Institution: Framwellgate School Durham

Context
Framwellgate School Durham is a large, mixed 11-18 comprehensive school with Science College and High Performing Specialist School status drawing upon a socio-economically diverse local community. It has been designated a Training School with research and development of teaching and learning central to the vision. Although it has an average intake, just over 50% of learners opt for Modern Languages at Key Stage 4 with a variety of academic and vocational options available; this is within an open option system.

Details of project
This project formed part of a bridging unit from GCSE to AS level; it was developed in French, but is now being extended to other languages taught in the school. The AS group is large for the area of the country with ten students in the class. Differentiation is an issue for the teacher as half of the class have a target grade of an A, with the rest of the pupils aiming for between a B and a D.

Digital video footage provides teachers with the opportunity to give pupils cultural exposure to the most up-to-date trends and issues in every facet of life in French speaking countries. It allows pupils to come almost face-to-face with native speakers expressing their feelings about contemporary issues and brings them to life in the classroom. Previously, teachers only had access to staged educational videos or lengthy foreign language films to give pupils a visual connection with a French speaking country.

The aim was to dovetail the use of up-to-date media and ICT resources with activities that develop PLTS and the ICT capacity of gifted and talented pupils in order to develop their overall vocational skills.

Principles of teaching
Working in a group initially sponsored by Comenius North East a small framework of activities was produced that demonstrates how to structure the learning so that students achieve creative and productive outcomes. It is a logical model which could be adapted and transferred to a variety of different videos. The order in which the activities are presented is designed to support learners as they progress from initial engagement with the video, to processing and internalising the structures to the extent where they are able to reproduce language in a creative context, recycling it productively and independently. The initial project used a French rap song with video. The songs was Petit Frère by IAM and links to a variety of issues needing to be covered in the major specifications. Download the lyrics (doc 26KB) to this song.

Different ways of exploring images were considered (for example, plotting scenes or feelings on a living graph, reordering scene titles, predicting content of the song), exploring lyrics (using a variety of sorting activities including matching text to images (doc 29KB) or Venn diagrams (doc 28KB) and accompnaying phrases (doc 25KB)), engaging with the meaning (modelling, preparing and answering questions, using odd-one-out techinques), that led into a class debate.

Impact on learners
The most common response was that it was fun to do something new. The quiz-quiz-trade activity (doc 33KB) was most popular with the slightly less able pupils, who felt that it gave them confidence going into the debate. The thinking skills activities were popular and pupils enjoyed the focus on justification. The subject matter was popular with one pupil who commented that it felt like the French was related to something which occurs in the real world. The slang included in the song was popular, with pupils commenting that it made the French sound more natural. Pupils also found that introducing a visual aspect aided understanding. The key points here are progression and thinking skills; pupils felt empowered for the debate and many were showing off, using French slang and impressive idioms. The pupils are enthusiastic and confident to try new things and enjoy bettering each other with the use of advanced grammatical structures.

Impact on teachers
Staff who have seen the model can see the benefits of, and feel more confident about, integrating online video effectively into their lessons rather than it being an ‘add on’. It also reminds teachers that even the most able learners need opportunities to develop vital functional skills that will enable them to succeed at university and beyond.

Future developments
The explicit development of thinking skills within the sessions requires a debrief. This is where pupils talk about the learning that has taken place. It helps them to recognise and value the other skills they have developed through the course of a task and asks where else such skills can be used across the curriculum. Future work may include developing debriefing ideas and investigating the role of effective target language in this area. The project is continuing with a wider group of schools.

Author: Zahida Hammond: Teaching and Learning Consultant, Hartlepool