What should drive topic choice in the new GCSE?

 As I write this post (February 2022), AQA are doing a survey of MFL teachers in England to find out what sort of thematic material they would like to see included in the new GCSE specification (first exam 2026).

The survey is here:

https://eu.surveymonkey.com/r/L2GM9JC

First, it’s welcome that the DfE accepted the desirability to have some thematic basis for the course (‘topics’, if you prefer). It’s also welcome that the most popular awarding body are sounding out teachers.  

So what topics would you like to see? And what factors might drive the choice?

When I think about this, I come up with the following criteria for choosing themes:

1. Is the subject matter interesting to students..

2. Is the subject matter relevant to students’ lives?

3. Can the subject matter be rooted in the TL culture? (This is a requirement.)

4. Is the subject matter important? By this, I mean: is it worthy of consideration in the contemporary world? This might include issues such as climate breakdown, diversity, inequality, health and well-being?

5. Is it easy to source materials to teach the subject matter?

6. Does the subject matter promote opportunities for communication? 

In a sense, I left the most important criterion until last. I say this because I believe that communication remains at the heart of a good language learning syllabus in most contexts. Some topics may be of great interest, but the language required to deal with them may too sophisticated to promote the most efficient long-term acquisition. In other words, some topics are hard to talk about with limited language.

To give an example, I might consider that an important topic for students to think about and know about is inequality. But textual material on this subject is likely to be too hard for many 14-16 year-olds learning a language in England. The students are not linguistically ready to easily comprehend and talk about the issue. (This is one reason why we traditionally leave the topic to advanced level.) Feasible communicative tasks are hard to design.

Similarly, as we have seen at A-level, texts which are rich in factual information, while good for building students’ cultural and general knowledge, may be less useful as a basis for communicative lessons. In short, although they may be informative, they can be dry and unproductive in terms of lesson planning.

On the other hand, there is the risk of falling back on the apparently mundane subject matter we may be used to for GCSE lessons. I’m thinking of topics such as pastimes, holidays, house and home, and family activities. And yet these topics are more personal to students, often allow for simpler, more comprehensible texts and easy-to-plan communicative lessons. Unlike texts featuring factual information, texts on the above topics can generate more narrative-style work, centred on everyday experience. One way to look at this is : does this material lend itself to information gaps, expressing opinions and storytelling? 

A key factor to bear in mind, point 5 in my initial list of criteria, is the availability of resources. Many departments may be reluctant to invest in expensive new books and digital content. They may be running very successful lessons with familiar material. Under-pressure teachers may or may not be excited by the prospect of sourcing or writing a mass of new content and lesson plans. This is one reason why AQA, in their consultation, suggested a number of familiar topic areas for consideration. Is this laziness? I doubt it.

So what themes would you like to see? 

This gets tricky, because in my experience there may be little consensus! Some will be rooting for a fundamental move away from traditional, tried and tested themes. Others will feel on safer ground using familiar topics with ready-made materials. Personal preferences come into play. For example, I would include environment since it is the number one issue facing us all. Others would argue it’s a tired topic, covered elsewhere in the school curriculum. Some would like to see a move away from safe, middle-class topics (think of ‘holidays in France’)  and a greater inclusion of topics relevant to students of all backgrounds. Others might even argue for steering clear of any ‘political’ topics such as diversity, poverty and immigration. In the current climate, some will argue for keeping in mind issues to do with of ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, for example you could envisage historical content including textual material on the slave trade in French history.

For me (getting controversial now), since communication and language acquisition ultimately trump broader issues of curriculum content, I would lean towards topics which allow for a personalisation of content, which, rather safely, you might think, push me towards some familiar territory. What do 15 year-olds talk about? What can most students talk about using a relatively narrow range of language? But also, what can they usefully learn about the TL culture and their own at the same time?

In curriculum planning it’s often advised that a ‘needs analysis’ be carried out before further steps are taken. This has not happened in this instance. Decisions so far have been led by a rather one-sided view of language learning, with scant attention paid to the needs of the learners, I would say. With this in mind, it’s worth going back to some first principles when choosing GCSE thematic content.

This becomes a little problematic, since for many students the main ‘need’ is to get a good GCSE grade to enable further study. For the large majority who will not continue with a language after GCSE, a main priority might well be to achieve a basic level of comprehension and conversational ability on everyday topics, so the subject matter should keep this in mind. The DfE Subject Content document says this:

"Through studying a GCSE in a modern foreign language, students should develop their ability and ambition to communicate independently in speech and writing with speakers of the language for authentic purposes and about subjects which are meaningful and interesting to them” (p.3).

‘Authentic purposes’ implies a degree of task-related or situational language, while ‘meaningful and interesting’ could mean anything!

So do and have your say!