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Speaking is the second language skill, after listening, that we acquire in our native language. It is also known as a productive skill as it requires us to use our vocal tract and brain to correctly produce language through sounds. Most of us will be in agreement that the ultimate goal for learners when learning a new language is the ability to speak it. Let’s face it, we are rather unlikely to write in foreign language when we travel abroad, especially when travelling for pleasure! Naturally, when travelling for business or as part of our profession that is then a different scenario. However, for many language lovers and enthusiasts it is not just about the language acquisition but also about the culture and opportunities to explore different ways of life. Speaking another language allows us to communicate with a variety of people, express our ideas freely and become an active member of a new community. I love the Czech proverb below (it is even on our curriculum map), it really resonates with me. I am sure that many linguists out there will concur with me saying: ‘We become almost a different person when we speak in another language’ – the choice of expressions, our voice, our jokes, our thinking, our whole manner changes… all influenced by the little cultural nuances that we have consciously or unconsciously learnt during the language learning process and experiences of the countries we have visited, spent time in or lived in. It definitely applies to me! So how can we nurture oracy in the classroom? Firstly, to get my students’ point of view when it comes to language learning, I have decided to conduct a short exit ticket survey with my KS3 and KS4 classes to find out what they consider to be essential when learning a new language. I have asked all of them the same question: How do you decide whether you are good at this subject, what is the most important skill when learning a language? The responses from students have been pretty consistent in terms of what they class as the top priority when learning a new language. 92% of my students at KS4 and 86% at KS3 measured their success in learning a new language by their ability to speak it. When we discussed the results  in more detail next lesson, they also voiced their biggest concerns about speaking – such as perceiving it to be very difficult, their lack of confidence, worries about making mistakes and being laughed at… Speaking is a skill which often can get neglected in classroom. It is also a skill in which students lack confidence mostly. Developing good oral skills takes a lot of practice and a lot of time which can be a real challenge for us – educators as the content of the National Curriculum is so vast and the time given for languages on the timetable so limited and not taking into account that lessons need to be spaced out more evenly (i.e. not having a 5 day gap between the lessons)! Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely to change, unless there is some major development on part of the DfE where the status of modern languages becomes more prominent and valued in the U.K. education. How can we move forward and support our learners? The practice that I will outline below is my approach on how I support my students in developing oracy and building their confidence when speaking. During my teaching career, I have observed over and over again that many students struggle to speak or are very hesitant to speak, so over the past 3-4 years, I have spent time reading about and researching different approaches on how to support their speaking skills and as a consequence this is the route that I have taken… Starting from day one, it is crucial that my students learn to produce new sounds as accurately as possible, so developing speaking goes hand in hand with listening – students hearing the sounds and imitating them back by saying them aloud. I am afraid, there is no room for hiding in my classroom. If you are wondering how I get the reluctant or anxious learners to speak – well, I talk to them about learning and about how memory works, I talk to them about forgetting which is natural and inevitable and why making mistakes is so important, I totally take advantage of the fact that I am ‘foreign’ – explaining to them that even after 20 year of living in the U.K., I still make mistakes and mispronounce words and even have some embarrassing moments. I work hard on building an environment where my students feel safe to take risks and build up their confidence. It has been a slow journey, but it is working, with more and more of my quiet students feeling happy to volunteer or even be ‘cold-called’. They know, if they don’t know the answer it is ok to say (in TL): ‘I don’t know that yet.’ – something I have learnt from Patrice Bain and her ‘Powerful Teaching’ (co-authored with Pooja Agarwal). Since September, we have been using E.P.I – a methodology developed by Gianfranco Conti, which has been proving highly effective so far, especially at KS3. The first step when re-designing our SoW we have reduced the content and pretty much stopped using the textbook (we still loosely use some of the topics for guidance making sure the National Curriculum requirements are covered and some of the listening activities). I introduce new vocabulary within a chunk using a Sentence Builder (however, what ever model you use – parallel texts, text book course etc. – the principles should be the same). We model and practice the new language extensively ensuring students know it really well before we move onto more spontaneous speaking without scaffolding. The MARS EARS sequence provides a natural progression. I use Retrieval Practice in all of my lessons, not just at the start of the lesson (I think there is a bit of a misconception about it, some educators thinking it is a new fancy word for the old starter activity). Retrieval can happen at any point in the lesson and the various activities we have at our disposal offer a plethora of opportunities for it naturally. To re-enforce  learning and recall, I regularly set learning (retrieval) HWK for my students – see my post on Making Homework meaningful and purposeful. This is, in my opinion, the key for ensuring my students have the necessary vocabulary and structures for practising first scaffolded and then un-scaffolded speaking tasks. I don’t set any writing for HWK as many students often resort to ‘cheating’ via google translate so learning is very limited. At KS3 these are some of the activities I use rather regularly: Narrow reading – flooded input – used as a listening but also as reading aloud activity – supporting pronunciation. Could be also used as translation activity – the teacher saying the text in L1 and the students matching it to L2. Oral ping – pong – this could be done as a written translation task, but I often use it as oral activity – students translating the sentences verbally taking turns and checking the accuracy and me – the teacher their pronunciation. Trapdoor – is a great game which offers students opportunities to rehearse and practise the same structures over and over again. * adapted from a resource shared online Battleships – students creating combinations of sentences – verbally – ensuring correct verb conjugation. Can be used to practice various grammatical structures such as tenses, adjectival agreements etc. Walk thru ‘Say it better’ could be used to make it more challenging. ‘Catch the dog game’ – I have been using this game for years – it could be used as RP/speaking practice at any stage in the lesson. I have a bank of interleaved questions (various topics) that I use with each year group. Soft toy dog is thrown to a student with a question he/she has to answer on the spot, firstly led by me – the teacher, later on the student picks another student asking him/her a question. This is a great way for students to practise not only answering questions but also asking questions which is a very important skill too. I often use it for practising tenses. Board games – snakes and ladders, connect four, dice games – the first template I would use with my KS3, the other two are from www.teachitlanguages.co.uk which are more suitable for KS4. Digital tools – with all of the recent changes in teaching, I, like many of us have become much better at using technology to our advantage and to enrich our delivery, they certainly can be great for enhancing learning and motivation – my favourite ones are – Wheel of names – I usually use key words and students need to make a sentence using the key word or a question which students have to answer and Flippity. I like to use 2 or 3 tools trying not to overload my students.                  The key for me is that they serve the purpose of learning and are not just a new gimmick. Some tools can be engaging and ‘fun’ but have a very low value in terms of learning and acquisition, so we should be wary of it. * template was shared on social media The work we do at KS3 in terms of oracy is a vital stepping stone for developing fluency and automacy at KS4. It is an essential skill and as mentioned above rated by my students as the one on which they measure their success in the subject as well as one of the most important criterion for motivation and whether the students chose the subject for their GCSE. The whole purpose of language is to serve as a communication tool which is in its most primary form executed orally. In my next post I will concentrate on how I develop my students’ oracy at KS4. I have put a lot of work into how we approach and coach students in independent speaking which has been positively commented on during learning walks conducted by the SLT and the CEO from within our Academy Trust. I would be very interested to hear what strategies colleagues use to develop speaking skills and oracy, so please get in touch as I am always keen to explore new ideas and to learn from fellow professionals. Credits: * If the original template/resource was shared by you, could you please let me know so I can credit you. Thank you. ** other templates created by Flo Rence and  board game resources from http://www.teachitlanguages.co.uk/ #communication #developing #oracy #KS3 #scaffolding #forgetting #environment #speakingskills #memory

Following on from my previous post – Developing speaking skills and oracy at KS3, this post will be focussing on my approach to the preparation for GCSE speaking examination, the practice and the support of oral skills at KS4 level. Building students confidence in speaking is crucial for successful communication! I am a firm believer that if we practise and expose our learners to oral skills consistently from the ‘get go’ when they start with their language learning journey in year 7, we will nurture and ‘mould’ more confident speakers for the GCSE course and beyond. It is inevitable that at KS4 I, like any other language teacher, have to  prepare my students for their GCSE examinations. It is my responsibility to ensure they have the skills and techniques needed to succeed, reach and maximise their potential in their examinations. Unfortunately, the way the GCSE exam system is designed, is not always the best way to support the natural communications skills and linguistic competence. Students often have to demonstrate they can use key grammatical structures, such as variety of tenses, justified opinions, subjunctive, comparatives, superlatives etc…, thus often resulting in structures and language that can be artificial, decontextualized and unnatural with little relevance or value for acquiring productive, linguistic competence (i.e. in German using future tense where native speaker would use naturally present tense, amongst others). In the past 3-4 years we were fortunate enough at my school to start our GCSE course in year 9, which meant that we have had enough time to focus on the productive skills of speaking and writing at the exam level in more detail. The meaningful and collaborative design of our SOW and lesson planning as well as having sufficient time gave us the opportunity to teach 3 units per year ensuring that deeper knowledge is embedded in LM. First half term of each term, we dedicate to teaching and drilling of the key vocabulary, grammatical structures, practising and developing receptive skills and recalling and/or restudying previous knowledge from KS3 that might have been forgotten. This forgetting is the main reason, that we have been focussing so much on embedding effective Retrieval Practice into our teaching from KS3! Naturally, speaking and writing skills are also an integral part of these lessons. Some of the activities mentioned in my previous post are also used at KS4 especially, various board games. However, having this time in our KS4 curriculum enabled us to dedicate the second half term of each term specifically to speaking and writing practise with the focus on the preparation for the GCSE exam. In year 11 we provide our students with a revision folder containing revision timetable, roleplay cards, photo cards, a list with possible conversation questions, translation booklet, KOs as well as a link to a Padlet with additional resources such as Quizlet links, websites and apps. We also explicitly teach our students revision skills. For more detail, please see my previous post on Metacognition, self-regulated learning and revision. On the first glance, many of my students find the Roleplays and Picture-based tasks confusing and disconcerting, so here is how we unpick them together, with clear modelling and step by step approach led by the teacher. Roleplay (RP) Firstly, on the white board I display the student version of the RP and we analyse it together – we look at what each symbol means, we translate the prompts (any new vocabulary will be noted and learnt – students will notice as we go over more RP cards that the vocabulary can be rather repetitive), predict what questions they could be asked for each prompt – we do this in L1 and practise the possible answers in L2. After the initial modelling, I show the students the teacher version of the card and we look at how close we were with our predictions. I think it is essential to do this with our students as the prompts on the cards can be ambiguous and our learners should be taught some strategies on how to tackle the task. Only after this modelling stage students are given their own set of RP cards with a copy of the student version on one side and teacher version on the other side. They use the student version to prepare (I suggest they spend only cca. 3 minutes of their preparation time on RP and dedicate the remaining time to the PT preparation as it is worth more marks). In pairs they then practice taking turns in being a student or a teacher. I strongly discourage students to write their answers down (I have noticed that when they wrote the answers down, they were then more likely to read them back to me rather then answer them spontaneously from the memory). In the next stage, I practise with them myself, I cold call students and only ask one question each student. I don’t conduct the entire RP just with one of them. This way all students are involved (no opting out) as they don’t know who will be asked/called to answer a question and it also adds an element of unpredictability. You might ask: ‘What about the less confident or weaker students?’ My classes are all mixed ability, so like many, I will have in my class a student with a target of 3 and a student with target of 9. However, I believe, we know our students and in order to build their confidence we always have the option to ask the appropriate question based on the ability of the student, thus ensuring differentiation happens in our classes. We can nurture their confidence, allow them to give a shorter answer and show them how to make it better without causing cognitive overload. The modelling stage also gives opportunities to address any gaps in knowledge, i.e. if students are unsure how to build questions, we can go over the process together. Nurturing a learning environment where students feel safe, understand the metacognition (how it can support them in improving their learning) and are reassured that making mistakes and not knowing ‘yet’ is acceptable  – as long as they use this knowledge to further their learning, is the key to success and will have a positive impact on their motivation too! Picture-based task (PT) We approach the PT the same way we tackle the RP. When analysing the PT, I encourage my students to make a note of the grammatical structure that is required for each bullet point as well as to jot some key ideas they would like to talk about. I explicitly teach them how to develop and extend their answers, especially if they say I don’t like something, teaching them (once they answered the question) how to steer the conversation to ‘ but I like …, I do this … or my friend/sister …’ to expand on their thoughts, as well as ensuring they link their thoughts and ideas using linking words. Please note that if a student gets stuck, they always have the option to say ” I don’t know the answer yet.”, at that point I would ask another student to provide the answer, but make sure that at some stage in the lesson I will go back to the original student and ask the same question again. All students are aware of this – so they are not “off the hook” and the “going back” ensures students are listening, paying attention and learning from one another! Modelling of the task: First bullet point – describing the picture – we use PALMW or if some students struggle to remember the acronym, they use dual coding instead. Second bullet point – expressing an opinion – we brainstorm some opinion phrases – simple ones to begin with and look at how we can improve and develop them (using justifications, specific connectives such as ‘weil, dass, wenn, als, obwohl, da…) Third bullet point – using past tense – we use retrieval practice to check whether there are any gaps in forming the past tense – perfect and imperfect tense, as well as some key past participles. Fourth bullet point – using future tense – similar approach as with the past tense – I often use the ‘Catch the dog’ game mentioned in my previous post when retrieving and practising tenses. Fifth bullet point – expressing an opinion. The complexity of the language depends on the tier (foundation or higher). In my view practice is detrimental to performance! Before Covid we would have roundtable oral practice every time, especially in year 11 once all content was covered. Pre-Covid my students would be seated in groups of four, for our roundtable we would join tables together so on each side of the classroom I would have a foundation roundtable (on the left) and higher roundtable (on the right). As students have extensively practised since year 9, at this stage of their journey, they were confident to answer most questions, complete any RP and PT on the spot, which visitors often found amazing (especially as students didn’t read their answers or even relied on notes)! I suppose, we were practising retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving without consciously being aware of it. Here, the saying: ‘Practice makes permanent!’ really applies! Being part of the roundtable gave also confidence to the quieter or more anxious students as the rules of the table were that the members supported anyone who got stuck, coaching them and providing some simple ideas. As students listened to each other’s responses they were also learning from each other! I would be circulating between the tables and listen to students practising, picking up a card and asking students question each, listening to their responses and giving immediate feedback, addressing any mistakes/pronunciation issues, but often also asking students in the group to give peer feedback as well: What was good about the answer? How could it be improved/extended? General Conversation For General Conversation, I provide students with a list of some possible questions – these would be tiered (foundation and higher), in preparation students complete these in writing as they prove useful not just for their oral exam but also writing exam and can be often interconnected. I model some examples on the board or under a visualiser – asking the students to give me examples of some very simple sentences first. We look at how we can extend them within using TMP (time, manner, place), justifying them using variety of connectives, change them into different tenses or a sentence using a modal verb. This provides scaffolding for my weaker students and demonstrates how to tackle the task, step by step. Students also practise more complex structures, “wow phrases” and idioms. Idioms are important for the top grades, but it is essential that students use them in the right context. As an examiner I have seen many pieces of writing where an idiom has been put in just to tick a box without it making sense! Unfortunately, we do not have a foreign speaking teaching assistant and we haven’t had one for many years now due to the costs, so all of the practise is really on the class teacher. However, I have been lucky that some of our students who went on to study languages further at the university, have come back to do some work experience with us as well as having associate teachers who can support some of our students for one to one practise when needed. There are also opportunities to use Blended Learning and sites such as Flipgrid, Qwiqr or TEAMs to set oral presentations as homework, but I personally am wary of using them too much as I can never be sure if students are reading or responding spontaneously from the memory, especially as we have to give them the option of hiding their faces with stickers. They are great for students to practise if done correctly, but they do not replace real face to face conversation – dialogue. In conclusion, I was really disappointed last year that after all of the hard work, students didn’t get a chance to demonstrate their speaking skills in their GCSE exam and feel the same way this year. I understand that many felt relieved they don’t have to conduct them, but I believe that the main purpose of learning a language is the ability to speak it! For me at the heart of language learning is communication which is in most instances conducted verbally! I would be very interested to hear what other strategies colleagues use to prepare their students for their GCSE  examination, so please get in touch. @j_st_88 has created and shared amazing speaking booklets in Spanish, with his permission I have adapted them to German. There are available for download here or on my resource page. Speaking Booklet Foundation here. Speaking Booklet Higher here. #Picturebasedtasks #communication #immediatefeedback #oracy #metacognition #KS4 #forgetting #Generalconversation #Modelling #Roleplays #GCSE #RetrievalPractice #speakingskills

Live modelling is considered to be one of the most powerful strategies in the teacher’s toolkit and I absolutely agree! Through live modelling I can take my students through a step-by-step process of completing the task at hand. These steps are process driven and they support students’ metacognitive thinking. This is the first stage of scaffolding where I ‘think aloud‘ and show/explain to them how to ‘think’ their way through the task. Modelling and scaffolding allows me – the expert teacher to guide and stretch my novice learners. This instructional strategy allows my students to learn by observing my thought process. The aim of this instruction is to engage my students in imitation of a particular behaviour that encourages learning. *Modelling of metacognitive regulation is essential to encourage our learners to be more independent. Planning stage (before the task) – Have I seen this type of a question before? What strategies can I employ to tackle it? What should I do first? Monitoring stage (during the task) – Am I on track? How do I know? Do I need to change my approach? Evaluation stage (after the task) – What worked well? What have I learned that I can use in future tasks? Over the time and with plenty of practice fewer of my learners will need this type of demonstration to tackle the task. With the support of guided practice they will be able to complete the task independently and apply what they have learned to similar tasks they encounter in the future. They will be able to transfer these skills, strategies and metacognitive knowledge. Below you can watch me ‘live’ modelling a writing and a reading task under my visualiser. I have recorded my screen whilst going through the process, so any student absent from my lesson or any student who would like to re-watch the metacognitive approach again, can do so on demand. It is a resource that I can use at any time in the future and in the past, I have also set it as HWK to watch before an assessment. My students have found it extremely useful and feedback has been very positive, so much so that colleagues from other departments were interested to see it and use it for their subject. Live modelling – 80-90 word writing task Live modelling – GCSE reading task – TL Some examples of students’ feedback: *Reference: Jennifer Webb: The Metacognition Handbook Exam papers: German GCSE Edexel Sample papers 2021 #guidedpractice #livemodelling #metacognition #scaffolding

Learning and building students’ vocabulary to develop fluency and eventually mastery of the studied language requires a lot of effort, time and practice. It involves a lot of hard work and patience and it is not always fun! It can be boring! Every learner has a passive (receptive) vocabulary and active (productive) vocabulary. The passive vocabulary comprises of words which we decode and understand when we hear them in speech or read them in a text. The active vocabulary is made up of the words that we can produce and use when speaking or writing. Our passive vocabulary repertoire is much bigger than our active one and this is completely normal and expected whether it is in our native language L1 or in our second language L2. However, moving words from passive vocabulary into active vocabulary also takes a lot of effort, time and practice! My students often find the receptive skill of listening a real challenge, especially when they have to listen to recordings. The speed of the utterances, the variety of accents/voices/ages/genders and the inability to see the speaker to help them with the small nuances that support the decoding of the message(s) can be extremely testing and at times demotivating. Language is a versatile tool which transforms with its perceived purpose. For example, when watching clips, my students can understand the gist and develop their passive vocabulary through comprehensible input and other clues provided via visuals much easier. For the receptive function, it is all about Comprehensible Input (CI). However, comprehension is not enough when students want to express themselves through speaking or writing. For this to happen the words need to travel from their passive lexicon into their active lexicon so they can retrieve them when needed and produce comprehensible utterances quickly. For this transfer to happen students need abundant opportunities to speak and write in TL. They need to be able to think of a word quickly (semantic retrieval), they need to be able to use it accurately in a sentence – have a syntactic awareness associated with it’s function in a sentence as well as to know whether the word is appropriate for the purpose of the communication at hand – Nation’s (2013) – form – meaning – use (we all had our students choosing the wrong word for the wrong context – I had once student talking about ‘Der Grundstück’ – the plot of land when talking about the plot of a film). So… how can we make the process of learning and expanding students’ vocabulary more effective? It is not a surprise that students that have larger vocabulary can perform better whether it is in assessments or in spontaneous situations, they demonstrate more confidence and are less worried about taking risks and having a go. This doesn’t mean that what they produce is 100% accurate. We can communicate a lot with a rich vocabulary whilst still making grammatical errors, however, we can not communicate a lot with perfect Grammar and small vocabulary repertoire. In second language acquisition it is important to consider the relation between implicit and explicit acquisition. Many researchers believe that most learning happens implicitly (Krashen, 1982 – CI), other practitioners suggest language skill is better developed through explicit instruction, modelling, practice and feedback. *Steve Smith (researchEd article, 2019) advises teachers to ‘hedge their bets’ by ensuring they do two things in their lessons: Exploit natural acquisition mechanisms by using as much TL as possible in meaningful & interesting ways in all 4 skills. Exploit the gradual acquisition of skills using certain amount of explanation & structured practice of high-frequency areas of vocabulary and grammar * Gianfranco Conti provides the best examples of marrying these two principles. For each year group, he uses a set of core items (universals) – chunks, patterns that are taught via implicit lesson routines such as texts and production tasks accompanied by SB scaffolds which facilitate the process of embedding them into LTM (see reference to full article below). Introduction and embedding of vocabulary: To introduce new vocabulary, at my school, we use sentence builders (a là Conti). We spend around 6 weeks (4 or 5 lessons a fortnight) on a unit of work. This involves extensive modelling of the pronunciation of the new words/sounds and structures followed by abundant opportunities for practice in order to manipulate it in the form of modified output. To see more information on our modelling phase, see for a detailed post here and for receptive processing phase here. Vocabulary is also regularly retrieved in class via MWB. Sentence Builder – yr.9 Each of our sentence builders is linked to a Quizlet set and Carousel Learning set enabling students to practise the new structures (in chunks, so vocabulary is learnt in context) outside of the classroom as well. Thus it is retrieved and reinforced to ensure that it is embedded in students’ LTM. Grammar is being taught explicitly at later stage, however, students often spot differences and patterns and ask curious questions, which we address immediately, when they inquire about them (Lexicogrammar). Carousel Learning has been developed from the idea of the Retrieval Roulette (Adam Boxer) and the algorithm allows for interleaving of the topics/questions – this can be a random choice or the teacher can decide what question should be quizzed. It gives you – the teacher a thorough analysis of which questions/topics students knew and struggled with. If you already have your Retrieval Roulettes/spreadsheets they can be easily imported in. Quizlet set Carousel Learning We check students’ learning every lesson via Retrieval Practice mostly using Retrieval Roulettes/grids (10 questions – mixture of words/sentences/chunks/Grammar points – L1→L2/L2→L1). If I have a group that is performing really well, sometimes I ask them to pre-learn some chunks/sets (flipped learning). A new platform/website created by Martin Lapworth (creator of Textivate) called SentenceBuilders has been recommended by many colleagues as an effective tool which supports students in their learning of the SBs. The SBs are based on Gianfranco Conti’s Sentence Builders books and the website is a collaboration of the two creators. The German section is being populated so I am hoping to test it soon myself. Recently, I have watched a webinar organised by Linguascope, where @richwestsoley was presenting about AnkiApp. An app, I have been familiar with, but haven’t used that much myself. After watching the webinar, I am convinced that it is an amazing tool for my higher achievers and more independent/autonomous learners. The app is very efficient in terms of spaced practice. As a bit of a caveat, personally, I think it is more suitable for more mature learners (AS/A-Level) as students need to be able to judge their learning honestly – they need to judge how confident they were with their answer. Based on this answer the algorithm decides when the card comes up again (spacing effect). AnkiApp Why is the app so good? (shared by Richard West Soley via Linguascope) Desktop (FREE) – web version works in phone browser too http://apps.ankiweb.net Uses algorithm to space your learning – great for spaced practice Can mix individual words and full phrases in context Can be used with students: export your decks and share them with your class Public decks are also available Add-on to extend Anki: http://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/2.1 Forvo.com Plug-In (native speakers): http://ankiweb.net/shared/info/858591644 Awesome TTS (computerised voices): http://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1436550454 Image Occlusion (add images): http://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1374772155 For effective communication we need vocabulary – passive-active/receptive-productive/high frequency-content… From experience, for vocabulary to ‘stick’, it is important that words are learnt in context and not in isolation! There have been many discussions about high frequency vocabulary (NCELP/Ofsted MFL review), especially about the most frequent 2000 words. However, what should be the high frequency words for students at schools? Are they based on the spoken or written language? Who is to decide? We can say a lot or a little using just high frequency vocabulary. We also need the content vocabulary. How do we choose the content vocabulary? To make language learning appealing to our learners the content needs to be relevant and of interest to them – the learners… *References: Stephen Krashen: Principles and Practice in second language acquisition, 1982 Steve Smith: What do we need to know about second-language learning?, researchEd, June 2019 Gianfranco Conti: Tempus Fugit – Four strategies to maximise MFL curriculum time, The Language Gym [blog], 2017 James A. Maxwell: Making every MFL lesson count, 2020 #comprehensibleinput #SentenceBuilders #vocabulary #productive #retrievalroulette #RetrievalPractice #receptive #passive #listening #active

The underpinning principle of effective teaching is challenge! Students rise or fall according to the level of expectation that we set for them, from the curriculum design, the culture and ethos we established in our classroom and the strategies we employed to ensure they meet these aspirational targets. We should not shy away from embracing struggle but provide scaffolding if necessary. Each student brings with them varying degrees of knowledge, cultural experiences, and preconceptions. We need to ensure all students are challenged in their language learning. We, ourselves will be challenged to adopt the most effective teaching approaches and strategies as well. Provision of challenge is a complex affair, it is long term, and it should be overreaching everything, it should run through everything, culture, strategies, routines, academic register, the language we use to communicate expectation to our students… Challenge is defined as the provision of work which causes students to think deeply and engage in healthy struggle in a manner that allows them, overtime, to learn effectively and affords our students opportunities to develop the procedural knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, discuss rules of the language and develop automaticity as well as manipulate the language quickly and fluently. In order to anchor high challenge, setting single and aspirational objectives whilst providing scaffolding so all students have opportunity to reach them is pivotal. Example of single and aspirational objective The objective as set above allows students to be exposed to the language in context, offers more sophisticated structures, the focus on justification draws attention to a particular function of language and aligns with the GCSE specification. Language learning is functional and cumulative and it is highly likely that students have already encountered justified opinions in a different context, so they are building on their prior knowledge, thus modifying and extending their schemas in LTM, i.e. in German – using extended sentences (weil + WO) – all students are expected to listen/speak/read and write in TL effectively without limitations! Strong and ambitious curriculum provides anchoring for challenge; dipping into GCSE work in year 7, 8 or 9, taking the expected knowledge base, concepts, skills … and teaching just beyond that as well as exposing students at an early stage to the most challenging concept of assessment guidelines will challenge students in their learning. It can be also very motivating for students, knowing that they are undertaking work which is above their expected level. However a caveat is needed. We must be careful to build in the rationale behind it: ‘I believe in you! I believe in your potential to aspire and achieve high! If we use our prior knowledge and skills that we have already acquired, if we demonstrate resilience and perseverance, there is a strong chance we succeed, your success and self-efficacy are important to me!’ The need for our students to experience success is crucial. In order to ensure optimal learning outcomes, students need to obtain high success rate.(B. Rosenshine, Principles of instruction) So, what does high challenge teaching look like in my classroom? An example of  a high-level, high-challenge reading activity may look like this: yr.8 This activity points students’ attention to core vocabulary of places in town, but it also emphasises linguistic function (opinions and justification, comparisons) and encourages them to use their linguistic knowledge and skills. Retrieval Practice – Why? – boosts students’ learning and strengthens their memory, makes forgetting less likely to occur. Click here to see examples. Spacing it out – Why?- the benefits of effective spacing in SLA – SLA is reliant on the cumulative build up of knowledge and dependent on our students making connections between new content and prior learning. This is significant. Importance of environment – Why? – to allow our students to marvel at the excellence around them – What is it they aspire to? What does excellence look like?                          Showing the best work from the most successful students to demonstrate the high expectations we have of them. To show them what they are aiming for. To challenge them to draft/re-draft/edit/annotate/improve their own work. Click here to see examples. Questioning – Why? – to elicit the process – the why and how not just the what? Why do we ask questions? To retrieve information from memory to strengthen it. To test the understanding of a concept – grammatical structure, language function… To develop and deepen the understanding of a concept. To provide opportunities for output. To highlight links to prior learning. To foster similarities and differences between L1 and L2. To give opportunities to respond to unprepared situations in L2. To give opportunities to practise – pronunciation, structures, skills and function. More on questioning here. While there are specific teaching strategies and techniques that we can employ to ensure that challenge is appropriate for all students at a given time, the concept itself is much more to do with our teaching approaches. We know our students, we know their strengths and weaknesses, we know where we need to push and where we need to adapt our teaching to support them all! Too often, I see posts from colleagues asking for specific activities that provide/demonstrate challenge! However, I don’t think it is that simple, each class, school and context is different and like scaffolding, challenge comes from knowing our students and from a curriculum design that demonstrates progression which in return provides challenge. Ofsted refers to a curriculum that provides ‘ambition’ for all. I, personally, don’t know how I would define this ‘ambition’ or what this ‘ambition’ should look like… It is too abstract a concept; each one of us, each context might see ambition differently… What I do know however, is whether my students are working and thinking hard and whether they are or are not making progress. This doesn’t mean they are all perfect students and they are all on an upward trajectory. It is still a battle, but I still enjoy fighting it and welcome every little or bigger victory that comes with it. References: James A Maxwell: Making every MFL lesson count (2019) Shaun Allison & Andy Tharby: Making every lesson count (2017) #Challenge #questioning #RetrievalPractice

The discussion about what is the best approach when teaching grammar in MFL is always a ‘hot seat’ topic and at times many of us will have to agree to disagree as we all have our own views and experiences which on a practical level, sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with the research into SLA – each learner and school context is unique therefore different approaches will be more suitable for the diversity of these contexts. In this post, I would like to discuss the differing points of view … I believe that the purpose of learning a language is to be able to communicate in it. Many times, students tell me: ‘ I would love to study German in the college, but I just want to learn to speak it well so I can use it with my other STEM subjects, I don’t want to analyse literature and learn Grammar.’ However, in the practice, for many teachers and leaders in the schools, this is not as straightforward as it might seem, especially with the pressures of delivering results and achieving good grades. Effective grammar teaching is essential for successful language learning, and it is important to build in time to our SoW to teach grammar well from the start. This can be rather difficult within the time constraints of the timetable and the lesson. Ergo, teaching of Grammar can take a variety of forms such as: Lexicogrammar: a level of linguistic structure where lexis (vocabulary and grammar or syntax) combine into one, they are not seen as independent but rather mutually dependent, with one level interfacing with the other (Sardhina, 2019). This is the approach observed in Conti’s E.P.I. methodology. Another approach which is more traditional, similar to the NCELP approach, is explicit grammar teaching – a teaching method that takes form as the centre, it puts the emphasis on purposefully learning grammatical rules so they can be used accurately and effectively as a language ingredient. Rather than allowing students to develop grammatical awareness through application of structures or letting them to simply work out correct answers to fill in the gaps in a grammar exercise through the context, students should be taught and should learn to correctly recognise and reproduce grammar structures through their understanding of how the principles of these structures work. However, teaching it explicitly will not suit all our learners. To embed grammar fully into students LTM, it has to be practised extensively via all four skills. From personal experience, this often happens via the reading and writing, but not as much through the listening and speaking skill. This is especially important, in a skill such as listening, where students need to be able to recognise grammatical patterns in a sentence within a speech and arrange them within the context to aid not only comprehension but also acquisition of the new structure or chunk. It is also rather common to observe lesser grammatical accuracy in spoken language than in written language. With my Academy context in mind, this is how we approach grammar in our classrooms: When I started to teach, some 17 years ago, my approach to grammar teaching was explicit. This is how I was taught grammar myself, as a student. On a personal level, I have to admit, it suited me as I was an academic student and I needed to understand how the language works and links, plus I had the discipline to memorise the patterns and study beyond the walls of the classroom. This was the way I was taught to teach it during my PGCE course, and it was also confirmed through the observations of my mentors and colleagues. On reflection, it is fair to say that this approach has worked for small proportion of my most academic students. Some researchers (Ullman, 2006 in Smith&Conti, Memory, 2021) believe that vocabulary and grammar are processed differently. Vocabulary being stored in declarative memory, whereas grammar such as i.e., verb endings, in procedural memory. From the research, it is known that procedural memory takes longer to establish and even though our students may be able to recite verb paradigms and may appear to know/explain the rules from their declarative memory, I have observed too many times that they actually could not use it effectively or consistently from their procedural memory. Too often, I have seen students completing grammar exercises competently during lesson practice (completing their grammar worksheets correctly), thinking they have ‘got it’, only to find out when completing an independent piece of work, they have failed to apply their verb endings, tenses, or word order correctly! They could not transfer their declarative knowledge into their procedural knowledge. As a teacher, I never see myself as a ‘finished product’! In the languages community, there is so much knowledge and good practice shared so generously which often accounts for one of the best CPDs available out there! I learn and develop myself continuously, so when I came across the lexicogrammar approach, I was ready to learn and try it to see what impact it would have on my students’ outcomes. As many colleagues who follow this methodology, we introduce the new language via sentence builders which are essentially chunks of language (Roshenshine’s Principles of Instruction: Principle 2). example of a sentence builder These chunks of language are extensively practised during the Modelling/Awareness raising/ Receptive processing and Structured production phase (I wrote separate posts on these phases in my blog, so have a look for more detail, I have linked them) of the M.A.R.S.E.A.R.S. sequence. During the structured production phase, we start looking at patterns more closely, this is referred to by G. Conti as Pop-up Grammar. For example, our students learn the phrase ‘ich möchte’ (I would like) in year 7 when are we talking about ordering food in a café or a restaurant, however, the conditional is not taught explicitly until year 9. I often find, that at this stage (sometimes even earlier, depending on class’s attainment) students start making observations and asking questions themselves, such as the differences in word order, verb endings or genders. Only after this phase, during the Expansion stage, are the structures learnt in greater depth and practised with the new and old vocabulary; we work on grammar explicitly and focus on generative processing and students expand to language patterns. We use less scaffolding (SB) and encourage our students to think deeply. Having said that, I would not claim that there is a specific time when we should move onto explicit teaching of grammar. As mentioned at the start of this post, each context and class is different. I have had classes, where I have been teaching grammar explicitly very early on and this was to accommodate my students’ desire for wanting to know the ‘why’ and ‘how’. I firmly believe in adaptive teaching and there definitely is not a ‘one fits all’ approach. It is fantastic to get inspiration from other colleagues and to try different things, however, we have to bear in mind our own unique context and therefore a curriculum that is well-designed, thought through and sequenced is crucial. For our learners to embed grammatical structures in their LTM, they need to be interleaved throughout and students need to encounter them numerous times in different contexts. For more on the curriculum and lesson sequencing see the CURRICULUM page on my blog or if your school subscribes to National College, you can watch my session on Secondary Modern Languages: Lesson-to-Lesson Sequencing and Adaptive Short-term Planning in Line with Teachers’ Standards. #declarativeknowledge #lessonsequencing #proceduralknowledge #Curriculum #deliberatepractice #memory #Grammar

Recently, I have read ‘The Feedback Pendulum’ by Michael Chiles which analyses different types of feedback and its research based effectiveness. As the author says ‘Power of feedback is determined by the power of follow-up’. There is a great deal of research on feedback with many studies showing that it has very high effects on learning (metacognition), but caution is needed as some studies also indicate that feedback can have a negative effect or even make things worse (EEF report). Therefore it is important to understand the potential benefits and limitations of it. The problem most teachers encounter is that we can spend a long time on writing/giving feedback to our students only to discover that it didn’t have the desired impact. Often, because of the pressure for results, students are mostly heavily interested in how many marks they scored or what grade they have achieved and just skim the comments we provided on how to improve, deepen and develop their work/learning further. Many of us have spent hours and hours on marking and writing lengthy feedback comments because it was demanded by our school’s marking policy with the perception of “the more detailed comment you have provided the better”, in assumption that this will impart a high quality feedback which will then consequently have a high impact on students learning and progress! However, there is finally a shift in the thinking, a recognition that feedback is not about how much you write in a student’s book but how effective it is in securing students learning and moving them forward. The problem with long written feedback is, a teacher setting too many targets on how to improve and develop students’ work which causes cognitive overload! Students often don’t know what to focus on first. So focussing on development of one structure (tense, WO, verb endings…) is more productive and manageable. The focus is also on the importance to reduce teachers’ work load with regards to marking and on how and what type of feedback we bestow on our learners in order for it to have the desired impact. Most schools are now moving away from ‘marking policy’ to ‘feedback strategy’ which aims to support students learning but also teachers well-being. I believe that feedback should be provided when and as necessary and not to timescale. In fact, in the classroom we provide feedback constantly, whether it is through our body language, gestures, facial expressions or verbally. It is a critical element, without it how will students know whether they know or don’t know the material of study? How will they and the teacher know how to close the gap in their knowledge? It assists with reviewing and reinforcing what our learners have learnt. In Language learning on a classroom level – when introducing new language or structures it is crucial that our students know if they are pronouncing the sounds and constructing new structures correctly. In this case immediate feedback – corrective feedback which requires little time is essential especially in terms of metacognition – it needs to be quick and accurate. Dependent on task, this type of feedback also supports development of procedural skills and is more powerful at the task level. Feedback is also important for correct answers not just incorrect as it reinforces and confirms knowledge and keeps students motivated as well. Corrective feedback through indirect error correction using prompts can get students to correct themselves (i.e. in German WO with perfect tense, opinions with ‘weil’ or in speaking asking ‘Wie bitte?’) and recall correct application in the future. Elaborative feedback – explaining why an answer is correct – for example in grammatical structures, formation of tenses, word order, genders, conjugation of verbs, declension – is beneficial for students’ transfer knowledge to new context and topics. Like in any subject also in languages classroom, reflection is extremely important, the more learners spend on reflecting on their learning the more automatic it will become – in L2 acquisition we are striving for the automacity – all our tasks, if well planned, are geared to guide our students to develop this skill, however it takes a long time and lot of work. Delayed feedback – often provided next lesson, as research says is beneficial for long-term retention as it reduces interference – allows the initial mistake to be forgotten and then re-encoded with no interference. It also aids the transfer of learning. It involves greater degree of processing therefore it is more powerful at the process level. Making mistakes is ok, it is how we learn, it supports the development of learner’s metacognition. Giving constructive advice how a student can move forward and achieve his/her goal has the potential to double the impact of learning. These are the types of feedback that I have been exploring in my classroom: Verbal feedback: ‘live’ in class during the teaching process – immediate/corrective – we do this all the time! using digital tools such as: Qwiqr which I have been using for feedback on our written CAE and my students liked it very much as they felt it was personal – the paper had 4 sections for foundation and 3 sessions for higher – each of my recoding was around 5 mins – there is no way I could write so much and frankly I doubt my students would be keen on reading long text. I have chosen one or two elements of the paper I wanted them to focus on improving (the ones which would have the highest impact on their grade in this case) and provided them with concrete point(s) – structure(s) and vocabulary they needed to apply to move their work forward. There are other tools teachers use; amongst others vocaroo, onenote, flipgrid or mote… essentially all very similar in their purpose. Whole class feedback: this is something we are exploring as a department in more depth at the moment to make feedback more effective and ensuring students engage with it as we have found writing long individual comments was very time consuming – had a huge impact on workload but only small impact on students’ learning! We designed 2 customised templates that we are starting to use – one for year 7 and the second for year 8-11 covering structures and content. Examples of whole class feedback An excellent example of feedback template on assessment has been designed by Elena Diaz @TeacheryDiaz who used her 20 keys as feedback criteria – it is very thorough and provides a clear guidance and steps for students to follow. I have been permitted to adapt her keys (originally in Spanish to German) and below you can see her original version with a link to her blog where you can download the templates (click on her template) and my slightly adapted version. Elena’s assessment feedback template Adapted template Peer and self-assessment: as M. Chiles discusses in his opening chapter there are three feedback triggers of truth, identity and relationship to consider. When I trialled it myself, my experience has been similar to his. Either the feedback is positive because students are friends so they have positive relationship or if they are not there might be other issues/conflicts and student will request a second opinion via the teacher. Students often don’t see their peers as an expert so they question the validity or quality of the feedback. I, personally don’t think it is wise to ask students to provide a peer feedback on an assessment – high stakes with marks or grades awarded – students are not the experts. However, as suggested in the book we could ask them to provide ‘guided peer feedback’ to support and enhance each others learning. Previously, when I was dabbling into peer feedback myself, I didn’t provide a clear structure for peer feedback in my classroom, this is something I will be addressing in my practice to see whether my classes would benefit from it. I also think it is important to think and plan which students to pair up together in order to make it as effective as possible, walk students through the process, making sure they know what the criteria are and give them plenty of opportunities to practise. LIFT (Learner Initiated Feedback Technique) is a strategy mentioned in the new Smith/Conti book on Memory What every language teacher should know – which I find intriguing – it is a good example of a metacognitive strategy – students write annotations/questions in their work regarding grammatical accuracy of their task (i.e. should I use ‘mit dem Auto’ or ‘bei dem Auto’) when expressing how they travelled. This informs us – teachers about our students’ difficulties and encourages a conversation which should make the correction more memorable. During the remote teaching, I as many of us have, been using what I call ‘acknowledgement feedback’ – positive comment (Great detailed work! etc.) in response to the work the student has submitted, certificate for the hard work and effort – normally classed as an example of ineffective feedback as it doesn’t move learning forward. However, in the current situation this type of feedback plays an important role to keep students motivated as well as acknowledging their hard work and effort in such difficult times – we can not possibly mark every single piece of work submitted to us in detail, but it is important to ensure our students know their work is read and that it matters. It helps with building student – teacher relationships. In conclusion, it is important to consider feedback from the perspective of the receiver as well. As mentioned earlier, it can have not just positive but also a negative impact on our learners which can consequently impact self-efficacy, confidence and motivation. I look forward to your comments and constructive feedback 😃. References: Michael Chiles: The Feedback Pendulum Steve Smith/Gianfranco Conti: Memory – What every language teacher should know thinkingdiaz.wordpress.com – assessment feedback template https://rewithmrsmcgee.wordpress.com – original feedback loop – ours is an adaptation. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/ #peerassessment #selfassessment #immediatefeedback #wholeclassfeedback #verbalfeedback #delayedfeedback #writtenfeedback #LIFT #elaborativefeedback

Following my previous post on Thinking about assessment where I have mentioned using multiple-choice quizzes (MCQ) for formative assessment, I had a few messages from colleagues asking about the efficiency of them. MCQs are seeing a rise in popularity in the classroom, especially when used for Retrieval Practice or formative assessment. Many schools have used them during the Pandemic via Google or Microsoft forms to monitor students’ progress and learning. However, there are also some concerns from practitioners that they might be much better for subjects such as sciences, but not considered as appropriate for arts and humanities. I believe that in the languages classroom, a well designed MCQ can be powerful for identifying what core knowledge (vocabulary or sentence structures) learners know and for addressing gaps in knowledge or for dealing with misconceptions. Expanding on the work of Dylan William, for MCQ to be valid and effective, Daisy Christodoulou (Hendrick and Macpherson, 2017) recommends avoiding the use of answers that are obviously incorrect and instead preparing answers that are incorrect but still plausible, as well as not telling students how many correct answers there are to reduce the likelihood of guessing. For novice learner, however, Christodoulou advises to provide the number of possible answers to begin with as this could act as scaffolding to help to avoid cognitive overload. Blake Howard also recommends always to offer the ‘don’t know’ option, as this will also avoid guessing or hiding students’ gaps in knowledge if they guess correctly. Although some critiques of MCQ strategy for formative assessment/retrieval practice argue that many of these quizzes focus on declarative knowledge – simple recall of vocabulary and paired associates (Dulonsky et al, 2013), I believe they can be used also to assess students’ procedural knowledge and allow the teacher to assess students’ understanding of how to apply this content before they attempt i.e. extended piece of writing. This process can identify and address common errors and misconceptions much faster and before students move to the next stage – independent piece of work rather than trying to ‘unpick’ them from the piece of work. When creating MCQ, Christodoulou also suggest, that students could be asked to add a confidence score  (1-5 for each question), indicating how confident the learner is with his/her answer. The rationale behind this is that if students find that a question they gave the score of 5 (absolutely confident) is incorrect, they are more likely to learn the correct answer to that question due to the hypercorrection effect (The Research Ed guide to assessment). However, I personally, have not tried this in my classroom practice yet, so can not confirm how effective this is. It is something I am intending to explore in the new academic year. It is my belief, that if we want MCQ to support students’ durable retention of knowledge, the emphasis needs to be on being able to create good questions which support students’ declarative and procedural knowledge within our subject domain. Below I will share some examples of MCQ that I will be using in my own classroom. I am open to further ideas and constructive feedback as I am sure within the M(F)L community there is a lot of expertise, knowledge and experience. Examples of MCQ #multiplechoicequiz #declarativeknowledge #proceduralknowledge #RetrievalPractice #assessment #formative #hypercorrectioneffect

‘Assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.’ Dylan William The importance of assessment is obvious, it is a process that gives us an insight into what our students know, understand and can do as a result of our teaching. It informs us teachers about what has been learnt, consolidated, where the gaps are and what needs to be re-taught in order to close these gaps. There is a significant research evidence to suggest that if formative assessment is successfully implemented, it has clear benefits for teaching and learning. It is built on the pioneering work of Paul Black and Dylan William (1998). When interviewed by TES (2013), Dylan William reflected that a better description for formative assessment is to call it ‘responsive teaching’. It is linked to the idea that teaching is adaptive to the learner’s needs.(Teaching Walkthrus) They reasoned that people often think about tests and exams, when the word ‘assessment’ is used. Formative assessment as well as retrieval practice does not include marks or grades. It does not compare students with one another. Black and William point out that it is a process which involves working with students, so that they know where they are in their learning, where they need to be and how they will get there. However, a caution is needed when conducting summative assessments (assessing what students have learnt using various forms of measurement) – as how a student does in one assessment doesn’t tell us necessarily how he/she will perform on another assessment in a term or years to come as too much will/can change in meantime. There is also the problem with estimating GCSE grades because the criteria will be different to that used in the final exam – for example in year 10, I will be unlikely to assess the entire GCSE content or all skills and as we know the grade boundaries shift every year. ‘Learning is an invisible process, teachers often have misconceptions about what pupils have actually come away with after a lesson.’ (Graham Nuthall: Hidden Lives of Learners) Assessment is designed to make the learning visible so that the teacher can respond to any gaps in knowledge and adapt the teaching for future lessons. It is important to think about: ‘ What is it that we want to assess?’ when designing assessments. It really is worth reviewing the summative assessments we use, often we use assessments provided by the course book we follow and there is nothing wrong with it, however they should be reviewed and possibly ‘personalised’ to fit the school context and approach. More and more schools are creating and designing their own assessments these days. We can’t assess everything that we have taught in our curriculum, so careful judgment about which parts/skills to assess and when is essential. The problem with summative assessment is also it’s validity (face validity, content validity, convergent validity and divergent validity) as Mark Enser raises in his book ‘Teach like nobody is watching’. On this post, I would like to concentrate on how I use formative assessment to inform my teaching. In his book ‘Embedded formative assessment’ Dylan William puts forward five strategies for teachers to embed formative assessment into their teaching successfully: Clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions and success criteria – discussing LO with students, modelling, SB/KO, worked examples, check lists, mark schemes/grids… Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities and tasks that elicit evidence of learning – use of ‘cold call’, posing a question before saying student’s name, use ‘no-opt-out’, providing ‘wait time’, retrieval practice, summaries, reasoning, ‘interpretive listening’… Providing feedback that moves forward – research has shown that comments only and not grades lead to the most improvement and motivation, giving one or two improvement points, providing students with enough time to respond; it should explain ‘how’ to improve not just ‘what’ and should be based on the success criteria. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another – collaborative learning – peer tutoring, group work, peer assessment, peer checklists (I will be starting to trial peer checklist from September), think, pair, share. I would also like to try ‘group revision’ – where students work in groups with each group member being given one question from a topic to answer to the rest of the group or it could be a Grammar point and students have to explain it to the rest of the group. Activating learners as the owners of their own learning – self-assessment, self-quizzing, metacognition, students being aware how they learnt and the strategies most useful for self-study (retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, feedback, dual coding). Assessment is a concept that has often frustrated me; with all of the different things that we are expected to do as effective practitioners, it has been one area which at times felt that no matter at how many different approaches I have explored, I just couldn’t seem to find one that would have a real impact on the progress of my students. During the Lockdown period, like many of us, I had the time to reflect and review the assessment and marking policies that I have been exposed to and have been using in my 16 years of teaching. At the start of my teaching career there wasn’t much guidance on marking. Marking often resembled a flicking and ticking exercise – ticking each page and writing comments such as – ‘Great work!’, ‘Please, underline the title!’, ‘Don’t waste the space!’, ‘Glue in your sheets!’, ‘Finish this work!’… Spending lot of time on marking and assessing with minimal, if any impact on students’ progress! Then the new trend came in – ‘personalised marking’ – marking and assessing one piece of work, usually extended piece of writing at least twice a half term. I thought, surely this would reduce the amount of marking and have more impact on the progress of my students! Well, the reality was, I spent hours writing the same long/personalised feedback into different books, such as ‘use different tenses, use variety of connectives, extend you writing more’ and using rather vague level descriptors provided… However, this was adding no value to my students’ progress, was only complying with the school’s marking policy and has not reduced my work load what so ever! I am not even going to start talking about the ‘triple marking’, all of us had to go through and the endless data drops ‘assessing’ what grade or level my students were!!! For how I use feedback now, see the post here. I would like to make it clear, that this is not a criticism of my school leaders, but it results from an education culture in the U.K that over the years became (and in some schools still is) data and evidence of progress hungry. What does formative assessment look like in my classroom: Influenced by the work of Dylan William, Michael Chiles, Daisy Christodoulou and Research Ed guide on assessment, I apply a variety of strategies. Strategy 1: Retrieval Practice – I use various forms of retrieval tasks which can be focused on knowledge (vocabulary, chunks, Grammar) recall or skill based such as speaking or writing. As Karpicke points out, retrieval does not just assess learning; it also enhances it: ‘learning is altered by the act of retrieval itself’ (2012). Testing strengthens both the LTM (storage strength) and retrieval (retrieval strength) and makes ‘forgetting’ less likely to occur. Learning so becomes more durable, particularly when it is effortful and regularly spaced over the course of study. When students are retrieving, I circulate the classroom to check for the gaps in the knowledge. Is there anything I need to re-teach? I ask probing questions, especially when retrieving grammatical concepts to ensure understanding and deeper thinking. More on Retrieval, see my post here. Strategy 2: Questioning – I ask a lot of questions – everybody is expected to respond – no-opt-out – using cold calling, MWB and other TLAC techniques. More on effective questioning, please see this post here. Strategy 3: Multiple Choice Quizzes (MCQ) – Blake Howard’s work on this topic has been extremely useful. MCQs need to be carefully written and some of the points to consider when designing effective MCQs are: Answers must be similar so that students engage with all of the material – this then prevents learners from guessing and makes the correct answer obvious for those who know it. Answers must include the most common misconceptions (like the example below on past participles) There should be always the “don’t know” option, as it avoids guessing or hiding students’ gaps in knowledge if they guess correctly. For students to engage with all of the material don’t tell them how many options there are. Answers should assess only one element to avoid confusion They should also assess understanding Strategy 4: Think-Pair-Share – I use this for formatively assessing speaking practice – I pre-determine the pairs and whilst students are talking, I circulate the class and listen. Are there any common misconceptions I need to address? Strategy 5: Silent work – This strategy is used usually during the written production phase when students are asked to produce extended piece of writing or working on translation activity, still using formative assessment – I always model the task using my visualiser and provide appropriate scaffolding to those students who need it, so all of my learners can access the task. Whilst students are working I move around the classroom and try to read as much work as possible. This collection of ‘data’ provides me with the opportunity to give a personalised feedback or to stop the lesson if I notice common misconceptions and address them immediately. Concluding words: In terms of reflection on assessment – what and why I am assessing, the biggest take-away for me is to remember who am I assessing for! The purpose of assessment should be to increase and support the progress of my students and they should be the centre of all we as educators do, its aim shouldn’t be just to inform the school’s reporting system – SLT, governors and parents. #peerassessment #selfassessment #MCQ #summative #RetrievalPractice #assessment #formative #marking

With a clear link between professional development, the quality of teaching and pupil attainment, in many schools, professional development is in the forefront of their focus as school leaders are trying to make it more coherent, integrated and motivating for staff. Effective professional development has been defined as structured professional learning that results in changes in teacher practices and improvements in students learning outcomes. (EEF) The quality of teaching is a crucial factor in raising pupil attainment therefore effective professional development programmes should focus on helping teachers improve through evidence-based and evidence-informed professional development which explicitly focuses on improving classroom teaching. Meaningful professional development needs to use a clear theory of change, and it should have clearly defined outcomes for improving the quality of the teaching and outcomes for pupils. In terms of effective professional development, schools need to create a supportive professional environment based on trust, high professional standards, and culture of collaboration where the leadership provides support, time and resources needed for professional development. They also need to avoid unnecessary workload and use time effectively. As teachers’ experiences, expertise and stage in their career differs, it is important that this factor is considered as well, thus diagnosing teachers starting points and building on their existing skills and knowledge and adapting the approach based on the assessment information. Implementation of any new approach is an ongoing and sustained process not just an event. However, for it to be successful there are a few aspects that need to be considered. The implementation process is divided into 4 stages: explore – prepare – deliver – sustain. Explore This stage is pivotal as it involves defining the problem – a key priority that needs to be solved and identifying appropriate programme to implement it. This key priority should be amendable to change and needs to be supported by relevant and rigorous data collected from a variety of sources that is plausible and credible interpretation. After reviewing the collected and triangulated data, evidence-informed decisions need to be made, which are based on what has and hasn’t worked before. This should be evidenced within the school but also external evidence from schools with similar context and must be relevant to school’s values and beliefs as this will ultimately lead to adoption decision. Prepare Once an adoption decision has been made, the leadership need to prepare the school and its staff for implementation of the new strategy. They must develop a clear and logical implementation plan of the new strategy. They must develop a clear and logical implementation plan, assess the school’s readiness to deliver the implementation plan and make practical preparation for its use such as training staff and developing the necessary infrastructure. Delivery Delivery is a phase when the new programme is applied for the first time. First stage for the leader is to take a flexible and motivating leadership approach to support staff and to deal with the barriers and challenges that will emerge. Reinforcing the initial training with follow-on support via expert coaching, mentoring and peer support is crucial for teachers to feel confident to apply the practice in their classroom. Gathering implementation data during this phase also allows leaders to tailor and improve the approach. This stage comes to an end when most staff adopted the approach naturally and routinely. Sustain In the final stage of implementation, the focus moves onto sustaining this approach or practice. When implementation is successful and it reaches the sustain phase, schools should concentrate on consolidating the new programme and help all staff to use it effectively and confidently. To ensure the programme is sustained, school leaders should continuously acknowledge, support and reward good implementation practice use. Up scaling of the new practice should be treated as a new implementation process and the cycle then starts again. As described in DfE’s standards for Teacher Professional development (2016), professional development should: focus on improving and evaluating pupil outcomes be underpinned by robust evidence and expertise include collaboration and expert challenge be sustained over time be prioritised by school leadership My Academy and department context: At our Academy, and specifically, in our languages department, for the past year, the focus has been on implementing retrieval practice across the department furthermore leading to its implementation across the whole Academy. Part of my research lead role has been to research and investigate how this strategy can be effectively implemented and create an implementation plan for the department.  As I am at the moment completing the NPQLTD via https://www.llse.org.uk/, I have been using the course content and the resources to create a step by step plan. adapted from Bedlington Academy – Northumberland Our Academy and leadership values professional development and has ensured we have protected time on our timetable for coaching – 1 protected period per fortnight as well as two am sessions per week (15 mins each) for deliberate practice of our Academy and departmental ‘high fives’.  During this time an identified strategy (this could be based on a ‘culture walk’ or teacher’s self reflection) is discussed with individual teachers, i.e entry routine, live modelling, quizzing, say it better/say it aga, scaffolding etc. During the first short weekly session – the subject leader (me), models the strategy either in person or via pre-recorded video and the teachers act as students. During the second session, staff then actively practises the strategy themselves (deliberate practice) using the rest of the team as a ‘class’ until they feel confident to apply it in the classroom. The application of the strategy is then reviewed during the longer coaching session and tweaked, if necessary. this example is pre-recorded modelling – the voices are staff acting as students download here also available at: https://learninglinguist.co.uk/category/mfl-cpd-library/ In conclusion, a number of schools in the Research School Network are able to help schools develop an evidence-informed approach to professional development through a course called Leading Learning - a comprehensive overview of some of the most important research evidence in education, so that leaders can create a high impact professional development programme. For more details, contact: mailto:stuart.mathers@eefoundation.org.uk References: https://www.llse.org.uk/ – materials and resources https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/effective-professional-development https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/evidence-reviews/teacher-professional-development-characteristics https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/evidence-reviews https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/537031/160712_-_PD_Expert_Group_Guidance.pdf #CPD #Professionaldevelopment

“If challenge, explaining, modelling & questioning are the ingredients for learning, practice is the oven in which it is baked.” Allison/Tharby: Making every lesson count We often hear the saying: ‘Practice makes perfect!’ However, what is perfection? Does it even exist? If we are to consider it, I would argue that only ‘perfect’ practice makes ‘perfect ‘! I am more inclined to agree with: ‘Practice makes better and permanent.’ Practice is the learning journey from the first encounter with new language to its mastery for independent use. Without it, sounds and letters can be seen or heard, yet quickly forgotten, so practice is the route to retention. Practice is about meaningful processing of knowledge; it develops automatization and confidence. In other words, practice is a wide array of activities that are “engaged systematically, deliberately, with the goal of developing knowledge of and skills in second language” (DeKeyser, 2007). Meaningful practice is not mechanical, its aim is to bring together language that has been learnt over time for the purpose of meaningful communication. This can be achieved after a lot of meaningful and structured practice. If we consider that in their home language, children are exposed to more than 17,000 hours of exposure by the age of four (Roffwarg et al., 1066, cited in Collins & Muñoz, 2016), this is nowhere near possible to achieve in secondary foreign language classroom in England, where learners typically have around 450 hours over five years of language learning (NCELP, 2021). Understandably, due to the constrains of timetabled curriculum, when we see our students on average two or three times a week for 50-60 minutes, it is vital to make the most of the practice, firstly by identifying what our students need to practise and secondly, the best way they should do it. In the first instance, students profit from practising ‘comprehensible input’ (listening and reading) via structured tasks such as making phoneme-grapheme correspondences or connecting word or structure to its meaning / function, thus establishing knowledge receptively before they are expected to produce it productively through speaking and writing. Students need multiple encounters with new language in a variety of contexts to embed it in LTM – research suggests between 8-20 encounters for learning vocabulary (Schmitt, 2008). As far as I know, there is no conclusive consensus as to the optimum intervals between practice. However, it is clear that practice should be frequent enough to prevent forgetting, but spaced enough to create a certain degree of ‘struggle’ in recall – a ‘desirable difficulty’ (Bjork, 2016). This type of practice is often not sufficiently represented in the textbooks where more emphasis is put on comprehension tasks with the focus on understanding of the key words or ‘deducing’ the overall message from several cues. The other issue with many textbooks is that they often rush to produce the new language and don’t provide ample opportunities to practise decoding or parsing skills. The whole purpose of practice is to ensure that linguistic knowledge, structures, and forms are well embedded in LTM and can be recalled quickly and effortlessly, thus becoming automatic, to develop and deepen students’ receptive and productive skills as well as provide students with plethora of opportunities to interact in TL and reduce the rate of error. So, what types of practice can we use… In her book ‘Making good progress’ Daisy Christodoulou discusses the “knowing-doing gap” – the concept that our students know what they are supposed to do, yet don’t do it reliably. For example, in German, my students may know that after ‘weil’, the verb moves to the end of the sentence, yet only some of my students will do so consistently. The answer to this knowing-doing gap for Christodoulou lies in deliberate practice, specifically, the isolation and practice of the particular micro-skill. The small components of deliberate practice may look very different to the final skill. If the final skill was to write a high-level paragraph on a certain topic, we need to ensure that after the material has been broken down into small steps (Rosenshine), students have ample opportunities for deliberate practice of these components within lessons. This doesn’t mean that deliberate practice should be easy, on contrary it should be challenging. In the case of the above scenario, it could be its application within a variety of contexts not just a specific topic or even looking at other conjunctions with the same rule. Guiding student practice and monitoring their understanding is crucial. If we agree with the theory of ‘practice makes permanent’ rather than perfect (Lemov, Woolway & Yezzi, 2018) then the use of CFU, worked examples, guided practice are detrimental to our students’ learning. In some lessons, our students will be dependent on direct instruction, explanation and working with models, in some they will rely on heavy or light guidance using writing frames and worked examples and in other lessons they will work at the autonomy stage – hopefully, at this stage they will be manipulating the language for their own purposes in both written and spoken form. Strategies to support practice: Sentence Builders / KO – these allow us to place the core knowledge in one place, have potential to reduce CL and support RP and self-quizzing. Retrieval Practice (RP) – see a separate blog post on RP here. Micro skills – as mentioned above Overlearning – as per D. Willingham’s findings from cognitive science – ‘practice doesn’t make perfect’ (Practice makes perfect – But only if you practice beyond the point of perfection, 2004). In other words, for a new skill to become automatic or new knowledge to become long-lasting, sustained practice beyond the point of mastery is necessary (Maxwell, 2019). When designing and sequencing the curriculum, it is important to build in opportunities for students to overlearn. For example, if past tense has been explicitly taught and via deliberate practice mastered in the context of ‘travel and tourism’, return to it within a different context later on in the sequence to provide (‘real life’) opportunities to ‘overlearn’ the structures within this context. Skills-based practice – Listening / Speaking / Reading / Writing – I wrote separate blog posts on each skill, click on the links for more. The journey from dependency to autonomy will vary depending on the class and difficulty of the material. We are the judges as to making the decision whether our students had enough practice and are ready to move on. A caveat, as per the MFL Ofsted Review (2016), in the U.K. schools, at GCSE most students will be at the novice level with only the most proficient linguists being at the expert level! This might be even more challenging to achieve due to the upcoming changes within the new GCSE and creating even bigger gap transitioning to A-Level! References: James A Maxwell: Making every MFL lesson count (2019) Shaun Allison & Andy Tharby: Making every lesson count (2017) MFL Ofsted Review (2016) #deliberatepractice #guidedpractice #independentpractice

Recently, I have been looking more closely at the research analysing the ‘lexical approach’ of language teaching. Here are some key facts that have been summarised by Scott Thornbury (2019) in Learning language in chunks. Part of the Cambridge Papers in ELT series.[pdf] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (For further reading, see references). Even though the paper refers in more detail to ELT there are also many parallels drawn to SLA which might be considered in context in our classrooms. Over 25 years ago Michael Lewis published ‘The Lexical Approach’ (Lewis, 1993), prompting a radical re-think of the way we view language and how we teach it. He argued that “language consists of chunks, which, when combined, produce continuous coherent text” (Lewis, 1997) By ‘chunks’ Lewis was referring to the following: collocations (to get a call, to do the shopping, give way …) fixed expressions ( all of a sudden, by the way …) formulaic utterances (I’ll get back to you later, I’m on my way…) sentence starters (I believe that, As far as I know…) verb patterns ( I hate to tell you…/I hate flying…) idioms and catchphrases  (under the weather, break a leg …) Lewis was not the first to relate to language in these terms, however, his contribution was to argue that language teaching needed to be reformed/revolutionised... (Lexical) chunks consist of more than one word, they are conventionalised, exhibit varying degrees of fixedness and idiomaticity and they are probably learned and processed as single items (‘holophrases’). There is growing evidence, i.e. from read-aloud studies (Ellis et al, 2008) that chunks are processed holistically, rather than as a sequence of individual words. A number of studies have established that there are many chunks that are as or more frequent than, the most frequent individual words (Shin & Nation, 2008). How could the learning of chunks profit language learning? The 3 main reasons that have been put forward for prioritising the learning of lexical chunks are: Fluency – facilitation of fluent processing. The possession of memorized store of ‘chunks’ allows more rapid processing, not only for the production of language but also for reception, since ‘it is easier to look up something from LT memory than compute it’ (Ellis et al., 2008). Some researchers noted that when chunks were used more confidently, they contributed more to the perception of fluency (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2009) Idiomaticity – ‘The use of chunks can help students to be perceived as idiomatic language users, disposing of a relatively impressive lexical richness and syntactic complexity’ (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2009), alluding to native-like proficiency. Language development – another strong argument in favour of a lexical approach is that ‘lexical phrases may also provide the raw material itself for language acquisition’ (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1989). In other words, the phrases are first learned as unanalysed wholes. ‘The Lexical Approach claims that, far from language being the product of the application of rules, most language is acquired lexically, then “broken down” … after which it becomes available for re-assembly in potentially new combinations’ (Lewis, 1997). Ellis (1997) agrees: ‘Learning grammar involves abstracting regularities from the stock of known lexical phrases.’ Based on studies (mainly with young learners), Ellis & Shintani (2014) accept that ‘the prevailing view today is that learners unpack the parts that comprise a sequence and, in this way, discover L2 grammar. In other words, formulaic sequences serve as a kind of starter pack from which grammar is generated.’ Other researchers are less convinced, especially when it comes to literate adult learners who are inclined to unpack formulaic expressions for their words not syntax. (Wray, 2002). Scheffler (2015) concurs that, even if these ‘unpacking’ processes apply in L1 acquisition, the sheer enormity of the input exposure required to ‘extract’ a workable grammar is simply unfeasible in most L2 learning contexts’ (Thornbury, 2019). Swan (2006) argues that: ‘ Much of the language we produce is formulaic, certainly; but the rest has to be assembled in accordance with the grammatical patterns of language […]. If these patterns are not known, communication beyond the phrase-book level is not possible.’ How are chunks best learned and taught? In the summary mentioned above, these 4 groups are cited: 1. The phrasebook approach – the practical applications of the approach are: rote learning of formulaic expressions drilling shadowing – learner listens to extracts of authentic talk and ‘sub-vocalises’ at the same time jazz chants – for young learners, preselected chunks are embedded via chants and songs 2. The awareness-raising approach – Krashen (1985) Input Hypothesis – the necessity for high quantities of roughly-tuned input as a source of learning extensive reading and listening tasks ‘chunking’ of texts – identifying possible chunks listening to extracts of authentic speech and marking a transcript into tone units to identify likely chunks record-keeping and frequent review recycling chunks in learners’ own texts (spoken or written) 3. The analytic approach – while Boers & Lindstromberg (2009) agree that time should be devoted to raising awareness about the role of chunks, they are sceptical that learners will be able to identify them without an aid. Their research supports the view that directing learners’ attention to the compositional features of chunks can optimise their memorability. Their analytical approach comprises of: teach vocabulary in chunks select chunks for targeting, also based on collocational strength and teachability reveal non-arbitrary properties of chunks to make them more memorable complement to improve chances of retention, elaboration of meaning and form 4. The communicative approach – Gatbonton & Segalowitz (2005) propose approach called ACCESS, which incorporates stages of controlled practice of formulaic utterances, embedded within communicative tasks. In other words, presenting and practising short chunks of functional language, before learners partake in interactive tasks that require the repeated use of these chunks for communication. ‘The ultimate goal of ACCESS is to promote fluency and accuracy while retaining the benefits of the communicative approach. In ACCESS, this is accomplished by promoting the automatization of essential  speech segments in genuine communicative contexts’ (Gatbonton & Segalowitz, 2005). With the restriction of the language curriculum time currently available, as well as the attitudes to language learning in many U.K. schools (even though it seems to be improving due to the pressures of Ebacc), the Lexicogrammar approach advocated by G.Conti which teaches language via chunks using sentence builders foremost and focuses on explicit grammar application later on in its sequence, might be the better solution for many schools in terms of development of communicative skills, self-efficacy and motivation compared to the very didactic approach of NCELP, which might be more suitable for highly academic or advanced learners. Or indeed combining a variety of approaches based on our specific contexts; especially if we want our students to know more and remember more (Ofsted MFL review, 2016). Key takeaways Whatever strategy we might embrace, effective teaching should take into account the following: distinction whether we teach production (speaking/writing) as well as reception (listening/reading) the need to focus on meaning as well as form the importance of teaching vocabulary in context, not as isolated items the need to teach vocabulary deliberately, rather than just rely on incidental learning (Webb & Nation, 2017) providing learners with the autonomy about what they are learning – ‘the more one engages with a word (deeper processing), the more likely the word will be remembered for later use’ (Schmitt, 2000) the importance of forming associations with vocabulary items – schemata – to aid retention and support memory – LTM – recall the need for regular reviews – spaced and interleaved practice – retrieval practice development of metacognitive skills – learners setting their own targets and measuring their success against them, making decisions about what and how they learn vocabulary References: Ellis, R., & Shintani, N. (2014). Exploring language pedagogy through second language acquisition research, 71. London: Routledge Gatbonton, E., & Segalowitz, N. (2005) Rethinking communicative language teaching: a focus on access to fluency. Canadian Modern Language Review, 61 Lindstromberger, S., & Boers, F. (2008). Teaching chunks of language: from noticing to remembering. Helbling Languages. Selivan, L. (2018). Lexical grammar: Activities for teaching chunks and exploring patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webb, S., & Nation, P. (2017). How vocabulary is learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press Scott Thornbury (2019) Learning language in chunks. Part of the Cambridge Papers in ELT series.[pdf] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. #chunking #lexicalapproach #vocabulary