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The AQA FCSE
Principles of teaching
Schemes of work
A scheme of work should be devised to which all staff delivering the course have access. Core resources such as textbooks with accompanying assessment materials often provide a scheme of work which can be adapted to the requirements of the FCSE. It is good practice to supplement textbooks with other materials such as authentic resources, web-based and electronic resources.
For the full qualification, each of the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) has equal weighting in the FCSE. Students should therefore gain a similar amount of practice in each of the skills. Well planned FCSE lessons should include three or four of the skill areas and a balance of teacher input and independent, pair and group work.
The possibility of assessing individual skills separately
The Unit Award Scheme allows the students to achieve in small steps, in the skills they are best in. This means that although all four skills may be taught, not all students may undertake assessments in all skills. It is also possible to base a course of study on less skills than would traditionally be the case. For example, a scheme of work could be planned for just listening and speaking.
Familiarity with the types of assessment
When planning a scheme of work, it is important that teachers fully read the relevant parts of the specification and consult specimen materials. For listening, students will need practice with a range of listening tasks including monologues, instructions, announcements, news items, telephone messages and conversations all pitched at National Curriculum levels 4-6. For reading, students should have access to a range of different stimulus material including notices, advertisements, extracts from letters and magazine articles and emails. Existing materials used in KS3 and in KS4 should provide plenty of practice with the types of tasks which will feature in the external assessments.
For speaking and writing assignments, teachers may use materials provided by AQA or devise their own resources specific to the interests of their students. It should be possible to use end of Key Stage writing assessment tasks used for Y9 students as well as existing simple GCSE written coursework tasks. This will dispense with the need to design completely new tasks.
For speaking, the candidates are required to produce three teacher-controlled assignments, one of which needs to be recorded. It is important to read the specification carefully to ensure that the support requirements are understood and adhered to in the assessment. The students need practice in preparing and using appropriate support materials. Teaching time should be devoted to this and practice should be given to ensure that students can perform to the best of their ability.
Differentiation
An FCSE language group may contain students with National Curriculum levels from 4-6. If the whole group is working towards the same qualification, differentiation should be reasonably simple as reading and listening tasks are provided at different levels. It will also be possible to differentiate speaking and writing tasks to cover the range of ability.
However, teachers may be required to deliver FCSE to a small number of students within a bigger class in which the majority of students are aiming for a GCSE. This is a difficult situation to manage as it will be challenging to stretch the most able whilst at the same time making the work accessible to the less able linguists. Teachers faced with this issue may wish to consider the following strategies to address it.
- Engage in-class support from a learning support assistant (hopefully one who has at least some knowledge of the language being taught). This person could work with those FCSE students using differentiated materials provided by the teacher to help them access what is being delivered. This will need careful planning and the teacher may wish to plan with the learning support assistant.
- Engage support from a foreign language assistant. A foreign language assistant could offer in-class support as described above. However, he or she could also be used with small groups of students inside or outside the classroom working on oral tasks.
- Design a seating plan whereby weaker linguists are seated with more able students so that the more able can offer support to their peers.
Use of existing materials
As the AQA FCSE is content-free and is based on twelve units of work organised into different themes, it fits well into existing schemes of work, coursebooks, electronic packages for interactive whiteboard use and other resources used in schools. Nelson Thornes will be producing teaching and assessment materials designed specifically for FCSE.
