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Introduction
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CILT-SLC case study |
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Comberton Village College |
Pedagogy |
Prioritising the development of language pupils' skills
Any language learning experience or course, no matter if it starts in Year 3 or Year 10 or even in adulthood, needs to have at its core the development of skills. And this development of skills cannot remain implicit, in the background or camouflaged by the topic or content, because that’s when learners are unable to see the patterns or make the links.
And without those links and patterns, language learning does not offer the sense of progression that in turn engenders the feeling of success, which teachers know is the foundation stone of motivation.
Teachers know that skills are important. We can all list accurately those skills (and also attributes) that gifted and talented (G&T) language learners have that make them potentially excellent linguists. But how do we achieve the equivalent of the ‘order’ button within PowerPoint that allows you to ‘Bring to Front’, ‘Send to Back’, ‘Bring Forward’ or ‘Send Backward’ with skills and content? Topics are so much more visible and obvious than skills that we foreground them in our teaching to the point where our learners, if asked what they have learnt in any given lesson, are much more likely to say ‘I learnt the rooms in the house’ rather than ‘I got better at saying words accurately from text without hearing them first’, ‘I practised predicting the spelling of new words’ or ‘I practised sentence building with verbs I already know and new nouns’.
Does it matter if the skills are in the background if they are being developed anyway? Yes, for the vast majority of learners it is crucial. Our G&T learners will most likely still be able to make the links and achieve progression without the teacher focusing on the skills and making them explicit (although even they are not disadvantaged by having them made more explicit!) For everyone else, it is not focusing on explicit skills-building that leaves learners unsure as to what they have achieved in any given lesson or sequence of lessons, and in the dark as to how doing ‘school’ one month and ‘daily routine’ the next month represents progression! And it is not just learners that are confused by this. Textbooks often contribute to an absence of obvious progression by beginning each new section with a 'match-up' listening task to introduce the new set of vocabulary, as though learners return to zero each time a new topic is begun!
How do we foreground skills in our language teaching? One way is to be bold when we reconsider our curricula in the light of the new secondary curriculum and to begin with the question, ‘What do we want our language learners to look like?’. When we stop to ask this question we will come up with some skills and attributes that many of our learners, perhaps the majority, don’t currently have. Looking then at how to re-focus our teaching, we might conclude that we need to ‘Bring to Front’ the following skills:
Pronunciation
By this I mean the acquisition of the sounds of the language and a firm grasp of its sound/writing system so that new language can be introduced in many different ways, words can be ‘read’ first rather than heard, repeated and drilled.
Memory
If we get this one right, we can claim to do more than any other subject area for the general development of the ability to use memory (and we should sell this message loud and clear to the whole school at every opportunity). It actually makes a further (less arguable) answer to the question ‘Why do we have to learn a language when the whole world speaks English?’! Learners of languages should develop the skill of memory and they should know they are developing it and how they are training their ‘memory muscle’ in their lessons.
Sentence-building
Of course all language learners write sentences. Foregrounding the skill of sentence-building though would involve students regularly using and re-using their bank of high-frequency words and structures to construct new meanings and incorporate new language they learn into their existing knowledge of patterns.
Autonomy
When all teachers of all subjects in my school were asked what they most wanted learners to look like, the resounding answer was ‘independent’ and ‘autonomous’. They wanted learners to be able to do things for themselves. There are probably two main elements to this though for our students. There is the ability to work autonomously and then this is also the motivation to do so. Sometimes it is hard to differentiate these in the classroom!
However, in language learning, we will see that a concentration on the development of pronunciation, memory and sentence-building skills produces both the ability to work more independently and the confidence and desire to do so. Foregrounding autonomy in language learning is helped additionally by both some explicit work on research tools, but more significantly by organising the learning differently to allow for independent tasks. This might involve any number of different ways of working such as carousel lessons; thinking skills tasks or whole lessons; extended project work or an approach whereby students have a list of small learning goals and a variety of methods, tasks and resources to use to achieve them and they select their own ‘learning journey’.
Creativity
Closely linked with all the skills above, for me creativity describes the skill of using the language you know (or can find out alone) to generate new meanings or new genres or text types. It is a generative process. The craft of the teacher lies in the conception and presentation of the task.
Performance
Speaking up and contributing with confidence is a skill that can be learnt (and therefore taught). It is not an ability that is fixed in our learners. Where learners are not doing it, we recognise as teachers that this is most likely a lack of confidence, although sometimes we attribute it to an innate shyness of character. You only have to go and observe your ‘silent’ language learners in a drama lesson or PE lesson to see if it is individual character or the classroom conditions in your subject that is the more likely root cause of the silence.
Research tells us that anxiety is experienced by a lot of language learners in the classroom and that listening tasks and speaking out loud in front of peers in the target language are the two activities that cause the highest levels of anxiety. I would like our subject to be able to claim, as with memory, that it does much to teach the skills of performance and thereby places a crucial role in the overall education of our students. By performance I mean the confidence to be centre stage, to speak up and project one’s voice clearly, to be aware of audience and communicate clearly, both with language, posture, gesture and eye contact.
These are the skills we have chosen to ‘Bring to Front’ in our Schemes of Work. This is not to say that there aren’t other important skills that we will teach. Rather it says that we want our learners to know that they are using, developing and improving in all these skills areas and will identify them as key success indicators when asked ‘What have you been learning in languages?’
It is often said that for real learning to take place, teachers must generate a learning environment where learners are happy to make mistakes and see those as contributory factors in their learning. In addition, learners learn most when they are at the edge of their comfort zone, taking risks with their contributions. In the language classroom, we are in an ideal position to make this learning environment the norm, as there are so many situations where risk-taking is required. However, learners need first to feel the success that comes from experiencing progression in their learning. Progression in language learning can only come from explicit skills-building and not from continual grazing on topic knowledge. Furthermore, where those skills are directly applicable to other subjects, we have a cast-iron way of defending our subject’s place within the curriculum for all learners.
Rachel Hawkes, Comberton Village College, Cambridge, June 2008
Comberton Village College is a Lead School for a KS3 MFL Strategic Learning Network. Find out more about the KS3 MFL Dissemination and Development Programme
