The five most viewed posts on my blog from 2021

Hi all. I often do an end-of-year round up of posts from my blog. It's useful for me to see what interests MFL teachers and which blogs attract most views. I'm also vain enough to be pleased when I get lots of readers! That said, I've actually been writing fewer posts this year. Maybe I'm running out of stuff to write about!

Anyway, if you are looking at this, thanks. Below are the five posts which attracted most views this year, with the most viewed first.

1.  The new MFL GCSE consultation

In this post I summarised and commented on the ideas put forward by a panel for a revised GCSE, to make the syllabus more attractive and accessible to students. It's fair to say that there were a lot of objections to the proposals and my take at the time was more generous than most. Since the consultation, a couple of key areas have attracted most attention. First, the vocabulary lists which are feared to be too short and based on corpora which may be not ideally suited to teenage learners and, second, the apparent lack of communicative intent in the proposals. A general anxiety, felt by me too, is that the proposals appear too doctrinaire and based on the NCELP/TSC view of language acquisition.

Looking back at the post, I reacted in a reasonably favourable way to two controversial proposals: the reading aloud test and the dictation test. I hope they don't make too much of a feature of these, but I still see the case for a short reading aloud as part of a speaking test. I also see the case for some transcription, though not a fully-fledged old-school dictation. The backwash effect of these two tasks may make them worthwhile (i.e. it will encourage teachers to use reading aloud and transcription).

We shall have to see what finally emerges, but rumours are that some account might be taken of objections raised by subject associations, heads, teachers and other stakeholders. The change in leadership at the DfE may be a factor here.

If you want to see a detailed analysis of the proposals, I recommend taking a look at Helen Myers' blog. She has been tireless in getting into the detail of all this for the benefit of MFL teachers in England.

2.  An NCELP lesson resource analysed

This was a detailed analysis of an NCELP lesson. In this post my main thought was "Could I have used this materials with my classes?" The answer was a clear no. If I try to distil why this is the case, I am left thinking that there is, essentially, a lack of communication going on in the resources. I have no objection to  phonics, vocabulary and grammar (we use to say pronunciation, vocab and grammar), but the way this is done in the NCELP lessons just seems rather dry and uninspiring to me. I don't see enough two-way communication and fun. The post explores why.

I have looked at other lessons since and have not changed my view. A few schools and teachers say they enjoy using the materials, often adapted. That's great, but I think it's important that before the approach and resources form a template for teachers in the future, they are objectively assessed. This will take time and history shows that it's hard to demonstrate the superiority of one method over another, since so many factors are at work, notably the teacher's belief in the method itself!

I have to say also that, while I try to be generous to colleagues and their work, this initiative is financed by the DfE and influenced by some relatively doctrinaire and, frankly, old-fashioned views about second language learning. (I'm thinking here of the structural, synthetic syllabus and high priority given to declarative knowledge.) So I feel justified in expressing an opinion.

I'd also like to repeat that the research resources on the NCELP site are really useful, as is the Multiling Profiler tool (which allows you to enter text and see which words are high-frequency). It's the resources which are just not my 'tasse de thé'.

3.  The Ofsted Curriculum Research Review

In this post I wrote: "This is one of those important documents that comes along every so often and which reflects the times. The current 'zeitgeist' is all about the knowledge curriculum and cognitive science." I picked out some extracts from the review and made comments.

Looking back on this now, I am reminded how Ofsted has changed in an important way, to become a sort of guardian of a certain type of curriculum, as defined by them. This view of the curriculum is intimately tied up with the original TSC Review of MFL Pedagogy (2016) and the NCELP holy trinity of phonics, vocabulary and grammar. It is already colouring the type of questions inspectors ask and encouraging departments to rework their schemes of work to ensure they have an planned (over-planned?), sequenced, approach to phonics, vocabulary and grammar.

So rather than asking; "How do you develop pupils' ability to communicate? or "How do you maintain the use of target language in lessons?", they are more likely to ask "How do you determine the order in which you teach tenses?" or "How and in what order do you explicitly teach sound-spelling correspondences?"

I hope departments are well-informed enough and courageous enough to do what they think works well, whether it be traditional 'weak communicative' with a supplemented text book, EPI, 'task supported', Knowledge Organisers or some other hybrid approach. I know that as a Head of Department I would have kept all this in proportion and made any necessary tweaks to curriculum plans to keep Ofsted happy.

Oh, and, yes phonics is important, especially for French where errors are more likely to lead to ambiguity. My take? Teach key sound-spelling issues explicitly, but keep the main focus on actual usage for implicit learning. Base curriculum planning on communicative use, not sound-spelling correspondences. Observe the class you teach, do they need extra phonics practice? Reading aloud is key.

4.  A better way to learn vocabulary?

The motivation for this post was my basic distaste for memorising words from vocab lists (or using apps with the same goal). It struck me that, where departments or teachers have a policy of doing weekly vocabulary learning, there might be a more enjoyable way of doing it. There's no doubt that Quizlet, Memrise etc have their merits, and many teachers report that pupils like using them. But what if you used a sentence builder (aka substitution table) so that pupils could set to memory whole chunks and sentences rather than isolated words? (This resemble how some teachers use Knowledge Organisers.)

Pupils would get the benefit of using vocabulary in context, focusing more on collocations than isolated words, and getting more communicative power in the process. It also means that the testing of the learned material can be more 'communicative' and enjoyable. We all know retrieval practice is useful, but retrieving chunks will be more productive and enjoyable than retrieving isolated words.

By the way, I think there's a misconception in some quarters that chunking leads to a less creative use of language and is all about 'phrase book learning'. Yes, just memorising formulaic chunks ('in my opinion', 'by the way', 'all the time ' ) would not be a good idea, but the chunks used in EPI, for example ('I went to....' 'I'm going to play', 'I live in England', are really more like common collocations (word combinations) than set phrases. Put another way, any approach which favours the use of connected language at nearly all times, is likely to build deeper vocab knowledge, better comprehension and greater spoken fluency. As I wrote in the post: "...every minute spent learning isolated words could be spent using these words in context, in connected, meaningful sentences or chunks."

5.  Low tech, low prep solutions to remote live teaching

This post aimed to address the problems of teachers having to cope with remote teaching due to Covid. It was a practical pedagogy post with specific, easy-to-apply tasks based on the following principles:

1. Do activities which align with what we know about the importance of comprehensible input - listening and reading matter students can understand. Is the language input at or fractionally above the level of the students?
   
2. Do activities focus on using the language more than talking about it?
3. Are activities easy to prepare, using existing resources where possible?
4. Is the language content interesting or, at the very least, relevant to the syllabus?
   
5. Do the activities require relatively little difficulty in terms of the use of applications and online learning platforms. Are they pretty low tech?
6. Are the outcomes easy and quick to assess?

Thanks for reading!