday?/ Tell me about last year’s summer holiday.

For students to gain confidence in their Listening skills, it was suggested to give a reading activity based on the transcript as a homework task before the actual listening activity in class.

Organisation

At stage 1 anything is permitted but the task must not be given in its entirety or with just a bullet point changed. However, individual bullet points can be practised and marked individually.

In 2014 the GCSE examinations will all become linear-everything will happen in the summer with no early entries in January.

The majority of centres adapted AQA tasks or devised their own tasks. Some tasks were more creative: interview with an air crash survivor, being in a celebrity relationship, big brother interview…

Schools set either the same task for the entire class or differentiated task on same topic.

For retaking the writing, the same topic can be used but the title and all bullet points have now to be changed.

It is important to have the task ready at the start of stage 1 for the teaching to precisely cover all the points needed to cover the task.

Speaking/ writing: In speaking all bullet points have to be addressed whereas in writing, the title is the most important. In fact, bullet points are not compulsory for writing tasks and are often used to support weaker candidates.

A broad title for the writing ensures that everything produced by candidates is relevant but it also makes it very difficult to organise tasks for student to retake in that specific context.

There is also sometimes some confusion between title and scenario E.g. Write a blog your holidays and what went wrong. The titles and scenario need to be different and there is a need for consistency. For instance, if there is a mention of a competition in the scenario, it must be mentioned in the task written by students.

When there is an overlap between the writing and speaking tasks, it is not appropriate to use the same bullet points, both tasks need to be “sufficiently different” to ensure students produce a very different outcome.

For speaking, the recorded time begins as soon as the teacher asks the first question relating to the first bullet point.

Stretching the More Able

Teachers need to ensure that opportunities are provided for more able students to reach the top band.

Opinions are essential: to get 3-4 and above a minimum of 2 opinions are required. They can be basic but they must be there to justify the mark.

Developments are also very important. They are instances when candidates offer extra language not specifically requested e.g. adding extra pieces of information, opinions, facts, etc…

In the best speaking tests, students need to take over and present each one of their bullet points like a mini-presentation e.g. 5 bullets = 5 mini-presentations

More able students need to be able to narrate events to get in the higher band and they also have to justify their opinions twice, which is where a lot of centres lost marks. The 2 different opinions and 2 different reasons could be introduced by par exemple, parce que etc…

For the Range and Accuracy, to get into the top band, a minimum of 2 tenses (any 2) is required but it is not needed for the 5-6 band.

Demain je vais au marché does not count as a future tense.

Able students must have a variety of tenses e.g. 5 different tenses (higher candidate) as a greater range of tense will add to the complexity.

Variety of expression is very important and students must actively be taught to use synonyms and how to express same things in lots of different ways.

The use of moods does not count as a different tense so if a candidate uses present indicative and present subjunctive, it still counts as one tense: present.

5 out of 5 for pronunciation seems to be more common for Spanish & German as the pronunciation is more phonetically regular.

There were some issues with high ability students who did not meet the 4 minutes minimum required for the speaking test. This meant that they could not get 10 for communication but they still could get 9.

Teachers do not need to push weaker candidates to do all 4 minutes as they would not get a 10 for communication anyway.

A strong emphasis on memorisation can have an adverse effect on students’ pronunciation e.g. verb endings in French, so it is very important to practise and record models and students at stage 1.

To assess the Interaction and fluency, teachers need to consider how much students hesitate and do not know what to say next.

4 or 5 bullet points seem to work the best for most candidates but teachers must not ask questions out of the order.

Unpredictable Questions

Unpredictable questions should also be very simple e.g. in the present tense, using cognate… Students must answer the unpredictable questions in a full sentence with a verb in order to score for their answer. It is also essential for the teacher to print all unpredictable questions on the teacher’s sheets sent to the board.

You need between 4 and 6 different unpredictable questions for a class of 30 to ensure that it remains unpredictable. You can link unpredictable questions with broad topic e.g. do you like ice-cream for the holiday and all unpredictable questions must be answered at the end of the test.

Teacher may want to get students to prepare 30 questions making it clear that the bullet points for the tasks will be drawn from there. At Stage 1, the teacher should not move on until students are comfortable with all the bullet points.

Planning Sheets and Dictionaries

If conjugated verbs are left on the planning sheet and students use them, students will be marked down. le/ la are counted in the number of words.

It was stressed that students should not be actively encouraged to use a dictionary at stage 3 because of the time it can waste. However, using the verb tables in the dictionary can be a lot more useful to help student to proofread what they have written.

The Language Show, Saturday 24th October 2011: Seminars for Language Teachers

2011-10-28T19:56:00.001+01:00

The first seminar I attended was about teaching grammar. James Stubbs, who now teaches English in Spain after many years of teaching languages in the UK introduced his concept of “Sticky grammar” taught through the Target Language.

Sticky grammar was presented as a way to reach all learners in a mixed ability group, supporting the lower ability student and stretching the higher ability one.

James then introduced his objective: to use indirect object pronoun correctly: lui/le

The first step was to use direct object pronoun with agreement in present tense and we were shown how Direct Object pronouns can be taught through classroom routine:

Voulez-vous nous donner un point?

Voulez-vous nous expliquer l’activité un peu mieux?

Tu m’as parlé en anglais!

Veux-tu/ peux-tu nous repeater en anglais?

Peux-tu nous expliquer pourquoi tu es en retard?

Veux-tu lui expliquer pourquoi tu es en retard?

Vous devez…

Vous devrez surveiller les autres et il faut leur dire “éliminé”

Then was introduced the use of direct object pronouns with agreement for number and gender in the perfect tense. Success depends on students knowing the vocabulary and the gender of the vocabulary.

It is best to use a perfect tense where the past participle sounds different for masculine and feminine e.g. ouvert/ ouverte.

Use multiple choices as a starter activity to get students to focus on correct spelling and/ or pronunciation e.g. is it : ordinateur, ordinature or ordinataire?

Songs can also help students to remember vocabulary lists.

Colour-coding helps students learning the items of vocabulary with the correct genders attached to them e.g. blue for masculine, red for feminine.

Slow-reveal activities can help student practise vocabulary and develop their listening skills when it is combined with paraphrasing, reading a text or singing a song.

Genders can also be associated with a different side of the room e.g. to your right for masculine and to your left for feminine. Students may reinforce practise of the vocabulary by pointing to/ turning to the correct side of the room or moving towards it.

Print cards related to a story and read the story very quickly. Students will not understand everything and will have to re-construct the story sing the cards provided as clues.

More details about sticky grammar can be found on James’blog.

I then attended Joe Dale’s No brainer blogging for beginners workshop, which featured some of possibilities offered by Posterous blogs (now Posterous Spaces).

As the blog was being built in front of us, it showed very clearly that Posterous is a very pupil-friendly platform. As a result, I now really want to explore it further to develop students’ blogging. What struck me most was how easy it was to embed a range of media including word documents, powerpoints, audio files, video and you tube links, something that can sometimes be quite problematic for beginners using platforms like Blogger or Wordpress.

The fact that Posterous also offers a choice between public and private blogs also makes it very suitable for student blogging.

Last but not least, I attended a very informative and entertaining workshop on memory techniques lead by Nick Mair, who was also at The Language Show to support the Speak to the Future campaign as shown by his “promotional” suit.

Nick adopted a no-nonsense approach to what can be done to support our students with memorization, acknowledging that the issue was general but that the solutions had to be specific to a wide range of students. He also mentioned differences in the amygdala that means that girls tend to find it easier to commit to long-term memory and learn from their mistakes.

Other issues mentioned enabled us to get a bigger picture of the issues linked with memorization like sleep deprivation, how teachers use and project their voice and visualisation.

I also found the explanation of the Link method quite interesting, as we were given an example where we had to tell a story linking a random list of objects to different rooms in our house. The aim was to create a way to visualise the whole list and it proved effective for many people.

Other factors to consider were:

Stress-how to reduce it and how to enable students to manage their mood levels. This can be combined with the effects of alcohol and drugs or general unhealthy habits: poor diet, lack of exercise…

Need to regularly monitor how effective the different strategies are for different students e.g. do you remember better using quizzes or flashcards

Students need to look at notes on a regularly basis to develop healthy studying habits

Students need to be organised-especially for male-as this will have a big impact on the quality of the final outcome

Avoid absenteeism at all cost as it interferes with good studying habits

Distribute study into “bitesize” rather than large chunks as the brain can only hold 5-9 things at any one time.

Encourage peer learning as teaching someone else is a very effective way to commit to memory.

Last but not least, students’ exposure to a wide range of strategies was more likely to have an impact on effective memorization rather than any one specific approach.

The Language Show was yet again a fantastic opportunity to share ideas and learn lots of new things and as it was during our half-term holiday, it also gave me some quality time to think about how I was going to implement some of these ideas. See you again next year!

ALL French Day at Gosforth High School, Saturday 15th October

2011-10-26T18:43:00.002+01:00

The first session was delivered by Jacqueline Turner who is a Lead Practitioner for Teaching and Learning at Gosforth High School (now part of Gosforth Academy). The focus of the session was to look at different strategies to enable students to give extended answers for their controlled assessments.

The strategies included maximum participation and engagement in class, opportunities for language manipulation e.g. re-ordering of sentences and sequencing, Peer/ self –assessment, grammar auction-when students bid and find mistakes in a text, Running dictations as well as scrolling activities as a starter or plenary to encourage students to proofread and read for specific detais.

Other examples of activities included:

Verbs in different tenses are identified and need to be attached to the correct person/ infinitive. They can be colour-coded e.g. black: present/ blue: past tense / red: future tense

For kinesthetic learners, students are sent to different parts of the room and blindfolded. A partner reads a text and the student has to demonstate understanding of the tense: a step forward is a future tense and a step backward is a past tense.

20-sided dice can be borrowed from the Maths department. Each side is allocated to a different word to get a choice of 20 words.

e.g. 1. Regarder-je/ nous, 2. ecouter-tu/ils etc…

Students work in pairs with the partner challenging the other student: what is the ending? How is it spelt?...

Russian roulette: Use a random name generator with different verbs and people to create competitions

Just a minute: Speaking challenge-if they pause/ repeat/ stop, their partner takes over. Whoever is talking at the end of the minute wins.

Talking trio: 3^rd person listens and assesses: e.g. “got the passé compose” wrong

Speed dating: rows, move down 2 to change partners. Speed dating can be use to revise vocabulary or questions/ answers for the speaking controlled assessment.

Writing race: Students can be given specific feedback e.g. look at the tenses, focus on verb ending...

Working as a team can give confidence especially before the actual exam.

Translate together: Students given a model paragraph in English in pairs they have to translate –can be differentiated. This activity is good to free up the teacher for individual feedback and it is effective to teach students back-up phrases-several ways of saying the same thing.

Blankety blank: Students fill in the gaps, use different phrases. This activity done with mini-whiteboard ensures maximum engagemen from the students.

Change the variable: e.g. mon père s’appelle Dan, ma mère s’appelle Marie sa mère s’appelle Marie ( change one at a time)

The next session was delivered by Steve Mulgrew, an educational consultant who is also currently supporting a local school as interim Head of MFL. The session focused on the use of ICT and “gadgets” to make language lessons more engaging.

The spotlight tool from the Interactive Whiteboard was used to introduce the rooms in the house with the spotlight revealing different squares representing different parts of the house. One obscured square was used to carry on practising with a kim’s game, where students need to identifiy the room that is hidden by the dark square.

Stickers can be used to enable to show understanding of where the different rooms are.

Promethean activexpression handsets can be used with students having to fill in gaps to demonstrate understanding of gender, number, names of rooms, verb endings etc...Students just key in the missing words and feedback can be provided immediately.

Bells can be used to show understanding or to focus on a particular word/ tense

Easi-view (visualiser) can be used instead of using individual textbooks.. hhe visualise is also a great tool for AFL and students to look at each other’s work

Beach ball with questions for talking (talk ball) can be used as a starter to drill basic questions or revise question words.

Digital photo frames can provide a dynamic and personalised display with text saved as pictures.This ensure that students are constantly visually stimulated with relevant key words and phrases.

Session 4 was delivered by The Newcastle University Language Resource Centre

Linguacast, teachers’ toolkit and Universed were the 3 main resources featured.

Linguacast is a free podcasting for language learning site with references to specific vocabulary.

Teachers’ toolkit is a site with teacher’s videos with worksheets/EFL worksheet too.

Universed is a free aggregator with safe sites that can be used for student viewing-possibly lso for homework. All materials are tagged to make it easier to find relevant materials quickly.

Free apps will also be launched soon, so watch this space...

Last but not least, Lesley Welsh, an Assistant Head and Director of MFL and International Coordinator at Manor College of Technology in Hartlepool, gave an inspirational presentation showcasing 3 language projects.

The first project, “Les pirates arrivent” is a KS2/KS3 6 weeks transition project. Y7 French teachers were observed by and observed Y6 literacy lessons. There was also a workshop day to create resources with the aim to re-cap, consolidate and extend what may have been done at primary. The project also included a baseline assessment in all four skills at the end.

The project included an overview of “Le monde francophone” with:

Food from French speaking countries : bananes plantain ananas etc… and “Le carnaval en Guadeloupe”.

The second project was about the Republique du Congo and included 2 workshop days to create resources. The project was for 8 lessons and 1 launch assembly, with the SCIAF (Scottish CAFOD) providing links for charity work.

A Domino activity was used to introduce key facts about Congo (in French): mortalité infantile, alphabétisation, Espérance de vie, exportations, la monnaie

The Listening resources from the SCIAF website were used: e.g. Joseph: video with/ without subtitles

There are many issues including children soldiers and AIDS but it is important to avoid stereotyping.

As a Speaking activity, students worked in threes : Samuel/ interviewer/ typical British teenager and used a video or voice recorder. The Listening and Speaking activities were also used to make Y9 see that GCSE is accessible.

The third project was called “Aim Higher in Languages” and focused on KS4/KS5 Transition and encouraging uptake at ALevel.

Amongst all the activities mentioned, I liked the idea of a voice-over activity. students worked with anti-alcohol / drinking adverts (in English) and worked in small groups to make a voiceover for the adverts. They were not allowed to listen to original in English to avoid them just trying to translate the original. Instead, they were encouraged to be creative. They used Movie maker to do the voice-over. I felt this activity was motivating and could easily be adapted for KS4 or possibly KS3 students.

EasyType French Accents: Encourage Accurate Use of Accents

2011-10-24T22:27:00.001+01:00

Producing text-based resources in French can take longer as teachers need to learn new tricks to type in accents quickly as well as other French characters not supported by the English keyboard. I have also seen many otherwise good resources-from native and non-native French speakers- lacking the expected accuracy in that area, which does not encourage students to think that accents are a big deal.

I really feel that not encouraging students of all abilities to write or type accents correctly is wrong, particularly given the strong link accents have in French with pronunciation. However, accents can be the last straw for students when they are trying to to type in French, something they usually find challenging anyway. This is one of the reasons why I first got interested in the EasyType French Accents software, produced by Accent Grave, a Toronto-based company. Accent Grave also has a full French version of its site that can be accessed from here.

With EasyType, you can type French accents by just pressing the same key twice or more to get the French accent you want, in a very similar way to what would happen while texting on a mobile. For instance, to type é, just press e twice. So, no more awkward key combinations and numeric codes… A French typography feature even simplifies typing French punctuation marks, also allowing you to type French punctuation marks according to standard French typography.

For example:
• — Double-quotes are replaced with chevrons « … »

• — Press - (dash) twice to type — (em-dash)

• — Modern French typography is used by default. Otherwise, a space is added before ? ! ; :

Pricewise, at $19.99 (about £13) for a single licence which lets you use EasyType French Accents on up to two computers, it certainly is a good value product and the company also offers substantial volume discounts, which would be ideal for schools or for students to buy the software in bulk. If your school offers Spanish, a similar product is currently being developed for Spanish, so watch this space.

To find out more, you can also check the company’s Twitter or Facebook page. This easy-to-use product could just be what you are after to re-focus your students on French accents and on the importance of writing accurately…

The Language Show 2011: Show and Tell

2011-10-23T23:19:00.006+01:00

Yet again the Language Show turned out to be great for inspiration and networking. The Show and Tell was fantastic, with lots of ideas and suggested tools to use.

My problem was that I wanted to demonstrate Songify, the iphone app that turns plain speech into something like a jingle or part of song but the IT started bevahaving in an odd way before I started my mini-presentation.

So here are the powerpoint and the sound files.

Language show & tell oct2011

View more presentations from Isabelle Jones

Please note that I am not suggesting that Songify will make it easier for ALL students to remember the whole of their controlled assessment preparation. In fact, as the maximum length of a song is 1 minute 20 seconds, this probably will not work as the only memorization strategy. However, I feel that this tool has a lot of potential to get students to remember how a short account is sequenced and to enable them to develop a stronger link between the spoken and written word. It is also a fun way to drill specific structures... Let's share ideas on how it could be used in the languages classroom...

ICT and Languages Conference, 25-26th February 2012, University of Southampton

2011-10-16T22:05:00.001+01:00

The ICT and Languages Conference will also be called #ililc2012 in reference to the fantastic ICT Links into Languages conference that took place last year. At #ililc2012 you will be able to find out how to use blogs and wikis and you will get your dose of inspiration for the rest of year. Like last year, a range of speakers will demonstrate different tools and appproaches for users at different levels, so you don't need to be an expert or a complete novice to attend.

#ililc2012 will also provide you with great networking opportunities, ensuring further support and inspiration after the conference. I am delighted to be involved again and looking forward to learning from others and sharing more ideas. In fact, I know that the most difficult part will be-again-to choose the sessions I would like to attend as they are all so interesting.

This year the plenary speakers will be Joe Dale and José Picardo

Workshop speakers are: Annalise Adam, Wendy Adeniji, Alex Blagona, Vanessa Burns, Joe Dale, Catherine Elliott, Stuart Gorse, Esther Hardman, Isabelle Jones, Helen Myers, Carole Nicoll, Juliet Park, Bertram Richter, Jo Rhys-Jones, Amanda Salt, Clare Seccombe, Lisa Stevens, Jenny Turner, and Sara Vaughan.

You can find out more about speakers here and there is also a Show and Tell event on the Saturday evening, to be held at the Highfield House Hotel. Last year's was also a great part of the conference, enabling all delegates to exchange ideas and really get to talk to each other-and sing too!!

You can still get an Early bird registration fee of £150 for both days if registrations and payments are made by 23.59hrs on 1st November 2011.

The Standard rate is £175 for both days / £125 for one day, with concessionary rates available for Postgraduate students-£100 for both days / £75 for one day (name and contact details of your tutor will be required when submitting your registration form).

To book go to the Languages South East website:
http://www.languagessoutheast.ac.uk/events/ict-and-languages-conference-ililc-2012

For more information please contact Languages South East on languagessoutheast@soton.ac.uk or call 023 8059 9135.

In our current climate of austerity and difficulty to gain valuable subject-specific CPD, the ICT and Languages Conference will offer you much more than a head start with using new technologies in your languages classroom. The networking opportunities will also support the development of your own Personal Learning Network, the best MFL staffroom in the land...

ALL French Day at Gosforth High School, Saturday 15th October 2011

2011-10-15T23:17:00.000+01:00

I had a fantastic day at Gosforth high School today presenting about how PLTS can support Speaking and Writing controlled assessments. Here is a copy of my presentation.

Gosforth oct2011

View more presentations from Isabelle Jones

MFL Show and Tell + at Cramlington Village, Saturday 24th September : Creative Partnerships

2011-10-07T22:47:00.014+01:00

IMG_1181, a photo by Joe Dale on Flickr.

It was only last year that I was hosting the MFL Show and Tell at my school, The Radclyffe School. The Show and Tell has an easy unconference format that enables a lot of networking and informal exchanging of good practice. However informal the formal , do not be fooled, as I have learnt more by attending the previous Show and Tell sessions than on a combination of at least 3 "formal" training days. This time, as I could not joined in person, I skyped my contribution and really enjoyed sharing my experience of creative partnerships.

The main aim of Creative Partnerships is to work with a creative practitioner on something that is usually a cross-curricular project. Last year, I worked with a film director on a video clip to promote languages and this year, I focused on music using a French rap project to try to engage some of my de-motivated boys. Although at first the project was not particularly aimed at boys, it soon became clear that the rap was a more popular vehicle with boys than with girls. After a lot of discussion, I managed to get a small group of girls working on it too, but 15 out of the 18 were boys.

I introduced the group to French rap and slam, showing them different genres within the genre and also how different it is from American Rap. We then discussed possible themes. Identity was a common theme but other themes emerged including Peace in Palestine, Racism, Bullying and Prejudice-hardly what I expected from a group of Year 8 boys! We then looked at developing the themes in small groups and we were lucky enough to work with a local MC and a music producer who could also speak French.

The first hurdle was to make the language accessible and I showed the students how simple structures can be effective, for instance describing a situation by naming what is around it. This was inspired by the French Slam Artist Grand Corps Malade's song "Un verbe: aimer" where he describes all the feelings rushing through his head as he is falling in love-all are nouns apart from one verb: aimer (to love). We also worked with cognates and known vocabulary like greetings and food, trying to make it sound good, without necessarily making it all rhyme accurately. This was great to develop their dictionary skills as well as their awareness of phonic patterns.

Pronunciation was an issue as cognates always encourage students to pronounce in an anglicised manner. To avoid this, I recorded myself reading the students' texts so that they could practise by listening to it rather than just reading it. The students also worked with a local Artist who helped them to design a CD cover for the rap. The rap was then put together by mixing all students' contributions. The students agreed on a beat, they had a try on the drums and the guitar and after quite a few attempts, our rap was born.

I learned a lot working with the students on something different and I enjoyed working with non-teachers to produce the rap. I am not entirely convinced the project will mean that all students decide to opt for French next year, but it has certainly changed our working relationship. I now know so much more about what makes them tick as well as about all the talents that had not been revealed to me during their French lessons...

Lyrics french rap

View more documents from Isabelle Jones

Resources Review: Spanish for Preschoolers E-Guide, Ana Lomba

2011-08-26T16:15:00.000+01:00

This e-guide aims to provide “everything you need to craft creative Spanish classes for toddlers, pre-schoolers, kindergarten and elementary school children”.

Ana Lomba is originally from Spain but she has been involved in languages education in the US since 1990 as a teacher, consultant, advocate, entrepreneur and mother. I was touched by the story of how she decided to take her business further to look after her youngest child-a little girl with complex special needs- at home. Ana’s approach to discussing her methods are always very personal and she clearly targets parents but there are many points made and examples in the e-guide that are of interest to ALL Spanish teachers.

Ana’s e-guide consists of 2 parts. Part one looks at ways to promote what you teach, considerations for different age groups, a range of language teaching approaches and Curriculum Planning. Part two presents more in detail Ana’s own immersion approach and how it helps structure her language curriculum, Ana’s favourite techniques with many examples and ideas to develop activities further as well as business opportunities using Ana’s immersion method. All language teachers will also find useful the two appendices, the 60 minute lesson plan and the Thematic Unit Template.

Although parents are clearly targeted, the e-guide introduction is actually addressed to teachers and encourage them to find their “own ways of doing things as well”

Ana’s belief is that “great teachers are first and foremost artists”, so there is a clear message for teachers to use the guide to find their own path to creativity in the classroom. The only point that would not find be totally transferable is the idea that you should not “waste your time thinking that you have to motivate your students to learn” but only concentrate on what the students are really interested in. I would say that developing activities that are intrinsically interesting for our students is essential but that sustaining their interest is certainly easier to do when your audience is willing to cooperate, which might not be the case of every student in a class of 30 in a school context… There are also many constraints imposed on the curriculum taught in schools, so I guess this is a call for teachers who are more independent to make the most of that independence.

Ana’s advice to teachers is to pay attention only to constructive criticism as “the pursuit of perfection leads to paralysis”. I would say this applies to any teachers-whoever criticises you, unless they can justify their criticisms against a set of criteria and suggest ways forwards that apply to your particular context, this is NOT constructive feedback. This is definitely worth reflecting upon…

Ana also encourages new teachers to join Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as they are a great way to get to know other teachers in similar situations and feel less isolated. I would however say that the use of these platforms for professional purposes for teachers needs to be linked with some specific training to ensure that all new teachers understand fully how they work and ensure that they are safe online. A teacher’s reputation takes time to build up and teachers new to using social media should understand fully what developing their online reputation entails.

I was very interested to read about how to develop partnerships with parents. Although some of the points did not apply to my secondary school context in the UK, they did make me think about different new ways to engage with parents.

I found the following points useful when I looked at reviewing communication with parents: (the headlines are Ana’s and the rest a mix of Ana’s and how I intend to implement these in my own context)

*Communicate: create an on-going dialogue, trying to make it as personal as possible and starting by introducing the course and what is expected in terms of personal studies at home.

*Educate: provide information about language learning and tips on how parents can help their children whatever their own command of the foreign language. As the parent of two bilingual little boys, I would say this is all the more important for younger learners, as some parents may expect “lessons” in a set format that is totally unsuitable for younger learners. There are also quite a few myths circulating about early language learning that need to be dispelled. Interestingly enough, these myths live on into secondary school and are often applied to EAL learners e.g. Children learning two languages are slower linguistically or academically.

*Provide a roadmap: Share your teaching philosophy and the goals for your students in your sessions and expectations for the parents. Ana also suggests mentioning your personal history-What made you want to teach young children a language, how you learnt the language yourself, what other languages you speak etc… Although I do think this is a good idea to mention these on a one-to-one basis, some teachers might find this could interfere with the professional distance they want to keep with their students and parents.

*Engage: document and share what you do in your classroom-this could be done electronically, for instance. Get parents involved in learning homework tasks. Ana suggests inviting parents to take part to classes-although this might be difficult in a formal school context, this could be considered for family learning and enrichment activities.

Ana gets us to look at the characteristics of different age groups within early learners and the type of activities that are more likely to be successful with each group.

I was pleased to read Ana’s words of warning about what she calls the “flashcard approach”. Learning a language and memorising words are two separate things. Although learning new words will help increasing the range of what can be expressed in the new language, it is how the new items of language are put together that will demonstrate linguistic skills and help getting messages across.

Like Ana, I feel that we underestimate what children can understand and if they are spoon-fed words only, they will not develop the skills to learn the language and get anxious when they do not know the meaning of every single word in a sentence. They will not be resilient learners, get impatient and ignore para-linguistic clues like gestures and other visual and contextual clues. They will behave this way, not because they cannot understand, but because of the messages we have given them by focusing on individual words only.

I found very interesting the references to theories and initiatives from the US and other countries, like the reference to the ACTFL Foreign Language Standards, the “Backward Design” theory by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe and James A. Asher’s Total Physical Response (TPR).

It is always fascinating to see how these approaches overlap with our national context, what their limitations are and how they have been adapted. Ana warns against “laundry lists of language functions, vocabulary, cultural notions etc…” and encourages a more global view of planning with some of these resources being used as guidelines, insisting again on the teacher’s professional judgement being key in deciding the focus for developing their learners’ skills.

In addition to the many references provided throughout Ana’s e-book, many other links are given to online resources for parents to support their child’s learning.

Like me, Ana is a big fan of using music in the classroom and she introduces many ways music can support language learning. She also warns against translated songs that do not always “work” in the translated language or original songs that are too challenging linguistically for a young audience-although she also gives us tips on how to still make it work for our young learners.

Similar dilemma can happen with story-telling: young learners need stories they can identify with but we also need to teach them about the culture of the countries where the target language is spoken and avoid stereotyping by exposing them to a wide range of genres. I found the advice to NOT present stories in one tense at a time a very interesting one-it mirrors what happens in real life, where young children do not get “put off” by their parents mixing tenses when telling them stories and are able to decode and established what happened when without many problems.

The e-guide provides many examples of activities as well as more detailed lesson plans to show how particular activities could be developed.

Many approaches are considered and I liked the reassuring tone of the e-guide telling teachers that whatever method they use “the important thing is to keep learning, thinking and evolving in our profession”.

The “Curriculum Planning in a Nutshell” is a very useful chapter in the e-guide. It will support all teachers who need to plan in a more thematic way for younger learners and provide ideas of mini-projects to integrate all 4 skills (Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing).

Ana’s no-nonsense rationale for the use of Target Language is also refreshing as it includes bilingual materials as a way to extend the interactions in the foreign language at home and it acknowledges that a grammar-led approach tends to hinder the use of the target language in the classroom.

Ana talks about Technology as “another fabulous platform for classroom and at-home learning” and recommend the Tech and Young Children ECETECH-L forum for informations on using iPods, iPads and other electronic gadgets. The forum is not specific to language learning but it provides great generic ideas that can be used in the languages classroom.

Ana discusses assessment of young learners and refer to examples of external assessments for young learners-SOPA and ELLOPA created by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL.org) as well as the “Keys to Assessing Language Performance” book by Paul Sandrock-although the materials in this book are more suitable for older students.

I have found this e-guide a fantastic source of inspiration for all the language classes I teach for the younger and the older students. I will need a lot more time to explore all the pedagogic approaches and ideas discussed in the guide as well as the wealth of resources and other links mentioned.

Ana’s e-guide can be bought via her site by clicking here.

Guest Blog Post: Language Learning in Online Classes, Lindsey Wright

2011-08-08T23:57:00.004+01:00

Lindsey Wright is a keen linguist and she is fascinated with the potential of emerging educational technologies, particularly the online school, to transform the landscape of learning. She blogs at OnlineCollegeClasses.com about web-based learning, electronic and mobile learning and the possible future of education. In this guest blog post, she considers the advantages and possible barriers to studying languages online.

There are many benefits to speaking and understanding more than one language. Professionally, learning a second language may increase students' job prospects or enable them to attain a higher education. In other circumstances, a second language may present the opportunity to better understand a friend or relative. Moreover, when travelling to different regions, knowing the primary language of the area can help when communicating with merchants, drivers, and local residents. Additionally, learning another language often forces students to use skills and knowledge from their native language which may otherwise be forgotten, reinforcing past lessons and making the student more articulate and successful in reading and writing. Still, students who weren't afforded the opportunity to learn a second language during their formative years may feel their potential for success is limited. However, this conventional wisdom may be slightly flawed.

According to New Scientist, a magazine devoted to scientific discovery, adults may actually have a better grasp of the meaning of a language, beyond simply memorizing. In fact, the major issue preventing adult students from learning another language is a lack of defined time to do so. Individuals with family and professional obligations may be unable to schedule specific blocks of time during the day to devote strictly to learning another language. VLEs (virtual learning environments) are convenient and enable anyone with the desire to extend and consolidate language learning in their own time to do so, but VLEs or online classes aren't for everyone. Prospective students should consider all of the advantages and disadvantage to make the decision that is most suited to their individual needs and abilities.

According to research by the U.K. Department of Education, e-learning provides many positive factors in terms of participation, retention, and attainment. Web- and technologically-facilitated study creates a sense of engagement, excitement, and involvement; personalizes the learning interface to individual needs; and improves communication. Some of the other key advantages(and disadvantages) are listed below.

Financial

Many institutions offer language courses online that are more affordable than traditional campus-based education. Additionally, many of the most substantial costs (housing and living expenses, travel and transportation) are completely avoided. This potential savings allows many students to learn a language without going into debt.

Convenience

Online courses enable students to determine their own class and study schedules. How long and how often to focus on the language is entirely at their discretion. This element of distance learning has long been the most popular attraction for many. Flexibility makes online learning more accessible than any other language learning method.

Availability

Opportunities to learn languages outside of a classroom have exploded over the past few years. Many accredited and reputable institutions now offer some form of foreign language program through a virtual learning environment.

Anonymity

In the online environment students retain a considerable level of anonymity. Factors such as age, status, physical appearance, race, gender, or disabilities are invisible. This unique aspect allows students and instructors to focus solely on the content of the material. Moreover, students who might feel self-conscious about their understanding of the language have the freedom to introduce their concerns without fear of ridicule or judgment.

Individual Attention

Learning a language online allows for a high level of dynamic interaction between instructor and student, as well as between the students themselves. By sharing ideas and resources in an open forum, students are free to learn from each other. The synergy of the virtual classroom is one of the distinctive traits often unmatched in a traditional classroom setting.

Technology

Lack of access can exclude otherwise eligible students from learning a language online. Especially in rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, individuals may not have adequate systems or a reliable connection. On the other hand, some potential students who possess the technology may not have the proficiency necessary to succeed. Individuals lacking computer savvy may face significant challenges in researching and interacting over the Internet.

Finally, the school's own technology can prove to be problematic. Reliability and constant availability are key, and unfortunately even the most sophisticated servers and instructional technologies may have issues.

No Face Time

Students with a learning style dependent upon face-to-face encounters with teachers and peers may find a virtual learning environment isolating. Some web-based classes use video conferencing and allow classmates and their instructors to at least see each other remotely to some extent, but even in those cases a video feed is definitely not the same as direct interaction.

Time Management

Procrastinators or those who always need extrinsic motivation to stay on task and complete work will be more likely have difficulty in a flexible online learning environment. Online language learning requires students to monitor their own progress and determine how often and how long to focus on course materials. This is often considered the greatest challenge of any distance learning program, and keeping up with the diligent practice necessary for language study can make learning a language in an online environment doubly demanding. Students should devote at least 9 to 12 hours per week to distance education to maintain a steady pace and successfully retain what they study.

When comparing the pros and cons of learning a language in a virtual setting, it does seem that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. However, every individual is unique and should examine all options and their potential pitfalls. When considering online language learning, prospective students should evaluate their own situations and capabilities. There is no denying that learning a new language can be exciting and beneficial, but the avenue through which one chooses to pursue that study makes a tremendous difference.

Mindset-The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck

2011-08-07T00:24:00.000+01:00

Mindset by Carol Dweck is probably one of the best book I have read this year. It relies on practical examples to support a very simple theory. The theory in itself is quite straightforward as it looks at two approaches or possible mindsets which can define personal and professional philosophy.

The growth mindset is all about reflection and self-improvement whereas the fixed mindset is about proving that you are smart. This is underpinned by strong belief sytems about what being smart is really all about. The book provides many examples of both mindsets, how they can affect different areas of our lives and how the mindsets can be altered.

There is a chapter of particular interest to parents, teachers and coaches. It is both enlightening and terrifying as it stresses how our every word and action send messages to children. “It can be a fixed-mindset message that says: You have permanent traits and I am judging them. Or it can be a growth-mindset message that says: You are a developing person and I am interested in your development”

This different way to look at our actions also leads us to reflect on the way we give feedback to children as parents or teachers and on the way we praise them. A brilliant example is as follows “You learnt that so quickly! You’re so smart… You got an A without even studying ”. Depending on the child’s mindset this can be translated as : “If I don’t learn something quickly, I’m not smart….I’d better quit studying or they won’t think I’m brilliant.”

One of the strong messages is that praising for intelligence or talent rather than effort can switch children off difficult challenges. It can also make children lose their self-confidence as soon as anything is challenging or does not go the way they anticipated. However, I thought the examples of feedback felt slightly awkward e.g. “That homework was so long and involved. I really admire the way you concentrated and finished it” and it really made me think of strategies to provide effective growth feedback.

• Describe the effort and the process involved: strategies, effort or choices “you took on a challenging project” “you did research, you designed…, you wrote about” “you are going to learn so much from it”

• Give the idea that effort makes learning worthwhile: “Skills and achievement come through commitment and effort”

• Present tasks that are too easy as “a bit of a waste of time” and extension work as a way to provide real learning opportunities.

• Discuss how resilient and reflective learners get more out of their learning.

• Be tolerant of mistakes and do not aim to motivate children by sharing judgements about them “give them the respect and the coaching they need to develop”

• Provide constructive feedback focusing on specific aspect of the work that can be corrected

• Present topics in “growth framework”

• Be reflective and consider how you praise-working the “process praise” into our interactions is often NOT a natural reaction

I will be looking at our reward policy to ensure this is built into our practice as reading “Mindset” has made me realise how traditional praising sytems can really have the opposite effect to what is intended…

Language World 2011: Active Learning with Greg Horton

2011-08-01T23:08:00.000+01:00

This session was so active that I found it very hard to make any notes!

Here are a few tips I picked up…

Teaching Connectives: Read the text and students do an action when the connective is said.

Valentine’s lesson: Present as “How to chat up somebody in Spanish”-you say something and the other person repeats it using “you” and swapping verb forms.

Human Word Chain: Children say the missing word, race to fill in the gap correctly, identify separate words e.g. Which word is … Jenny?, “adjectives please sit down”

Writing can be improved by developing a picture of word sequences in students’ heads. This can be done through speaking and can be more “boy-friendly” too.

Get students to build a storyline around the room: can be done in speaking or writing.

Find pictures to support narratives for students to consolidate their knowledge of structures.

Design a child as a “word guardian” in charge of remembering the class of a specific structure

Associate specific gestures with subject pronouns to help students learn verb paradigms. E.g. curtsey for formal “you”

Get students to make their own videos to demonstrate how different verbs work.

The clock times ballet: students to model the time using their left arm for the hours and their right arm for the minutes. The “Blue Danube” is used as a musical background to get students to focus on the time at some specific point.

Language World 2011-Snow, Chocolate Cake and Model Aeroplanes, Kate Shepheard-Walwyn & Vincent Everett

2011-08-01T21:50:00.000+01:00

I really enjoyed Vincent and Kate’s session, which was full of practical and motivating ideas to use in the classroom. All the ideas are also generously shared on Northgate High School blog.

The title of the session, particularly the reference to snow and chocolate cake, was explained by the departmental use of various metaphors.

The Chocolate Cake Rule: “In Technology, if they give you flour, egg, sugar, butter, milk and chocolate powder… do NOT try to make a bird table. Make a chocolate cake. In French, if we teach you to give opinions, justify them, link your ideas, talk about the past and future, put in direct speech to bring it to life…then those are the ingredients you will be using. Use them to create a nice tasty paragraph. Don’t write French you don’t know-you don’t know it!”

The Snow Rule: “Some pupils let their French all melt. You have to get yourself a snowball of French. Make it yours, have some fun with it. And your snowball won’t melt. Roll it around and it will get bigger and bigger.”

For the Cake and Snow posters, see here.

The idea of tangible outcomes, like model aeroplanes, is a really interesting one. It is a bit like the learning cycle associated with subjects like Design and Technology: project launch => creation => delivery => celebration.

The department has an approach of “Progression in Creativity” with a programme of activities for Year 7-Year 9.

Y7 Francovision song contest: each group learns and videos a French pop song, with the aim to practise memorisation, pronunciation, communication and culture.

Y7 French staff café: pupils act as waiters and waitresses.

Y7 Gressenhall Farm Stamper trail: create a French version of the Farm Stamper trail.

Y8 Flat Stanley project: cut out and post Flat Stanley to France with a letter.

Collapsed curriculum days-Y8 greenscreen filming: Use the French you know and technology to do something and be creative.

Y9 Norwich Castle story-telling: create a resource for the museum based on different artefacts on display, with students using their knowledge of language to write creatively.

Y9 Children’s book: create a book in French for younger learners like the “Spot” books.

Each activity aims for students to be more and more independent linguistically, has a tangible outcome and a real audience: whole school, staff and visitors, pen friends, teach tube, museum website, primary pupils…

Other projects include BBC jingles, supported by work done in Media lessons, as well as weather news/ traffic jingles

To celebrate the project the department gets judges and other people involved like parents, local paper, technicians to publish on the school website etc…

In addition, all staff use a common working kit:

Being Ben: The idea is that “it’s not the French that is hard, it’s thinking up what to say and pitching it right. “Ben” tells the others what to say. They spontaneously build up long sentences and if they can’t say them, it is Ben’s fault for not pitching it right.

Fridge sheet: core grammar for a unit. At the bottom of the sheets examples of what can be produced are supplied.

Speed dating: the purpose is to do away with the suppor sheet for the person doing Spanish. The sheet gives students the confidence to get started.

Scribble Talk: Scribble while your partner talks and pause if they pause. They have to talk until you fill up the scribble box.

Keep Talking

The Booklets page will have more materials on different topics in French.

Connective Dice: Use the dice to keep students talking or to do silly sentences.

Ski Slope: build sentences following gradient

Tree: Branching off sentences

Pimp my French: Take a simplistic text and use your tool box to improve it. The toolkit includes key phrases like je vais, je veux, je suis allé etc…

Megamutantpenguinskideath: Draw a penguin and write a secret word on the back. Target the kind of word pupils need to add to their repertoire. Pupils talk on the subject until they say the secret word. The penguin skis into a tree.

For examples of pupils work click here. If you are looking for ideas for practical projects and strategies to engage and motivate students, look no further!

Language World 2011 Plenary-Language learning – why bother?

2011-07-30T23:31:00.003+01:00

A panel of guests from the worlds of academia, business, politics and the media debated the pros and cons of language learning in the UK in the 21st century. The discussion, which lasted an hour, quickly went into arguing whether languages were a necessity or somewhat of a luxury. The dreaded question of whether languages should be made compulsory was also discussed.

I found the discussion stimulating due to the range of backgrounds represented by the panel and although I did not personally agree with some of the comments, I found them at least thought-provoking.

The panel included:

Professor David Crystal, an eminent linguist and author, also patron of the Association for Language Learning, and president of the UK National Literacy Association.

Richard Hardie, from the Swiss bank UBS and also Chair of the Hackney Learning Trust. He read History and French at university, before pursuing a career in business and corporate finance. He is now Non-Executive Vice Chair of UBS Ltd in London, which is part of the UBS Group, the world’s largest financial asset manager.

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon , Shadow Leader of the House of Lords, Leader of the House of Lords 2008-10 and a languages graduate, who has supported languages on a number of occasions in the Lords. She was spokesperson for Education in 2010 and takes a special interest in foreign policy and development.

Professor John White, an educational philosopher from the Institute of Education in London. His research field is the mind of the learner and the relationship between educational aims and their applications to school curricula. His published work includes 'What schools are for and why’, and ‘Rethinking the School Curriculum: Values, Aims and Purposes’.

The discussion was very aptly chaired by Rosie Goldsmith, a journalist specialising in arts and international affairs. During her 20 year career at the BBC, she covered events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions in Eastern Europe and also presented BBC Radio shows like 'Front Row' and 'Crossing Continents'. She is now a media consultant and a proud of champion European languages and literature.

These are the following points made by the different members of the panel:

Baroness Royall:

“Those who know nothing of a foreign language know nothing of their own” Goethe

Oracy and literacy in English are supported by the study of a foreign language.

Languages are a tool for acquiring knowledge, enriching Intercultural Understanding and boosting the competitiveness of the UK economy.

Languages boost individual employability-they are always considered as an asset by employers.

All children should have the same opportunities to access languages whether their schools are in the state or the private sector.

Everybody speaks English? This is contradicted by the need for more professional linguists like translators and interpreters.

There is a worrying disparity between the language provision offered to children in the public and the private sector that can only be put right via compulsion.

It is a positive fact that the Ebac includes a language.

The previous government did a lot for Primary Languages [Where are we now?]

We need to lobby-our place in the world has changed.

Continuous process

Richard Hardie:

Professional lives are undoubtedly coloured and enhanced by the study of languages.

Graduate with working knowledge of languages are highly valued-it is a sign of effort and dedication to studies.

There is a shortage of bilingual Brits.

Well-taught graduates will have a good command of grammar, technical vocabulary can then be added later.

Involvement in the Speak to the Future campaign, promoting cross-phase languages.

The best communicators speak languages-there may also be a link with private schools but nobody is sure which way around it actually works.

Social exchanges in business are supported by good language skills.

There has been a delay in the UK in realising that selling was affected by a lack of languages skills.

Only 5% of EU jobs are taken by UK citizens

Prof John White:

Should every child learn a language?

The argument that it helps with jobs is not convincing.

There is also a cultural argument-is it a worthy aim good to understand the nuances but not something that cannot be done without?

Learning a language helps to understand how languages work.

“Students might not want to work abroad” [This is often mentioned by students who think that knowing a language is not useful in the UK and it is denying the personal benefits of studying a languages!]

Prof David Crystal

Multilinguism is the norm. It is natural, 50% of the world population is trilingual.

Chomsky describes the Multilingual Acquisition Device we are all born with.

Languages are essential to support the understanding of a multicultural society.

Sense of identity is strongly linked with languages-another language is important to understand somebody else’s appreciation and viewpoints.

“Teenagers are disaffected- that’s what they are for!!-learning another personality is not best done during teenage years.

Languages are essential to being a good citizen in a multi-ethnic society.

Rosie Goldsmith

Champion of languages?

Arsen Wenger, Rory Bremner… scientists , people who are not necessarily linguists.

CBI and DFE declined to attend the conference

A Language Prize to recognise achievement in languages -like achievement in other academic areas- would support the view that languages are important.

Language World 2011: Modern Languages-Achievement and Challenge 2007-2010 OFSTED Report

2011-07-28T17:42:00.000+01:00

This session presented the latest evidence from OFSTED. The full report and report summary are available from here.

Inspection focus:

Achievement
Teaching
Curriculum
Leadership & Management

Special issues:

Reading

Take-up at KS4

Progress towards entitlement at KS2

Additional evidence:

FE and SFC inspections 2009-10

Survey of good practice in colleges 2008-9

Phone survey of primaries found not to teach languages in previous inspections

Core outcomes:

Primary-positive general picture

Good or Outstanding in 6 out of 10 schools visited;

High variance skills development-focus on Speaking and Listening;

Knowledge About the Language (KAL)-concept of gender and adjectival agreement put into practice with some confidence;

Intercultural Understanding (IU)-good in most schools;

Primary schools can adopt very creative approaches to develop Intercultural Understanding: they use the internet, skype, dvd and try to get the local communities involved;

A bigger picture of Intercultural Understanding is developed through trips, visits and topics;

Foreign Language Assistants, Trainees from other countries also support the development of language learning.

Out of the 235 lessons observed in primaries, 2/3 were Good or Outstanding.

Languages are reinforced through a drip-feed technique;

Subject knowledge is mostly good although there are still some issues with pronunciation and intonations.

Good support by language specialists: FLAs and other native speakers.

Assessment is satisfactory but emerging evidence show assessment as the weakest area.

Curriculum: model of external language specialist is effective when teacher stays with the language specialist during the lessons.

Schemes used tended to be commercial ones-there can be issues with planning for mixed classes or planning and adapting the commercial resources for the actual curriculum time taught.

The Leadership and Management of PMFL at Primary is usually assumed by a language co-ordinator or the Headteacher themselves.

The rationale for choosing a language is sustainability as a priority.

Transition arrangements to secondary schools are still under-developed.

There can be weaknesses in the monitoring and evaluation of provision especially when senior staff did not feel competent to judge language provision.

More trainees have some language background but Local Authorities are not providing as much support as they did in the past, with many Las not having Languages Consultants any more.

Secondary: KS3 and KS4

Overall the provision for 6 out 10 schools was deemed Good or better.

Students' progress was Good or Outstanding in over half the schools visited.

Listening was found to be impeded by a lack of target language use in class.

Writing was good but could be over-reliant on model practice.

Speaking can be a concern when there were too few opportunities to use the language routinely & spontaneously.

The explicit teaching of language learning strategies has had a positive impact.

Effective pair and group work is key to students’ skills development.

Pace and challenge are essential to keep students on track.

Activities to monitor class progress throughout the lesson are successful in re-focusing students (mini-plenaries)

Exemplification of good practice in the report

Secondary schools are trying to link with primary schools to check about content taught (not achievement levels).

Strong leadership-innovation, use of local networks, effective liaison with primaries and post 16.

There can be inconsistencies in practice, insufficient monitoring, lack of clear policies and priorities for language learning.

Variable access to CPD can be an issue in some schools.

International staff development to be extended-TIPED e.g. research immersion teaching in Canada

Post 16

Progression rate to A level is lower than in other optional subjects (uptake issues).

The challenges:

Primary

There is a need to develop students’ early skills in reading and writing;

Clarification of progression through KS2.

Secondary:

Regular use of the Target Language in the classroom;

More use of authentic materials to develop language skills and motivation;

More planning need to be done to ensure smooth transition from KS2;

Increasing the uptake of languages at KS4 is still an issue in the vast majority of schools where languages are not compulsory;

Ensuring that KS4 prepares for KS5 more effectively.

Language World 2011: Making the Languages Department the Most Popular in the School, Eva Lamb

2011-07-27T21:21:00.000+01:00

Eva shared some of the secrets that led the Languages Department at her school, King Edward VII School in Sheffield, to be central to all school developments:

Faculty and whole-school systems:

Good systems for monitoring and evaluation

Strong development planning

Importance of ethos

Real commitment from the leadership team: option choices discussed individually and every student is interviewed

The strategy is that to opt out of languages, students need to be interviewed by the Headteacher with their parents. Students do not opt in, they are expected to study languages unless they are willing to explain why they should not.

What can we do as a department/Faculty:

Providing a stimulating learning experience at KS3

Offer courses that cater for different interests, needs and encourage participation

Raise the profile by taking part in a wide range of activities

School management will be convinced by “The Vision”: how does the Faculty’s vision support the ethos of the school?

Taking an active part in developing the International dimension across the curriculum

Promote a prestigious image

Languages as a way to promote Social inclusion: class and gender

Languages support the development of Citizenship

Languages contribute to employability, indirectly by the qualities and attributes developed by language learners and directly by offering students opportunities to work abroad and within international organisations.

The Action at Faculty level consists of monitoring the uptake within the option blocks, offering new courses, proving and/or supporting career guidance, providing students incentives like visits and enrichment activities.

Counteract negative comments

Use “Engrish websites” like this one to show that not everybody speaks English as we know it. “What they are trying to say does not come across as what you hear” and you only know that if you speak another language…

Join up with the coolest departments in school and get the coolest teachers to promote languages.

Remember that Languages are a medium so we can join up with any subjects…

A Visit programme can be a strong incentive for non-specialists to support languages, with cross-curricular links being developed.

Comenius project are a great opportunity to develop cross-curricular links. E.g. graphic design as a political tool (historical/ propaganda posters)

Languages can help raise achievement in other subjects too through CLIL.

Parents should be kept informed and involved as much as possible e.g. judging competition

To finish with, Eva showed us the “Football, the Universal Language” video. Inspirational!

Language World 2011: Handing Over! LinkedUp Project, Claire Dodd and Sue Balmer

2011-07-27T00:24:00.000+01:00

This year, Language World showcased many of the wonderful projects set up for the Linked Up Award scheme. LinkedUp is now over but its legacy lives on with 100+ projects freely accessible with all their resources from the LinkedUp website.

Claire Dodd and Sue Balmer, from Gosforth Academy, presented the context of the project with a pyramid structure of 8 primaries, 3 middle schools and 1 high school.

The aim of the Handing Over! project was to motivate Primary School teachers with very little or no knowledge of Italian or German, to improve their linguistic skills and understanding of language learning to be able to deliver their chosen language to their pupils in an integrated programme of study.

There was a need for a consistent teaching approach so that all pupils in Years 3 and 4 would enjoy high quality language provision. Collaboration between teachers helped ensuring this by identifying and sharing resources and pedagogical approaches to develop language skills but teachers were at first very doubtful of their ability to deliver the language lessons themselves.

In each of the 8 “First Schools” in the Gosforth Pyramid, staff chose to focus on Italian or German and a Lead Teacher was nominated as the main contact in each school. The first joint planning session included a practical introduction to an online workspace set up for all to use (posterous). Although not all contributed to the blog and it was difficult to get teachers to contribute, the resources shared on the blog were widely used.

Teachers used the QCA Key Stage Two schemes of work as the basis for their planning, sharing ideas for additional “fun” and cultural activities. Teachers agreed weekly lesson plans to be modeled by the Project Leader. They shared ideas and resources to be able to carry on with some aspects of the lesson during the week and to maximise exposure to the target language.

Primary teachers also consolidated their linguistic skills through their participation in the pupils’ lessons. Active lessons really helped them to improve their pronunciation, cultural knowledge and general confidence. On the other hand, the use of shared resources and access to commercially-produced language CDs, songs, stories and web sites also helped building their confidence as they realised that all resourced did not have to be produced from scratch.

Primary teachers then moved on to identify opportunities for using basic target language at regular times during the school week so that their pupils could experience the use of language for real purpose.

Teachers used their expertise in Key Stage 2 pedagogy to enrich pupils’ experiences of language and culture. They chose to develop CLIL with Art as it was one of their areas of interest. There were also unexpected developments as more staff, including teaching assistants, wanted to take part. Free evening classes in Italian and German led by foreign language assistants have now been set up to continue with the project. The direct involvement of the teachers in the language learning was noted by OFSTED as, far from a case of “Spanish and Vanish”, there was clear evidence of linguistic consolidation integrated in the school’s routines throughout the week.

Last but not least, the 12 teachers who took part in the project went to Bologna on a course at half term to develop their language skills. It was a course for beginners but included a lot of cultural aspects.

More details about “Handing Over!” and all the resources produced for the project can be downloaded from here.

Language World 2011: Cross-Curricular Contexts for Learning and Authentic Resources, Martine Pillette

2011-07-25T12:23:00.005+01:00

This workshop aimed to demonstrate how cross-curricular contexts and authentic resources can be used throughout the year to motivate and give students a more meaningful linguistic experience in the classroom.

The resources can be used as a visual/ aural stimulus: the activities simplify the language and support students’ understanding. Using “raw” materials also helps students to develop their capability and confidence in listening and reading.

The range of styles of activities was quite wide and included:

Film trailer like the “Bonobos” trailers from allo cine, a fantastic site with lots of trailers and articles about films in French and other languages.

Transcripts

Start with the resource, play the trailer again and students try to match print to sound.

Students read and when you stop, students say the next word

Students put their hand up when you read something different from the text

Listening must not be presented as a test

Aux arbres citoyens video (dailymotion)

Aux arbres citoyens by Dolio-Keyok

Card activity –re-order the sentences to follow the order of what happens in the video clip

Support grid with key structures to mix and match

Find the corresponding French word in the lyrics

Use authentic resources to present real issues: e.g. Quinoa - basic food from Colombia now turned into a luxury item –prices go up, impact on poor people in Colombia.

Look at cognates, themes, titles

Regarde, ecoute, lève la main si c’est different

Does it mention these facts?

Discard the odd one out and sequence the paraphrased sentences in the correct order

Gap fill in English about a text in the Target Language

Some of these activities can be used with Y7 students as transition resources in order to re-visit some of the language taught in primary in a different and more linguistically challenging context.

Crossword with sound and gapped phrases as a clue

Listening activity to self-check

This is a fantastic starting point for anybody aiming to use authentic resources regularly in the classroom and I intend to use this post as a reminder of some of the generic activities that can be developed.

Language World 2011: Using the National Curriculum Exemplification of Standards Files to support effective assessment in Modern Languages, Lesley Hagger-Vaughan

2011-07-24T23:21:00.005+01:00

I found this session useful to consider different uses of the standards files as a tool box for language teachers, particularly when thinking about next steps for students and for training and development purposes.

Assessment is at the heart of the curriculum and part and parcel of Learning and Teaching, it does not need to be all formal assessment but it needs to be reliable. There is also a need for Senior Management Teams in schools to understand the specific nature of assessment in Languages so that it is not viewed as a barrier to accessing our subject.

The exemplification for foundation subjects follows the APP principles (curriculum 2008)

The Standard File Project involved a number of schools to provide examples of standards through collecting pieces of work across all 4 skills (Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing), with the overall profile exemplifying where evidence could be collected from.

Key aspects of assessment are integral to Learning and Teaching, evidence is gathered as it occurs in the classroom and it is a response to students’ needs.

The issue is sometimes to get evidence across all 4 skills, particularly when the time allocated to the study of languages is very limited.

Some work also needs to be done on sharing the files with SLTs and parents to get them to understand how young people progress in languages.

There is a need for the judgement to be reliable and it is advisable to link it to national standards and expectations to give it that clout.

The student file contains a student profile. There are also some details about the context, audio files, examples of work and teacher comment. The comments are clustered by skills: Listening and Speaking, Reading and Writing, Intercultural Understanding and there is also a note about what the teacher thought the student needed to do to progress.

Peer and self-assessment is featured quite heavily in the different assessment strategies and the whole ability range was covered with Levels 1 and 2 being exemplified with work done in Special Schools, although this does not cover all languages.

The use of FLIP video cameras was mentioned as a good way to collect speaking evidence and there are also some commonalities with English developing speaking and listening across the school (check materials)

Progression and move to independence is more important than overall language level as it will make what students learn more future-proof and allow them to develop further as linguists. However, there can be strong conflicts of interest in schools that do not have a sixth form, for instance, as they may not have such a long-term view and interest in developing students’ language learning skills.

The New OFSTED framework being currently piloted puts the emphasis on students engaging in discussions about their own work, which will be made easier by widespread use of Assessment for Learning in the classroom.

The question remains for many Faculties and Departments: How do you make this manageable?

I feel that sharing the files could help many to agree on departmental strategies to do just that.

Olympic Values and Cultural Understanding, Saturday 9th July, Language World 2011 at Imperial College, London

2011-07-10T08:34:00.000+01:00

Here is a copy of the presentation I gave yesterday:

Olympic Values

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LinkedUp and Show and Tell Conference, Shrigley Hall, Macclesfied, 1-2 July 2011

2011-07-03T17:26:00.009+01:00

Picture courtesy of Esther Mercier

I had a very enjoyable half-weekend at Shrigley Hall in Cheshire, talking to 25 teachers from the North West about their LinkedUp languages projects and sharing ideas and resources.

The conference was hosted by Network into Languages North West as a follow-up LinkedUp dissemination event and it was a real privilege to be able to meet in such lovely surroundings and to spend quality professional time in such great company.

There are currently 5 LinkedUp projects displayed on the LinkedUp webpage, 3 of them were represented at the conference.

The first presentation about the “Liaison into Languages” project also led to a discussion about SOLO taxonomy and referred back to the “Hooked on Thinking” website showcasing good thinking skills development practice.

I started with a short introduction. I had also some ideas to share just in case but I only shared the first one in the end: Join MFL resources!

Linked up conference july2011

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As my classtools.net randomizer failed due to a very unreliable internet link, I proceeded by asking for volunteers.

Here are a few related links:

Stuart Gorse reminded us of Hugo’s daily routine-great for revision of this topic

Gorseville channel: short animated clips in French and Spanish great to introduce a range of topics.

Mr Gorse’s youtube channel

Neil Phillipson showed us how QR codes could be used to replace expensive voting systems-despite some very adverse ICT conditions. http://www.qwikvotes.com

For more ideas look at Tom Barett’s google document here

Get interactive! Esther Mercier shares her tools

And some students work done on Glogster

Michelle Cairns shared an idea for a differentiated task

Je voudrais writing differentiated

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Gary Stroker, Head of Languages at Mossley Hollins, shared how his students are being encouraged to sponsor a child abroad.

This project is managed by the children who need to do some fundraising to send the child to school and support their local community. They have the opportunity to become “world Vision” ambassadors. It is also a great way to make the target language more real and get the students to find out more about the country the child is from.

Dominic McGladdery shared 10 ideas in, well, a bit more than 3 minutes but as they were all very good nobody minded!

Diane Shakeshaft shared a Thinking Skill activity she did adapting an activity from MFL Sunderland.

Isabelle Arnett talked about a KS2/KS3 transition project based on the story of “L’anniversaire de la tortue”. Students made their own puppets and performed the play. Flip camera is used at the end for peer assessment.

To memorise paradigms, we were made to chant verbs waiting for a member of the group to give us a “signal” of their choice to allow us to move on. A “policeman”, chosen member of the group sporting a policeman hat then had to guess who was giving the signal.

Diannah Miller presented us the opportunities offered by etwinnings and the etwinnings website-a private space that can be used to exchange digital materials with partner schools e.g. project on the weather-daily videos sent about the weather of the day.

Alison Smith prepared 3 items for the Show and Tell: a photo game and two really interesting short presentations on Creativity and Business & Enterprise.

Alison took a photo of each of the pupils in her class and printed them off with a thick white border to look like a Polaroid. She then laminated them so they can be written on again and again with marker pens. Several games can be played with them:

* Find your partner: write down a key word from the lesson and a move round the room asking the same question until you find someone with the same answer (Example: "Qu'est-ce qu'il y a dans ton sac?" "J'ai un stylo" "J'ai un cahier" "J'ai une gomme" "Ah, moi aussi".
* Find your gang: as above, but you are trying to find as many people as possible with the same answer as you. A merit/point/sweet can be given for everyone in the biggest gang.
* Plenary: write the longest sentence you can (on the back of the photo) using language from today's lesson - get your partner to mark it. Prize for the longest sentence/most creative one.
* Starter: Put 6 of the plenary answers from last time on the board, ask the pupils to guess who wrote them. You can reveal the answer by turning the photo around to reveal the face.
* Categorise: put all the answers on the board and ask the pupils to assign them categories. There is no right or wrong answer, but some pupils will be more adventuous with their choice of categories. You could also arrange them in to an "odd one out" game.

Session 2 creativity

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Session 3 the business & enterprise challenge

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If you attended and you have ideas or materials you did not have time to share or if I have missed your idea or resources, please email-me and I will add what you send me-description of activity, worksheets, resources, links-to this blog post for all to enjoy.

Again, thanks a lot for such a professionally reinvigorating "half weekend"...

ALL London Conference, 11th June 2011

2011-07-03T15:12:00.000+01:00

As always, it was a pleasure to see some old and new friends and listen to Rachel Hawkes and Neil Jones, the two main speakers.

Rachel started by looking at questions: 20 questions like have you/do you like/how/where/is...?
Students need to know how to make up questions in the Target Language, however, this need seems a lot less urgent now that English is used for testing students’ knowledge at GCSE. So, in a way starting off answers has taken precedence. I have pointed out to my students that understanding how questions are made helps you to remember how to start off answers, so it is still well worth practising anyway. Short-termism is not the best way forward if we want students to develop the skills needed to take their languages further.

Question can be used as starters e.g. Tienes?
Piensas que...? can be used in prediction games as well e.g. Do you think my favourite colour is blue?

What are the questions?
Question starters are included in Schemes of Work and themed e.g food
12 squares answers are displayed and you can see in brackets the number of possible questions
Each questions reveal part of a photo. All anwers/ questions to do with school. The picture in that case was a picture of the teacher's first day at school.

Find someone who..
Va tres bien/ a son Anniversaire en Novembre/a une soeur/ aime l'hiver/peut écrire le mot « father » en français

Elaborating
Say something else-different ways to say similar things
Pimp my sentence! 5-6 mins add to the sentence
Have I got news for you-guess what could be missing in the headline
Spend the words: include star structures in speech pair work with a partner ticking off the star

CLIL
“Impure CLIL” – borrowing content from other subject challenging texts, intense Target Language use in class but no direct teaching through the medium of the Target Language by non-specialists.

Miro painting: Art Link with Spanish-descriptive language, cultural awareness and personal details.
Spelling bee: motivating students to improve their vocabulary and taker regular practice.

El Agua Module y9
BBC clips online
Videos about children in Spanish-Speaking Western Sahara-good for comparisons considering overlaps & differences
Categorise adjectives about water-thinking skills
Haiku 5-7-5 Very easy poem form as it does not have to rhyme. It is also good to focus on the phonic aspect of the target language

El pan
BBC videos-How to make empanadas / Cornish pasties: compare similarities and differences.
Bocadillos: write down everything that could go in a sandwich
Favourite sandwiches in both countries
Compare holidays and festivals e.g. 1st and 2nd November with Guy Fawkes’ day
Aim to include Present tense/ past/ conditional

Y9 media modules

Morph episodes

El Misterio del Pez (claymation with or without subtitles)

looking at infinitives
Verbix.com

One of Neil Jones’ main areas of interest is intercultural understanding
e.g. Los colores del mundo-different colours for taxis, post boxes, phone boxes, buses, police cars...

Statistics on holidays/ compare with Britain
Where do British people spend their hols?
Venns diagram for cultural comparisons
animals from South America
Guinea pigs in Peru and Le lapin in France: meat or pets?
Barro o paso la aspiradora-carpets/ tiles inside houses
Stereotypes: handball, cricket, cazar, tapear
List with statements and students have to guess if it refers to England or Spain

Who is this about?
Daniel Retuerta -El Internado ( tv series)
Cut up reading activities-fill in form about it
Time: use new year custom in Spain
Family: royal family and their many houses
Física o Quimica (tv program)
Personal ID, character, physical description, family, free time...
Rutina de Michelito (Mexico)/ South of France (bull fighting)
Paradores- description of a parador ( exclusive)
The ice hotel
Use Trip adviser for reading- hotel reviews in French and Spanish

You tube/ moviemaker to introduce advert
Pepsi advert in Spanish (Torres)
Respond with tick sheet
Defi Sante / Panama you tube on healthy living
El deporte en el mundo Hispano- hablante
Pelota vasca
Description being revealed
Pok a tok
Origin of tenis
Handball-balonmano
The Incas
AVE advert
Vicuña
Alpaca
Llama
Looking at a town over a decade- description,using imperfect and preterite
Comparison- before and after the Olympics
Burkina Faso-explain what different places are.

Clothes- worn for the San Fermin festival
Use movie maker to cut YouTube clips.
For and against: about a festival.

French surname

Diversity of communities in Spain-Ceuta y Melilla
Gitanos, judios ...

Medio ambiente
Los pimpollos
Guggenheim Museum-virtual tour
Teach them how to make a English cultural ref eg explain what Eastenders is.

Shorts: El Misterio del pez

Character/personality => adjectives, exploring the theme
Description of characters
Empathy
Act out scenes for before/ will happen after
Guess the end
Free time link
Medio ambiente link
Daily routine/imperfect
Turn sound off

LinkedUp Dissemination Conference and Show and Tell, Friday July 1st to Saturday July 2nd 2011, Shrigley Hall, Macclesfield.

2011-06-25T19:23:00.005+01:00

The LinkedUp project finished in March 2011 when Links into Languages also ceased to exist to become Network for Languages. The project has generated many resources that have been uploaded to the LinkedUp website and there has been a series of national events to disseminate the good practice shared.

The dissemination event for the North West Region of England will be combined with a residential Show and Tell at Shrigley Hall near Macclesfield, Cheshire.

This will offer an opportunity to hear about the projects from the North West and see innovative resources and ideas that have been tried and tested.

Due to circumstances beyond our control there are now 10 FREE places going for interested colleagues from the North West and beyond to come along and share good practice. They will be allocated on a strictly first come first served basis.

This is a beautiful country house hotel in rural surroundings, with excellent facilities and amenities. A website link is on the attached plan for the Friday evening and Saturday morning. Evening meal, room and Saturday breakfast and lunch are included as well as use of the facilities.

I will be leading the Show and Tell parts of the weekend and I am certainly looking forward to it! There will be three sessions with a LinkedUp presentation in each, followed by some lively opportunities for letting us know what works/ has worked for you or finding out more about something you would like to try out in the classroom.

ICT facilities and internet access will be available – bring your own laptop if you feel more comfortable with it, otherwise a pendrive will do. If you are a Twitter user, use the hashtag #LUSAT to share your findings.

The Proposed Plan for both days is as follows:

Friday afternoon

4-5pm: Arrivals, Booking in and Welcome - Afternoon tea (guests may check in from 2.30)

5-6pm: Guests are welcome to make use of the hotel facilities.

6-7pm: Session 1: Linked Up Projects and Innovative Classroom Ideas

7.30pm: Dinner

Saturday morning

9.15 – 10.30: Session 2 – Creativity, Good Practice and Motivation

10.30 – 11.30: Break, chance to network, use leisure facilities, go for walk…..

11.30 – 12.30: Session 3 – Linked Up Projects, Working with Enterprise and Businesses

12.30: Lunch

1.30: Plenary

2pm: Depart

If you want to join us, please contact Hilary Jones at Network for Languages NorthWest to check availability and secure a free place.

See you there!

ALL Together: Language World at Imperial College London, 7-9 July 2011

2011-05-22T13:02:00.001+01:00

Language World is the not-to-be-missed yearly conference organised by ALL, the Association for Language Learning. In these tempestuous times for languages, with the disappearance of Links into Languages and CILT as we knew them, Language World is very unique in trying to get all the languages teachers together and provide them with a dazzling range of CPD opportunities for languages teachers from all sectors.

This year, Language World will take place at Imperial College London from 7-9 July 2011. Visit ALL's website at http://www.all-languages.org.uk for more details

If you are not a member, now is your opportunity to join to make sure your voice is heard and you will also get a discount on the conference and many more benefits including language journals and the fantastic Languages Today magazine .

As this year the conference is in London, it means that different teachers get a chance to "nip in" for a day should they want to. Last year, the conference was held in York, which was very practical for colleagues based in the North but required more planning for other colleagues. This year, you can make a day trip of going to the conference-or just go to the free conference exhibition, which is always great to find out about the most up-to-date languages resources on the Market. In fact, you can even take your department with you and make this a Faculty INSET...

This year, you will be able to attend training sessions run by Rachel Hawkes, Bernadette Holmes, Claire Dodd, Liz Black, Greg Horton, Lisa Stevens, Liz Fotheringham, Joe Dale, Eva Lamb, Chris Hart, Mike Kelly, Martine Pillette, Alex Blagona, Wendy Adeniji, Suzi Bewell, Sara Vaughan, Vincent Everett, Chris Fuller and many more (including myself!) …

You can also find out about last year’s training sessions here with a copy of the materials presented by speakers

Last but not least, you will be able to take part in a Show and Tell where you can just share with other teachers something that has worked for you in the classroom. I love these sessions as they are very effective in giving you new ideas and reminding you of things you used to do and have not done in a while. The show and tell will be offered in different rooms according to your teaching profile i.e primary, secondary, community languages and higher education, so you get maximum benefit out it.

See you ALL Together at Language World 2011, London, Imperial College Friday 8^th to Saturday 9^th July

The best professional “me time” you will get for a while…

Lexiophiles:Time to Vote For Your Favorite Language Learning Blog 2011

2011-05-17T21:24:00.003+01:00

For the third year running, Lexiophiles is organising the Top 100 Language Learning Blog award. Thank you for nominating this blog in the language learning blogs category. Should you decide to vote for it please click here.

This year, there are four categories:

- Language Learning Blogs
- Language Professionals Blogs
- Language Facebook Pages
- Language Twitterers

I am delighted that so many fellow UK twittering language teachers' blogs have been nominated too:
Chris Fuller, Sam Lunn, Joe Dale, Saira Ghani, Graham Davies, Gillotts mfl and I am looking for more...

Thank you to the Lexiophiles Blog and Ba.bla for organising the award as it helps so many languages teachers and professionals to connect online.

Resources: Cine-minis-Short French Films for Language Learning and Literacy

2011-05-14T23:57:00.000+01:00

The pack consists of a DVD with 12 short French films suitable for pupils aged 7- 14 and a teaching guide.

Although the teaching guide has been developed by practising French teachers and includes a range of online resources to support the use of the short films in the classroom,

I felt that more ideas for sequences of activities could have supported lesson planning more effectively.

The shorts turned out to be fantastic resources suitable for students from a wide ability range. They challenged students visually and linguistically and created a lot of debate. I also found them useful to get students to focus on extended chunks of language.

I used the film called "Le génie de la boîte de ravioli" to consolidate the topic of food with a middle ability year 8. I deliberately told the students the story to prepare them for watching the video without subtitles. The students were then asked to write down as many food items or other food-related words as they could see or hear in the video. I chose to challenge them by turning the subtitled off to get them to focus on the French language. However, as they had been told what the story was about and warned about the unusual style of the film, students really responded positively to the challenge.

I also used the film called “Un bisou pour le monde” with a mixed ability Year 10. As we were studying the topic of work and careers, the film provided a very interesting introduction to the French educational system and lead into discussing teaching as a job and the qualities a good teacher should have.

Although at £47.30 for a DVD and small booklet this can be seen as a pricey resource, I certainly would recommend it as it is so wonderfully versatile and can be used with a much wider age range than what it advertises.

As a taster, have a look at “Les crayons” and get inspired…

Why do I Need a Teacher When I’ve got Google? By Ian Gilbert

2011-04-22T16:27:00.002+01:00

If you need food for thoughts on what the future of Education is likely to look like, this is a book for you. It packs a wide range of issues all teachers should be considering and it certainly make me re-focus on a few things as well as wanting to find out more about others.

What follows is not a summary-as it would not do the book any justice-but a series of notes that relate to what I intend to concentrate on in the next few weeks…

One of the first things I noted was the insistence on the importance of the comma in Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills. I always had considered the Personal and Learning on one side with the Thinking Skills on the other. Really, they should be looked at as three separate strands although the 3 categories certainly overlap…

I really enjoyed the “Neuromyths debunked!” chapter. Amongst the myths were the fact that we only use ten per cent of our brain, the existence of a “critical” window of opportunity to stimulate and enrich the brain up to the age of three and the fact that we need to immerse babies and children in multisensory enriched environments to enhance their ability to learn. I was particularly relieved to find out about the latter on behalf of all the French kids whose parents think-like mine-that a little bit of boredom is good for you and an excellent preparation for “real life”.

Although I am not a scientist, I have always been fascinated by what the brain does and can do and how it links with learning. This book presented it in a very approachable way especially for non-scientists like me.

I really related to the “Don’t make ‘em mad, make ‘em think” chapter, as I see thinking as the most important job in teaching and a much more important one than just teaching subjects.

I liked the STAR strategy, an easy one to share with students to get them to consider engaging in some form of reflective/ thinking activity:

Stop

Think

Act

Reflect

STAR could be a great way to start discussing with our students what we mean by “Think”, “Act” or “Reflect” and what it means to them…

Sometimes, learning just happens if the right levels of chemicals are produced in the brain at the right time. For instance, “if dopamine has been released with glutamate, your brain will learn whatever it is paying attention to at the time”. The two “good” ways of producing the neurochemical dopamine are reward and anticipation of reward, so it might be worth having another look at how we all integrate these in our teaching…

I particularly enjoyed the chapter titled “Is yours a teaching school or a learning school?” as well as some of the opportunities re-visit the Learning How to Learn approach

According to Ian Gilbert, the attributes developed in the learning classroom experience are:

1. Choice

2. Responsibility

3. Trust

4. Practical nature of the work

5. Development of competences

6. Fun

7. Multiply-intelligent working

8. Independence

9. Team working

That certainly is a good list to re-focus yourself and colleagues as to what should be happening in your classroom… Some terms such as “fun” and “practical” may however need to be discussed to agree to a common understanding within Faculty areas, for instance.

PLTS Training at Werneth High School, Thursday 17th March 2011

2011-03-17T21:28:00.000Z

I had the pleasure to be asked to deliver a PLTS training session at Werneth High School today. This is a copy of the presentation and reference sheet I used for the training. Thank you to all present for their warm welcome and stimulating conversation-you got me thinking too...

Werneth High School thinking skills 17 march

View more presentations from Isabelle Jones

Werneth plts handout

View more documents from Isabelle Jones

My Response to The Education Select Committee on The E-Bac

2011-03-12T16:59:00.003Z

The original version of my contribution will be published if it is kept as evidence. In the meantime, I can only say I have contributed and present my ideas in general terms. I have also added many examples that I thought about after I sent my contribution...

A step in the right direction

I consider the E-Bac to be a step in the right direction as regards the promotion of foreign language learning in England. It has already secured a massive increase in the languages uptake at my school-where students had to make a choice between carrying on with the GCSEs in their preferred technology options or-gasp- start a GCSE in Spanish from Year 10.

For the first time ever, 70 students opted to take Spanish GCSE and we had to turn students away as our specialist staff was stretched to the limit. We currently have 11 students studying GCSE French in Year 10 and 18 in Year 11, so what happened?

We got together with the Humanities Faculty and highlighted just under 70 students who we thought would be good candidates for the e-bacc. I sent a letter home referring to the e-bacc but not giving great details as the information was due to be delivered by our Deputy-Headteacher on Option Evening.

Option evening was incredible. Rather than hearing the usual “I will think about Miss”, we had many “I am definitely doing it Miss”, which surprised everybody in the Faculty. There was no major change of SoWs, no change of staff and nothing new in terms of promoting languages apart from getting an ex-student who is now a professional linguist to come and talk to our students.

As a linguist, I am now confident that all this will re-affirm the status of languages within the curriculum but I am also concerned that the E-Bac will only encourage the more able students to study languages and not contribute to improving the UK’s language capacity as a whole.

Reporting in January 2011

I really felt that The E-Bac was unfairly used to report on schools’ achievements before schools had time to make the necessary adjustments to their curricula and staffing. In some ways, this discredited the award by highlighting its political intentions.

My school and many other schools- including language colleges -ended up with low percentage that failed to acknowledge all the opportunities offered to students within the previous curriculum set-up. In many respect, a stay-on rate would have been fairer to show the school’s commitment to increase the life chances of its students rather than resort to this crude indicator.

I am concerned that some schools are trying to implement emergency plans involving force-feeding languages and humanities to some children who had opted not to study them. This means that valuable curriculum time is wasted on understandably reluctant students. Specialist members of staff are also overstretched trying to deliver these subjects to large co-horts, sometimes as twilight lessons, so that schools can say that they provided the “E-Bac opportunity” to their students.

Impact on school performance and organisation

Although the E-Bac is presented as only one measure of school performance, most schools will not want to be seen publicly as making no improvement in their E-Bac percentage indicator-especially as the link between the new E-Bac indicator and OFSTED is still not known. A lot of schools will therefore feel pressurised into hasty sweeping curriculum changes that will be unsuccessful especially if there is a lack of specialist teachers to deliver them in the short term. Let’s not forget that Modern Languages Departments across the country were hit very hard when languages became optional post 14 in 2004...

Staffing and staff development are major issues which will not be helped by recent cuts in education and the decision to stop the funding of organisations like the Links into Languages Regional Centres.

Practicalities and Promotion

I am also puzzled about some of the practicalities of the E-Bac, such as who is going to award it and its actual recognition by universities and large employers. As a “new qualification”-especially as it is not really a qualification-I am also surprised that very little literature seem to be currently available to introduce it to parents and other stakeholders.

The need for this kind of literature was felt during our option evening as there was still some degree of confusion about what the E-Bac really is about. In some cases, the confusion even stretched to getting it confused with the International Baccalaureate.

Measure of Individual Students' Performance?

I do not believe that the E-Bac should be used as a measure of individual students’ performance as it does not include a full range of subjects. For instance, the achievements of students who have a talent in subjects like Art, Music, Sport or Technology would be totally unrecognised. It also does not take into account students’ level of attainment on entry in Year 7 and for languages in particular, this could be strongly affected by the time allocation and quality of the students’ primary languages provision.

Which subjects?

The choice of the subjects included in the E-Bac is important but as many of us will base this on our own perceptions and experiences, there is very little chance of a rational debate. My own personal view is that the E-Bac should allow for an academic core-with RE as an alternative Humanity-as well as optional subjects like music, Art, ICT or PE. In addition, ICT should be taught throughout as a core, pretty much in the same way PE is protected by a statutory requirement even if students decide not to study for a specific PE qualification at KS4.

Languages should be included in the academic core but GCSE should not be the only qualification available, as only more able students are likely to be successful in it due to a well-documented severity of grading.

International Comparisons

As a linguist who was also educated in France and Spain, I cannot see how the E-Bac can be used for international comparisons. The term “baccalaureate” will be confusing for many as it is used for a post-16 qualification anywhere else. Languages in most European countries are part of a core and might not be certified separately. The level required will be a minimum, likely to be offset by other subjects. This means that nearly everybody will have some knowledge of a language although it might not be equivalent to a GCSE level. More students will also be likely to continue with languages post-16 if it is part of a post-16 baccalaureate broad curriculum offer.

As a conclusion, I would say that the E-Bac will only support the development of languages in the UK if it is re-thought to offer different mixes of subjects with languages as a core for all students, although not necessarily at GCSE level. A recognition of the value of vocational languages is also essential to support this-The E-Bac as it stands is an exclusive award, but we cannot afford for languages to become exclusive. Languages are communication and communication is a core skill.

ICT into Languages Conference (#ililc), 12-13 February 2011: What Now?

2011-02-27T16:17:00.004Z

I was lucky enough to be invited to talk at this fantastic event and although I greatly enjoyed it, my only regret is that it meant I missed out on some fabulous workshops and seminars run by my fellow speakers!

The conference has already created a lot of online buzz and I have tried to gather all related posts via Diigo here.

I am also particularly delighted that Zena Hilton, the Regional Manager for Links into Languages South East, has uploaded the vast majority of the presentations and handouts directly onto the Links site.

These resources represent months of specific training for Languages Faculties all over the country and it would be madness not to make best use of them…

In addition to the great launch and plenary presentations given by Joe Dale and Rachel Hawkes that have been video recorded and are available from here and here,

Chris Harte’s Language Reboot can also be viewed on here

I attended Jackie Berrie’s Powerpoint Magic for Language Teachers, Helen Myer’s Let technology take the strain, Chris Harte’s Edmodo, Alex Blagona’s wikis and Jo Rhys Jones’ Simple and Effective tips for KS2/KS3 transitions sessions. All the sessions were great in different ways and really got me thinking about the next steps for our Languages Faculty as well as my own professional development. I have also included some of the gems collected during the Show & Tell that took place on the Saturday evening.

Here are some of the things I will be looking at:

• Specific aspects of using Powerpoints in the languages classroom

Use a split screen with different backgrounds to reinforce gender/ number

Create a countdown with numbers on the slide for any activity involving vocabulary recall.

Free Powerpoint timers by Dave Foord are available from http://www.a6training.co.uk/indez.php

Use motion paths to reinforce directions eg à droite- car going to the right

Find the right path to go to somebody’s house-students guess and then see where the person actually goes (prediction game).

Ping pong vocabulary game: template can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/rubiales/ping-pong-vocabulary-game

Use tagxedo to create flags in the shape of countries http://www.tagxedo.com/

Create a role-play scene for student to use-add writing and sound files. Mp3, Wav, Wma, Mid all of these can be inserted into a Powerpoint presentation. Format factory can be used to convert files from mp4 to mp3.

Realplayer can be used to download YouTube videos and change their formats

Hyperlinks can link to existing files as well as external sites

True or false activity hyperlink back to true or false slides.

Drag & drop macros get Powerpoint activities to behave like they would on an Interactive Whiteboard: Re-order letters, Click and drag: dans mon panier, il y a...

Mouse mischief is a free add-in for Powerpoint and it allows multiple users to interact with a Powerpoint in slideshow mode. Details, free software and templates can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/uk/multipoint/mouse-mischief/default.aspx

• Some tools shared during the Show and Tell:

Lingro.com

Lingro looks great for extension reading as it makes students more independent. Any word you click on can give you a translation/ definition based on wiktionary. It can also produce simple flascards.

Twister from classtools.net http://classtools.net/twister/

• How Wikis can be used to develop students’ independence and AFL:

They can be designed for each classes to develop community within class, peer assessment.

Good for work monitoring and encourage peer assessment as students look at each other’s pages.

Teachers can monitor the work done eg with 6th formers when extra study time has to be tracked.

http://northgatemfl.wikispaces.com/

This page is the students own space-the teacher check history to see who has done what and wikis can also be password-protected.

If teachers get the students to register, they will be trackable.

It is a good idea to include widgets such as the French newspapers headlines or simple reference widgets.

Wikis can be set up for short term projects e.g. outreach project, trip etc…

To encourage students to look at each other’s work, students can be paired up by the teacher and share a same wiki page.

Students can be asked to comment on each other’s page to support AFL in and out of the classroom.

Homework can be set on the wiki and shared with parents- good for homework monitoring.

Speaking homework can be set with uploaded audacity files as examples.

Content can be tailored quite closely to the audience and differentiated by page.

On Monday 28th February, a Flashmeeting has been set up to talk about all the great things we shared at the conference . It is an opportunity for other people who could not make it to the conference to find out more… so sign up here on the wiki and clic here to join the meeting at 9pm.

I am giving myself the challenge to use at last 3 things I have learnt from the conference before the Easter holiday. Will I succeed? I will be back to tell…

Speak To The Future-Promoting Languages as a Strategically Important Subject

2011-02-26T00:48:00.002Z

By including languages in the English Baccalaureate, the current government is making a strong statement that languages studies are an important and “rigorous” academic pursuit. However, whereas the E Bacc fails in terms of inclusiveness, the new Speak to the Future campaign reminds us all that only a "Languages for All" approach will have the desired impact on our work force and economy in general.

Speak to the Future was officially launched on15th February 2011. It has the support of over 30 organisations in order to address the UK’s under-achievement in language learning. The launch speech was delivered by Richard Hardie, Chair of UBS ltd and it can be downloaded here .

Key supporters of the campaign include:

Association for Language Learning

British Council

Chartered Institute of Linguists

CILT, the National Centre for Languages

Independent Schools’ Modern Languages Association

Institute of Translation and Interpreting

National Association of Language Advisers

Specialist Schools and Academies Trust

Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

The Languages Company

University Council of Modern Languages

The campaign calls for urgent action to boost language learning across all phases of education. The aim is to develop and enhance educational and career opportunities for young people as well as our ability to compete in the global economy.

It will target policy-makers in government and leaders in education and business. It will make the case for long-term positive action to transform the UK’s capacity in languages.

The campaign will span the intended life of the current Parliament, also benefitting from the opportunities created by the 2012 Olympics, the 2014 European Parliament elections and the election campaigns for the next Welsh Assembly and Scottish and Westminster Parliaments.

Speak to the Future has five key aims, designed to create a coherent approach to language learning across all phases of education:

1. Every language valued as an asset

2. A coherent experience of languages for all children in primary school

3. A basic working knowledge of at least two languages including English for every child leaving secondary school

4. Every graduate qualified in a second language

5. An increase in the number of highly qualified linguists

The five-year campaign will reach out to people and organisations from all walks of life to gain wider public support for language learning.

According to recent figures, England is currently joint bottom of a table of 39 countries in the developed world for the amount of time spent on languages by 12-14 year olds in schools. No wonder a lot of them get frustrated with their rate of progress…

The first lesson has to be that curriculum time allocated to languages does impact on students’ self-image as linguists and examination results.

A LinkedIn group has been set up to share ideas and activities to support the campaign. More information about the campaign can also be downloaded from here and comments are welcome on this blog too.

Maybe we really are “the people we have been waiting for”…

CLIL Twilight at Saddleworth High School, Friday 4th February 2011

2011-02-22T18:18:00.000Z

This twilight was a follow-up from a full day INSET in November.

It was very interesting to see everybody’s work towards implementing CLIL as we were all at completely different stages. This ranged from starting to talk to another subject area to two teachers from different departments jointly planning and delivering lessons.

The first part of the Twilight was spent on getting students’ views about CLIL. At Saddleworth High School, CLIL is currently used to deliver history lessons in the Top Set Year 9. Although students admitted that they might not necessarily have chosen to do their history lessons in German, they were adamant that this was helping them both for their German and their History. Students still have history assessments in English and their performance was reported as at least in line with if not above the students who had not been taught through CLIL. One of the advantages mentioned was that the concepts had to be simplified and chunked to be accessible linguistically, which also made them easier for students to understand.

Students enjoyed being rewarded for their use of the Target Language in class and they commented on the fact that it came more naturally as the lesson was delivered through German with only very few key items of vocabulary provided with their translation in English.

One of the drawbacks of CLIL is that there can be a tendency for it to be very teacher-centred. It is therefore very important to find alternative ways to deliver the history content with more student-centred activities to ensure sustained engagement in the lessons: mind maps, match up exercises, cut up & stick exercises to show how ideas are connected to each other, pair work: summarise what you have learnt so far.

Other examples of CLIL-like opportunities were presented for PSHE- A Day in the Life of..., Healthy Living, First Aid, Geography-Crime in France, Strawberries from Spain, Art-Painting titles

Ready-made resources in English were presented for these topics that naturally lent themselves to being adapted and delivered through CLIL.

We were also given the opportunity to explore the Anne Frank guide .net site to look at resources in different languages as well as suggested ideas on how to edit these resources using Movie Maker to make them more CLIL-friendly-adding own sound, music, sequencing pictures etc...

Finally, CLIL was mentioned as a way to support other E Bacc subjects like English, Maths, Science and Humanities. By providing a different approach to some of the content taught in those subjects, students can revisit concepts they have been exposed to before and gain confidence in both their understanding of the concept and of the language used to discuss them. In addition, as no further curriculum time is required, this makes it a real win-win proposition...

CILT National 7-14 Transition Conference, Wednesday 2nd February

2011-02-22T16:41:00.000Z

I attended this event as a speaker and really enjoyed the keynote speech and the other workshops on the day. Transition is something we all work at but also something that is really difficult to resolve permanently as each school’s circumstances are different and always changing. So more than a magical recipe, an ever-growing set of possible strategies is likely to be more effective. Being opened to sharing new ideas on how to cope with transition issues is indeed crucial...

Jim McElwee, from Redcar & Cleveland LA, gave an inspirational Keynote speech presenting projects and issues he had come across as an adviser. He introduced us to the Honeycomb Project, aiming to develop students listening and speaking skills through the use of ICT.

Jim asked a controversial question: Are we interested in what children know? If we truly are, this should affect our attitude to errors and how we correct them. Making connections was also mentioned as essential to developing speaking skills in particular. The example given was a presentation on planets and it showed that the appropriate level challenge represented by integrating planet, colours and pronunciation made it more effective to develop students’ skills rather than teaching these items separately.

I then attended Liz Black’s session. Liz is an AST at Stokesley School in North Yorkshire. She has a wealth of experience in organising cross-curricular projects, some of them can be viewed on her school website .

Liz introduced us to her new project based around wild animals and the circus. The aims of the project are:

*to build on prior learning

*to merge primary and secondary pedagogies more closely

*to provide challenge and encourage independent learning

*to increase the use of authentic resources

*to link the different areas of the curriculum

The schemes of work were developed with the support of the SLN which provided quality time, something always crucial to the success of such projects.

The transition unit included latin words for some of the animals, geography, science, Art, citizenship. The aim was for the content to be age-appropriate, meaningful and challenging. Each areas of the curriculum were linked-for instance the geography units on “Les continents” and “Le réchauffement de la terre” set the scene for the animal unit. There was also a strong focus on developing independent learning skills through encouraging the use of dictionaries and glossaries, for instance. The link to science was made through looking at the characteristics of the Artic Hare and the link with Art involved describing various animals and looking at unusual sculptures.

Poems like Cinquains and Haikus were used to raise self-esteem and demonstrate that “with a little bit of language, you can do a lot”. I found Haikus particularly interesting-3 lines and 17 syllables-with the idea that students could beat the rhythm of a particular word for others to guess. Y8 were asked to do these poems for Primary children to raise their motivation.

Topics like animals in captivity with strong images and music were used and movie-maker presentations designed as outcome to be assessed and revision material for Year 9. The assessment was done by using a Flip camera to record and peer-assess the outcome. It was felt that there was no need for a formal sit-down test. Plenary activities included “Find the link between...”, “Give an example of”, “If I was an animal, I would be ... because...” as a way to recap using the Target Language. Other websites used by Liz for her Unit of work can be found here .

Last but not least, I attended Florence Finneberg’s workshop, run with Betty Sachet from Coldfall Primary School: “ Developing capacity in primary environments and capitalising on students’ progress in Year 7. Florence is an AST at the Fortismere High School in Muswell Hill, North London and she works closely with her 4 feeder primary schools in order to build on previous learning and stretch students in Year 7. The National Curriculum levels 1-5 are introduced in Primary and resources shared although used differently e.g. listening materials. Sharing success criteria earlier has also been key to raising standards as well as introducing peer assessment for speaking.

ICT Links Into Languages, Sunday 13th February: Personal learning and Thinking Skills In The Languages Classroom

2011-02-14T23:30:00.002Z

This is a copy of my presentation on PLTS

Personal learning and thinking skills in the mfl classroom new

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Here is the reference sheet given out during the session.

Links conf plts handout

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ICT Links into Languages, Saturday 12th February: Show and Tell-Creative Partnerships

2011-02-14T23:26:00.003Z

Here is a copy of the presentation about my French rap project that I shared at The Show & Tell

Show and tell creative partnerships

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This paralel text is made of the lyrics from the song with French and English side-by-side

Je viens de la gcm

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ICT Links Into Languages, Saturday 12th February 2011: Get Inspired, Create and Share

2011-02-14T23:13:00.003Z

Here is my presentation about developing the use of ICT in the MFL Faculty

Get inspired, create and share

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I have also embedded the corresponding reference sheet:

Get inspired links conf handout

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CILT Transition Conference , Regent's Park Holiday Inn, London, Wednesday 2nd February 2011

2011-02-03T23:28:00.001Z

I had a lovely and very productive day at the CILT National Transition Conference. I will blog about the 2 workshops I atttended in a separate post.
Here is my presentation....

Effective networking for transition feb11

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ICT Links into Languages Conference, 12-13th February 2011, Southampton University

2011-01-05T13:27:00.000Z

The ICT Links into Languages 12-13th February 2011 will be held at Southampton University, Avenue Campus. Modelled on the extremely successful Isle of Wight Conference, it features an extensive programme of seminars and hands-on workshops delivered by a range of speakers including some of the most creative and innovative language professionals in the UK today (see list below).

I am looking forward to presenting, being in great company and learning a lot as well attending plenaries by Joe Dale and Rachel Hawkes and contributing to a Show and Tell event on the Saturday night. No doubt this will be a very productive weekend!

If you are at all interested in how technology can enhance language learning, this is the right event for you. It caters for all levels of ICT skills and at £100 for both days or £75 for one day (discounted rates for PGCE students), it is incredibly good value for money too.

For more information or to book follow this link. Speakers will include:

Wendy Adeniji - Independent MFL Consultant

• Teach them to pronounce it right! (Seminar)

• iLanguages: teach them the usual in an unusual way (Seminar)

Jackie Berry - Primary Languages Consultant, Hampshire LA

• PowerPoint Magic: presentation tips and tricks for the languages classroom (Hands-on workshop)

• Getting started with screen casting (Seminar)

Suzi Bewell - PGCE MFL Curriculum Area Leader, University of York

• Going global! The importance of Intercultural Understanding (Seminar)

• MYLO – an exciting new way to learn languages (Hands-on workshop)

Alex Blagona - Language college coordinator, Northgate High School

• Collaborate, Communicate, Consolidate – How wikis can transform learning in MFL (Hands-on workshop)

• An A-Z road map of ICT resources in MFL (Seminar)

Joe Dale - Independent MFL Consultant

• If you build it, they will come! The rise and rise of the MFL Twitterati (Keynote)

• Podcasting with Audacity (Hands-on workshop)

Catherine Elliott - Training Manager at Sheffield South City Learning Centre

• Encouraging creativity in languages through animation (Hands-on workshop)

• First steps in using video in the MFL classroom (Hands-on workshop)

Chris Fuller - Educational Consultant

• Moblogging across the universe (Seminar)

• Typepad – I blog, you blog, we blog (Hands-on workshop)

Esther Hardman - Teacher of French, Spanish and German, Curriculum Development Coordinator for MFL (ICT), Weald of Kent Grammar School

• Flashmeeting for easy videoconferencing (Seminar)

• Using ICT to enhance teaching and learning in MFL (Seminar)

Dale Hardy - Primary & Secondary Languages Consultant, Nottingham City LA, Links into Languages regional trainer & CILT KS2 framework trainer

• So you have a school link? Now what do you do with it? (Seminar)

• Gifted and talented linguists – Identification, Inclusion, Provision: Using simple techniques as well as ICT (Seminar)

Chris Harte - Assistant Head Teacher for Personalised Learning, author and trainer on PLTS in language learning, Cramlington Learning Village

• Managing social learning – Edmodo (Hands-on workshop)

• Languages: Reboot (Seminar)

Rachel Hawkes - Assistant Principal, Director of Languages, AST and SSAT Languages Lead Practitioner, TES Resources Languages Advisor, Comberton Village College

• Get real! Language Learning for the 21st century (Keynote)

Kath Holton - Head of Languages, Argoed High School

• Using voice and video recorders in the classroom (Seminar)

• Interactive Web 2.0 tools to enhance learning (Seminar)

Isabelle Jones - Head of Languages, The Radclyffe School

• Personal Learning and Thinking Skills in the MFL classroom (Seminar)

• Inspire, Create, Share: Developing the use of ICT in the MFL faculty (Seminar)

Helen Myers - Teacher of French, Assistant Head, The Ashcombe School; Chair of ALL London branch; ALL former President

• Add a dimension to your teaching: an introduction to language learning in Virtual Worlds (Seminar)

• Let the technology take the strain!How ICT can provide the motivation and the inspiration for the hard grind of language learning! (Seminar)

Jo Rhys-Jones - Primary Languages Consultant, Hampshire LA

• Simple and effective tips for transition KS2-KS3 (Seminar)

• Making languages games for your VLE/blog (Seminar)

Amanda Salt - Head of Spanish, Grosvenor Grammar School

• Integrating ICT into an MFL department (Seminar)

• Using Web 2.0 tools in the MFL classroom (Hands-on workshop)

Clare Seccombe - Sunderland LA Support Teacher for Primary Languages and the International Dimension

• MFL Sunderland – It’s good to share! (Seminar)

• Arts Smart! (incorporating art, music, drama etc) (Seminar)

Lisa Stevens - PLL educator and consultant, Apple Distinguished Educator and eTwinning Ambassador

• What can eTwinning do for you? (Seminar)

• Tell me a story! (Hands-on workshop)

Lesley Welsh - Director of Languages and the International Dimension at Manor College of Technology

• Keeping it real – maximising the use of authentic materials (Seminar)

• Funky flipcharts and interesting interactivity (Seminar)

Thank you for supporting this event: spread the word and sign up here

See you there!

ALL Manchester Event at Manchester Grammar School, Saturday 11th December: Integrating PLTS in the Languages Classroom

2010-12-11T16:25:00.004Z

I had a lovely time this morning presenting on how to integrate Personal Learning and Thinking Skills (PLTS) at Manchester Grammar School. Here is a copy of the presentation I used. Please note that parts of the presentation might look slightly different from the one I delivered at MGS as I decided to copy the documents I referred to into the presentation. I also include a copy of my reference sheet.

All manchester PLTS Event 11thdec10

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All manchester mgs reference sheet

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Please note these files will also be added to the wiki referred to on Slide1 with many more...

The Importance of Teaching, The Schools White Paper 2010-A Turning Point for Languages?

2010-12-04T14:52:00.004Z

The White Paper highlights the government’s educational philosophy and presents languages as an important subject that is part of the new qualification called “The English Bac”. If you do not fancy reading all 95 pages, ALL, the Association for Language Learning, has published a handy summary available from here with a number of interesting links on the subject and what it means for Modern Languages.

ALL has also published a summary document to show what the White paper means for languages.

I feel that the proposal is certainly a step in the right direction-even though I would say that the proposed changes for teacher training would not help to develop further the position of languages in schools. In addition, the lack of references to Primary Languages is both disappointing and concerning-a real missed opportunity to re-affirm the place of languages in the primary curriculum and congratulate teachers and managers on all their effort to promote quality early language-learning .

Indeed, a lot more detailed information is needeed to ensure that the proposals have maximum impact in schools.

Is the percentage achieving the “English Bac” going to be published with the old 5A*-C including Maths and English? Is that going to be open for comparisons between schools locally through the local newspaper, for instance? The current indicators for MFL are hidden away and not easily accessible by the public-hence the lack of pressure on schools to improve them.

Is GCSE going to be the only indicator? If this is the case, languages will become even more elitist and there will be very little incentive for some schools to re-launch languages and “sell it” to more students in case they just miss a C. It will also mean that the emphasis will still be on ensuring students get at least a C rather than ensuring every student does his/ her best.

What would happen if a school decided not to make any changes to their curriculum and still have a minority of students not getting the “bac”? Would this trigger an OFSTED inspection? Would this be published in the community? If the school sees this as a legitimate way to create life chances for students and the parents do not voice disagreement-who would challenge this?

I am delighted that our subject has been recognised as an important part of the curriculum but I do feel that we need more than statements of intents to shift the situation and improve participation as well as achievement for all students in all schools.

Michael Gove has written to all schools. A copy of the letter can be found at http://tiny.cc/DfELetter . He invites initial responses to the White Paper by 8 December.
They should be sent to schoolswhitepaper.team@education.gsi.gov.uk
If you are an ALL member do share your response with them by sending it to languagestoday@all-languages.org.uk as they need to know their members' opinions to be able to represent us effectively.

Integrating PLTS in The Languages Classroom, Saturday 11th December, Manchester Grammar School

2010-11-26T22:52:00.004Z

I will be delivering a PLTS training event at Manchester Grammar School on Saturday 11th December-More details and how to book in the downloadable scribd document below. See you there!

Isabelle jones-11-dec-2010

View more documents from Isabelle Jones.

Integrating PLTS in the Modern Languages Classroom
by Isabelle Jones• Discover strategies for embedding PLTS in your daily practice
• Audit your own practice and look at ways to promote PLTS in your classroom
• Identify creative ways to widen your repertoire of Thinking Skills activities
• Discover ICT tools to support the development of Thinking Skills resources

The Manchester Grammar School, Old Hall Lane
Fallowfield, Manchester, M13 0XT
(Free parking)
http://www.mgs.org/index.php/contact-us

ALL Members £5
Non-members £20
NQTs £2
PGCE: free (if members of ALL)
(Please make cheques payable to ALL (Manchester Branch)

It is important that we know in advance if you would like to attend. To reserve a place, please send the application form below by Tuesday, 7th December 2010 to Geoff Brammall, 3 Sundial Road, Offerton, Stockport, SK2 5QU, via email: geoffbram1@btopenworld.com or phone: 0161 483 4347

Application Form
To: Geoff Brammall, 3 Sundial Road, Offerton, Stockport, SK2 5QU
Telephone: 0161 483 4347 Email: geoffbram1@btopenworld.com

Integrating PLTS in the Modern Languages Classroom
(Saturday 11th September, 10.00 am – 12.30 pm)

Name

Establishment

Contact Telephone Number

E-mail

Please list below (in BLOCK capitals) the names of all participants.

Name ___________________________Member/Non-Member/NQT/PGCE/FLA*

Name ___________________________Member/Non-Member/NQT/PGCE/FLA*

Name ___________________________Member/Non-Member/NQT/PGCE/FLA*

Name ___________________________Member/Non-Member/NQT/PGCE/FLA*

Name ___________________________Member/Non-Member/NQT/PGCE/FLA*

* Please circle/highlight as appropriate.

CLIL is Brill (But Keep It Real), Saddleworth School, Friday 12 November 2010

2010-11-19T22:30:00.001Z

Karen Hutley is a SSAT MFL Lead Practitioner at Saddleworth School, my local language college. She has been working to develop CLIL-French and German with History-at her school for more than 2 years now and the aim of the training day was to share her experiences and present her school’s approach to CLIL.

CLIL stands for Content and Language Integrated Learning and it is an approach encouraged by the Revised PoS, as it provides “opportunities for pupils to... use the Target Language in connection with topics and issues... that may be related to other areas of the curriculum”

CLIL is not a new concept and there is a wealth of references found in different European projects.

http://www.clilcompendium.com/

http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/lang/doc/clilbroch_en.pdf

Karen divided the planning process into 4 areas:

Vision: What do I want to achieve with our learners?

Content: What is appropriate?

Unit concept: What will a unit consist of? Aims? Outcomes? Opportunities for assessment?

CLIL is a way to promote languages through another curriculum area:

Apart from the reported gains in value added and motivation, I like the fact that CLIL encourages independence and challenge rather than pure “fun” (What’s fun anyway?) and that it redefines the content and the purpose of languages lessons, which will address some much-debated gender issues.

It also develops study skills and concentration, encourages linguistic spontaneity and widens students’ horizons at many different levels from the classroom to the outside world in general.

I am particularly interested in CLIL as a pathway for mixed-experience language classes at the start of KS3 and a powerful way to keep motivated young linguists on board rather than de-moralising them by revisiting what they have learnt at KS2 in nearly exactly the same way.

CLIL was also presented in terms of wholeschool benefits:

Revisits effective teaching and learning approaches

Creates REAL cross-curricular partnerships effectively disseminating good practice

Provides new challenges and raise our expectations

Develops creativity and innovation in the curriculum

Stretches and motivates students, especially the most able

Raises the status of Languages

Improves generic and specific language skills

Top tips to start CLIL

Observe colleagues in the non-specialist subject

Share SoWs and NC levels

Plan carefully together-Do you understand the concept you are teaching?

Make good use of your FLAs

Praise/ Reward system

Use SEN worksheets as a starting point and look at resources already available.

http://www.clil4teachers.pbwiki.com/

http://euroclic.net/

Resources

We were given an opportunity to look at how Movie Maker can help producing CLIL resources.

Although I have used movie-maker in class, there are a few things I had not considered:

You can only import .avi .mpg and .wmv video files, so importing a Youtube clip will often mean charnging the format.

I could use my own camera footage (sometimes the most obvious is not what we go for...)

Movie Maker can automatically split your movie into smaller clips that are easier to edit or you can manually trim video clips to show just the most interesting moments.

I enjoyed muting the video and putting other sound for it as well as altering its appearance e.g. black and white/ sepia, which is always an effective way to convey how things used to be in the past.

It was also great to be reminded about tools like keepvid that can be used to source and download You Tube clips or Zamzar that also provides a free online file conversion service.

I found out about new resources/tools too like sounddogs, Flash Catcher-tool that downloads flash animations into one single file and Pixelan which has new editing add-ons for Movie Maker, pre-made packs and powerful customizable wizards.

We were also given the opportunity to see CLIL in action and to then go back to plan part of a CLIL lesson. As the topic was Poverty in Victorian Britain, which I know very little about and I certainly did not study at school in France, I found this part of the day both challenging and enlightening. It also made me think very carefully about the subject I would do CLIL with as some prior knowledge of the key concept is definitely an advantage.

The other thing to consider was the level of language. When you talk to colleagues about CLIL, there is a general misconception that the level of language used should be equivalent to the one used in the target language country. As the aim is to communicate the concepts rather than focus on the linguistic side of things, this could not be further from the truth. It is up to the teacher to define the appropriate language needed to teach the concept, keep the challenge and provide support rather than just dumb down the language in the hope that students will understand the concept better that way (they don’t!).

Although CLIL has a lot to offer, it is clear that the Saddleworth School model needs to be adapted to different schools according to their circumstances. The school has put a lot of thought into joint-timetabling and included some extra time for preparation to ensure the sustainability of CLIL in the curriculum but this might be more difficult to implement in a non-language college.

Sustainability is an issue not to be brushed aside, as parents will want to know about future continuity and impact on the other areas of the curriculum. Good communication with parents is also essential for them to understand the benefits of CLIL and not to feel that their child is being used as part of a “strange experiment”.

Time is also a pressure as a CLIL will require even more preparation time than a traditional language lesson-hence the title and the need to make good use of support staff like FLAs and ICT support staff.

Show and Tell at The Radclyffe School, 13th November: My Top 7 Apps for French

2010-11-14T11:33:00.003Z

Thank you to everybody who attended and presented at the Show and Tell at The Radclyffe School for being so creative, approachable and intellectually generous. All presentations and related resources are available at http://www.diigo.com/user/isabellejones/mflsatoldham
This is my presentation, but you also get a chance to exchange ideas about good languages iphone apps via other posts on this blog and via my googledoc spreadsheet on iphone apps for languages teachers (feel free to add to the list).

My top 7 apps for French

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AQA GCSE Course: Improving Preparation for Writing, 1st November 2010, Manchester

2010-11-07T16:21:00.001Z

This course focused on the writing part of the GCSE: 2 externally marked assignments.

The assignments can be on any topic but must not duplicate content. They must also be different from the speaking tasks.

The quality of the pieces will be assessed overall even if the pieces go beyond the recommended number of words: 230-350 across the 2 tasks for grades G-D and 400-600 for grades C-A*

It is therefore not in the students’ interest to write in too much length unless the accuracy and the quality of the range can be maintained throughout.

Although writing and speaking must be different, they could both come from the same topic. It is however important to ensure there is no duplication of content (3+ sentences, not the odd word) as the language can only be credited once

It is the response to the title which is assessed, bullet points can be ignored (unlike for Speaking)

6-7 bullet points is what seems to provide students with the best kind of guidance

Beware of over or under-prescription: responses need to be individual but lower ability students need more support with structure at the start.

When writing your own task, you need to keep the following in mind:

• You need a title and to keep the title separate from scene-setting

• Use simple and clear language in bullet points

• Make sure ALL bullet points are directly relevant to the title

• Look at exemplar material for recommended format

• Tasks do not have to be approved by your Controlled Assessment adviser. Advisers cannot mark tasks but can offer useful general advice.

Stage 1: is the stage when students are being taught the language. All materials including marked work can be used at stage 2.

Stage 2: The task is given to students, who have 6 hours of planning and preparation time in school and at home. Teacher can launch Stage 2 with general advice to the group, going through the bullet points and explaining what is required e.g. give an opinion and a justification, ask them to recall what piece of homework they have done that could help them with the task, direct their attention to helpful resources, but no further teacher help is allowed after that. Students can work with and help each other but responses should be individual. There is no requirement to measure the 6 hours preparation time.

Drafts must be kept in school and teachers must not comment on them.

The task and the plan can be used a home and in school.

Task-planning sheet: 40 whole words maximum, no visuals, no conjugated verbs, no phonetic transcriptions, no codes.

Students should be taught different strategies to write an effective task-planning form, such as:

Set it out in the same order as the bullet points,

Use the first word of each bullet point to help you with sequencing

Make a list of words you find particularly difficult to remember

Highlight “impressive” structures to enable you to score higher for the range of language used e.g. après avoir fini... (l’ d’ and hyphenated words are not counted separately)

Stage 3: Test conditions-one hour maximum, students have access to the task, task-planning form and a bilingual dictionary. There is no access to the draft and no access to online resources if a computer is used.

It is important to bear in mind that the use of tenses is credited in the Assessment scheme. 2 different tenses are required (NOT references to 2 time-frame) e.g. the perfect and the imperfect are OK as they are 2 different tenses. Please note that in French near future is not considered as a future tense, so "Je vais aller/ J’irai" count as 2 different tenses. Conversely, do not use “J’espère” if you want the student to produce a future tense construction.

Accuracy is only 5 marks so it is important to use the whole 1-5 scale-it does not need to be perfect for a 5. When assessing for accuracy, tenses are not taken into account but the emphasis is on the range of the language and the content. Candidates do not need to write in paragraphs.

All key materials can be found here for reference:

http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/newgcses/languages/new/french_overview.php?id=11&prev=11

The AQA resources list can provide additional ideas and resources for teaching at Stage 1:

For French: http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/newgcse/pdf/AQA-4655-W-TRB-RL.PDF

For Spanish: http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/newgcse/pdf/AQA-4695-W-TRB-RL.PDF

• Speed-dating

• Fill-in-the-gap activities: text with every 5th word missing, text without linking words

• Pictures: write something about it including one opinion, two time phrases...

• Tarsia formulator (dominos with different and more complex shapes)

http://www.mmlsoft.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11&Itemid=12

• http://www.esaudio.net/powerpoints (Spanish)

• http://ssl4you.blogspot.com/ (Spanish-advanced)

The last activity of the day was to reflect on the opportunities provided by different titles:

A wide-ranging title is more effective like “Life of a Celebrity” rather than “A day in the life of...”, “Holidays” rather than “My last holiday” etc...

The letter format can also be more restrictive than an article but the title must not encourage the candidate to produce lengthy lists rather than a wide range of structures.

As always networking and sharing good practice will ensure that opportunities are maximised for students.

The Language Show: Lots to Think About!

2010-10-30T22:25:00.001+01:00

I really enjoyed my day at The Language Show on Saturday 16th October, a very productive day which provided me with so much inspiration...

I started the day attending Joe Dale’s session on PLNs. Although I am very familiar with PLNs and Joe’s work, I really enjoyed the session despite what I can only describe as “diabolical acoustics”.

I found the following particularly useful:

• Explore more uses for sites like paper.li or The Twitter Times to get a community to engage in a different way

• Potential of ipadio for live podcasting

• Use tools like Friend or Follow to manage your Twitter following. I also like Twittaquitta, a tool that sends you emails to keep track of who is starting to follow you and who has stopped following you

• Keep an eye on suitable webminars taking place all over the world like this one and podcasts via Twitter

I then went on to listen to Rachel Hawkes’ talk.

Then again, lots of ideas but I decided to focus on these in particular:

• Develop the idea of “student co-teachers” as a way to promote independence and confidence

• Log target language use on seating plan to justify reward

• Involve some KS4 disaffected students with the community: adults, link primary schools

• Use extracts of Wikipedia in Spanish to provide a Reading Challenge/ demonstrate phonics rules/use of cognates and near cognates

• Consider setting up one-off “Phonics for parents” workshops to enable parents to support learning homework

• Re-evaluate how effective choral repetition is-practise pronunciation to a beat/music as an alternative (this reminded me of another possible use for Songsmith...)

• Use mirror images/ upside down words when focusing on pronunciation

• Investigate Group Talk and how it can be set up with large KS3 classes

• Look at character cards using the Target Language for role-play practice

• Refresh language mat practice-We used to do this! Produce mats with core language to develop student independence. Good CPD is not always about finding new ideas but about reminding you of the good ideas you used to have...

• Using paintings as stimuli to discuss colours, shapes and feelings as well as introducing key structures like hay/ no hay, tiene/ no tiene in Spanish

• Use real school events like a popular residential trip to discuss what students are going to do (future tense) or did (different sorts of past tense), feelings and opinions

Listening to Eva Lamb’s talk, I also found out about the wide variety of LinkedUp projects as well as the fact that all resources from these projects will be shared very soon.

I was also reminded of the National Spelling Bee Competition which focuses on Year 7. Students have to learn key vocabulary in the language they are studying at school. The challenge consists in translating the words into the foreign language and spell them out loud.
Spelling Bee (Go in past events)
http://www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk/northwest/events.html

In the Show and Tell, my attention was drawn to the following:

• Collaborative stories using mini-vocabulary flashcards with key words like “hier” in French

• Using Wallwisher for homework

• Give students access to podcasts in the Target Languages (extension homework on the VLE?)

• Look at primary practice for inspiration: Use of mini-whiteboards, table set-up, rewards...

• Make more use of Tagxedo (lovely word clouds) and Universed (podcasts, videos, blogs, bookmarks, photos, tags)

• Consider using Xtra-normal or puppets for livening up speaking practice

Last, but not least, I picked up a fantastic free publication on CLIL by The Languages Company

I now need some time to digest and share with colleagues...

ALL Show and Tell, The Language Show, London, Saturday 16th October 2010

2010-10-17T12:36:00.001+01:00

I will be posting more in details about all the great ideas I gathered during the Show and Tell at The Language Show. This is my contribution-a bit ambitious for a 2 minutes chat but I honestly did not go much over 5 minutes!

Using pictures in mfl

View more presentations from Isabelle Jones.

The Language Show, Earls court, London, 15-17th October 2010

2010-10-10T11:46:00.001+01:00

The Language Show is a free yearly event and will be held 15-17th October 2010 at Earls Court, Old Brompton Road, London SW5 9TA.

This is probably one of the largest events of the year for language teachers with taster language lessons, teacher seminars, world cinema and a large exhibition and much more...

On the Saturday, Joe Dale and Helen Myers will host a Show and Tell during the show ( 4.30 – 5.30) and a social event straight afterwards.

The ALL London Committee has found a function room at The Tournament Pub next to the exhibition venue which will be used for the social event.

To register your interest please sign up on the wiki.

This is a great opportunity to meet languages colleagues and exchange ideas in an informal way. The idea is to get lots of different speakers to talk about lots of different things for about 2 minutes, so no need to be an experienced speaker...

But what if they already know what I am talking about?

Once we know something, we always tend to assume everybody else knows it. Maybe they don’t, maybe they do-and you have just reminded them of it. There is surely nothing wrong with that... so come, be refreshed and inspired and enjoy good company!

More information is also available on the ALL London website

See you on Saturday 16th October!

MFL Show and Tell, Saturday 13th November, 10-3pm The Radclyffe School, Oldham.

2010-09-25T22:08:00.000+01:00

The idea of the MFL Show and Tell is to give teachers an opportunity to share good practice on the teaching and learning of languages as well as the use of technology in the MFL classroom in a relaxed, informal environment. This will be the third event organised nationally after a first one in Coventry and a second one in Nottingham.

If you would like to come along as a speaker or attendee, please sign up by adding your name to the wiki and add your details to the page (click on edit, position your cursor in the text, type your details and save). It would be great if you could also say what you would like to talk about or what you would like other people talk about.

This event will be free as it is sponsored by ALL and Links into Languages.

Speakers so far (please volunteer as a speaker-you can just speak for 5-10 minutes)

Isabelle Jones, The Radclyffe School, My languages,Twitter: @icpjones

Mary Cooch, Our Lady's High Preston, Twitter: http://twitter.com/moodlefairy

Joe Dale, independent ICT/MFL consultant, Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom Twitter: @joedale

Helena Butterfield, St. Michael's RC School, The Langwitch Chronicles, Twitter: @langwitch

Attendees (so far):

Isabelle Jones, The Radclyffe School, My languages,Twitter: @icpjones
Joe Dale, independent ICT/MFL consultant, Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom Twitter: @joedale

Mary Cooch, Our Lady's High Preston, Twitter: http://twitter.com/moodlefairy

Marie O'Sullivan, Levenshulme High School, Twitter: @reesiepie

Helena Butterfield, St. Michael's RC School, The Langwitch Chronicles, Twitter: @langwitch

Alex Bellars, Ballard School, Ballard LangBlog, Twitter: @bellaale

Esther Mercier, Longridge HS, twitter @atantot and maybe one teacher from the German exchange!

Saira Ghani, Chiltern Edge School, @sghani

Nigel Yeo, The Radclyffe School, Oldham

Vanessa Parker, The Radclyffe School, Oldham

Fiona Joyce, Ian Ramsey Cof E (Languages College), Stockton-on-Tees, Twitter: @wizenedcrone

Kath Holton, Argoed High School, N Wales, @kath52

Nicola Pearson, Rochdale Sixth Form College, Twitter: @nicpearson

Samantha Lunn, Arnold School, Blackpool, @spanishsam, http://www.languagesresources.co.uk/

Pauline Sheaff, Bolton School Girls' Division, psheaff@girls.bolton.sch.uk

Clare Seccombe, Sunderland LA, @valleseco , Changing Phase

Julia O'Brien, MFL Supply Teacher, Twitter: @Mlleob

Miriam Wall. Manchester Creative and Media Academy, Moston, Manchester, mwall@mcmacademy.com

Catherine Agrain, All Saints College, Dukinfield, c.agrain@allsaints.tameside.sch.uk

Celine Bauer, All Saints College, Dukinfield, c.bauer@allsaints.tameside.sch.uk

Topics of interest (so far):

New GCSE controlled assessments (speaking and writing)

Promotion of Languages

Managing the assessment of speaking skills at KS3

NVQ

GCSE in year 9 successful or not experience and what course next ?

ALL Together For Languages: My Response

2010-09-20T16:08:00.000+01:00

1. I would like the media and the decision-makers to move away from constant reports that we are not good at languages “as a nation”. Good linguistic role-models should be publicized more widely rather than make them look like the geeky exception. I find there is sometimes a snobbish attitude about monolingual people that makes you feel that, if you are making the effort to learn somebody else’s language, you are losing your Britishness and you are somewhat letting the side down… Monolinguism should be portrayed as an exception, not multilinguism. I feel there is also a lot to be done to educate the public so that they do not feel that teaching a child another language from a young age might “confuse” them or “hold them back”.

2. I find it incredible that despite the fact that so many of us are trying so hard to make our subject accessible and interesting, we are always hit by the argument that “language teaching puts most people off learning a language”. There are endless discussions about poor literacy and numeracy skills in the media but never any link with the teaching… I sometimes feel that this attitude is caused by some parents who are not aware of the sweeping changes that have occurred in the teaching of languages since they went to school and their bad memories are passed on to their children…

I cannot understand how languages are considered the least important in the curriculum when they overlap with so many key skills such as literacy and oracy. Then again, a serious information campaign is needed to get parents from all backgrounds to understand that languages are not just useful to order a drink whilst abroad… and to get rid of the “for middle class only” tag.

3. I am very worried that there is currently a very unequal access to studying a language in secondary schools. It seems that unless you are in a language college, where languages have the status of a core subject, the position of languages is far too vulnerable for such a strategically important subject. Some safeguards need to be offered by our government to ensure that studying a language is encouraged in ALL types of schools, as languages should be seen as a core skill. I am very excited at the prospect of an English “bacc” model of reporting exam results but I am also very worried that this would only take into account a GCSE, when it is clearly not an inclusive qualification.

4. Decision makers should reward schools who encourage ALL students to take some kind of qualifications in a foreign language, and not just a GCSE. Qualifications could be weighed but effort to study and take an examination in a language should be acknowledged and rewarded. If not studying a language cannot be used as a shortcut to better looking exam results for schools, there should be every incentive for senior teams in secondary schools to give languages the important place it deserves in the secondary curriculum.