Skip to main content

Loss of AS levels in their current form would be bad for languages

 ... and all other subjects for that matter.

Back around 2000, when the last major reform of A-levels took place, there was a battle between those who wanted a broader post 16 curriculum and those who wished to maintain the "gold standard" of three A-levels. The second group feared that broadening the curriculum would entail a watering down of subject content and produce students less prepared for university courses.

The "gold standard" folk won the day, if not the argument. We ended up with a dog's breakfast of four. AS levels in lower sixth and three A2s in upper sixth (apart from a minority of students who take four A2s). This is still, by international standards, a remarkably narrow curriculum.

At least it meant that more students would be tempted to continue doing a language for a year after GCSE and, indeed, this is what happened, even if the numbers continuing to complete a full A-level courses continued to dwindle.

Michael Gove's reform of A-levels, making AS levels a stand-alone course pitched at the same difficulty level as A-level makes it likely that many schools will choose to drop AS levels altogether. My guess is that schools focus on helping students get three good A-level grades and that is what universities will want to see. Maybe a minority of schools and students will want to beef up their value-added scores and curriculum vitae with added AS grades.

Fewer students will continue with a language beyond GCSE and, in all probability  fewer will take full A-levels, especially given the current popularity of STEM subjects.

This reform is bad for languages and the reduced diet at AS level makes it likely that all subjects will  see a decline in take-up in the lower sixth year. Universities do not like it and Stephen Twigg has said Labour will reverse the reform.

Of course, what  nobody seems interested in is a genuine broadening of the post 16 curriculum. Pity.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a langua...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zaz - Si jamais j'oublie

My wife and I often listen to Radio Paradise, a listener-supported, ad-free radio station from California. They've been playing this song by Zaz recently. I like it and maybe your students would too. I shouldn't really  reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but I am going to translate them (with the help of another video). You could copy and paste this translation and set it for classwork (not homework, I suggest, since students could just go and find the lyrics online). The song was released in 2015 and gotr to number 11 in the French charts - only number 11! Here we go: Remind me of the day and the year Remind me of the weather And if I've forgotten, you can shake me And if I want to take myself away Lock me up and throw away the key With pricks of memory Tell me what my name is If I ever forget the nights I spent, the guitars, the cries Remind me who I am, why I am alive If I ever forget, if I ever take to my heels If one day I run away Remind me who I am, wha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Longman's Audio-Visual French

I'm sitting here with my copies of Cours Illustré de Français Book 1 and Longman's Audio-Visual French Stage A1 . I have previously mentioned the former, published in 1966, with its use of pictures to exemplify grammar and vocabulary. In his preface Mark Gilbert says: "The pictures are not... a mere decoration but provide further foundation for the language work at this early stage." He talks of "fluency" and "flexibility": "In oral work it is advisable to persist with the practice of a particular pattern until the pupils can use it fluently and flexibly. Flexibility means, for example, the ability to switch from one person of the verb to another..." Ah! Now, the Longman offering, written by S. Moore and A.L. Antrobus, published in 1973, just seven years later, has a great deal in common with Gilbert's course. We now have three colours (green, black and white) rather than mere black and white. The layout is arguably more attrac...
26 comments
Read more