Teaching A-level MFL

This is the first of first of four posts on the subject of teaching A-Level languages. Because the focus is the A-Level syllabus in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the posts are aimed primarily at teachers in those countries or working in international schools. A good deal will be relevenat to teachers working with other syllabuses, notably IB.

The posts are also mainly for teachers who are new or inexperienced with teaching A-level, although more experienced teachers may find useful reflections or new ideas to enhance practice.

In writing these posts, I am drawing on over 30 years of experience teaching French A-level in three different schools. My students achieved highly and enjoyed their lessons very much (on the whole!). My experience is also founded on having done work with the AQA exam board, both writing and presenting on A-level for them, as well as the skill I have acquired through writing hundreds of resources, both during my classroom career and for frenchteacher.net. In addition, I have studied a good deal of research about language learning in general.

The four posts will look at the following:

1. General principles underpinning your teaching.
2. Working with aural and written texts.
3. Teaching film and literature.
4. Preparing for assessment.

I shall link out to other posts from time to time and include examples of resources.

So here we go...

1. General principles

Input and interaction

At A-Level, as at every level of teaching a language, the general principles of language acquisition apply. Firstly, students need large amounts of interesting comprehensible input (language they understand at or just above their current level). Secondly, they also need the opportunity to interact with that input through communication. Thirdly, they need to have their attention foused on the form of the language (the grammar), though explanation and practice of grammatical structures. 

There is, of course, a lot of debate among researchers about the extent to which explicit instruction about grammar is useful, but my conclusion after much reflection over the years, and having studied a lot of research, is that, especially in the school setting, we need to teach some grammatical rules and practise them. However - and this is a major caveat - if you spend too much time on this, it is at the expense of other activties involving input and communication, so never asume that students can easily apply grammatical patterns you have taught them. 

A great advantage of teaching A-Level through comprehensible input is that students already have a good store of language knowledge at their disposal. This means we can use more complex texts which may be more stimulating. Prior knowledge varies hugely, of course, though in general terms the ability profile of A-level linguists is higher than average, so we are often dealing with higher aptitude learners.

When planning resources and lessons, therefore, we always need to keep in mind how much comprehensible input we are providing and how we can stimulate them to interact with it in enjoyable ways. Put very simply, if lessons are largely in the target language and students understand and communicate, nature takes its course and proficiency develops.

For posts about comprehensible input see here and here. That second post is a lengthy one about the long-standing debate about formal learning and natural acquisition. To what extent is learning a new language as a teenager like learning one's first language(s)? That's always a good question to ponder!

Don't overdo the grammar!

We know from research that learners are developmentally ready to actually acquire structures at certain stages and that they cannot easily turn their explicit or declarative knowledge ('knowing that') into procedural knowledge ('knowing how'). For more about so-called natural orders see here. It's the 'knowing how' which we need to help them develop and this occurs largely through actually using the language - interacting with input. Teaching some rules is thought to help to some extent.

I'm pretty sure that teachers tend to overestimate how useful teaching rules is. That said, if you practise grammatical forms through input (drills, questions-answer, gap-fill, etc), then you can argue you are killing two birds with one stone. Students are interacting with input and focusing on the form of the language. It's about keeping things in proportion, I think. In general, maintain the emphasis on communication and the brain will do its language learning thing.

For more about research on grammar see my posts here and here. For a discussion of why grammar teaching often fails, see here.

Content

What form should the input take? Well, this is largely dictated by the exam specification, so if topics include education, heritage, equality, diversity, the world of work and cinema, then inevitably you will source a lot of material based on those topics. Students will build their topic-specific vocabulary and their ability to understand, talk and write about those subjects.

The film and literature elements of the course will naturally dictate a good deal of the content, and we'll come to those in Part 3. But let me just tease that a bit by saying that it's unwise to view the film and literature parts of the course as somehow entirely separate from the rest. Think of those sources as just other sources of language for input and interaction. If you have that mindset, you'll get more ideas about how to exploit the film and lit.

But this doesn't mean that all your lessons have to be focused on the exam topics alone. You don't have to be a complete slave to the syllabus. When you bear in mind that texts on pretty much any non-technical subjects consists mainly of common, shared vocabulary, then a text on any subject will be useful for acquisition. So if something comes up in the news that you want to discuss, then you can do it. If you want to do a fun task-based activity, then you can do it. If you want to do a storytelling lesson, you can do it. The point being that all these activities include input, interaction and high-frequency language which can be transferred to other topics, including your exam-related ones.

For more on task-based lessons see here . For a favourite task-based lesson of mine see here.

Integrating skills

Another general principle to keep in mind is that each of the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing supports the others. This means that sensible lesson planning is likely to involve elements of all the skills. We'll see this in the next post when we talk about working with texts. It is unlikely to make sense, therefore, to plan a course based on 'listening lessons', 'grammar lessons', 'speaking lessons' or 'translation lessons'. Far more advisable is to build lessons around all four skills. This has the added bonus, of course, of allowing for variety and changes of focus in lessons, making them more enjoyable for students.

In cognitive science terms, memory is likley to be strengthened when processing is more 'elaborate' and, in this context, memory traces may be stronger when they are fromed from aural and reading input, along with oral and written production.

The idea of integrating the four skills is one of the 10 principles Gianfranco Conti and I included in The language teacher Toolkit (2nd ed.).

Don't assume too much knowledge

I just want to throw in one little point here, based on experience. Because our schooling system makes the sixth form seem rather distinct from earlier years (courses change, GCSE is done, class sizes are usually smaller, uniforms may be different and students have all opted to take your subject), it may be tempting to think that suddenly students are more grown-up, sophisticated and skilled. This is not really the case, so we need to keep strongly in mind that a period of adaptation is needed. It's also important to assess any new students who may have joined the school. But make no mistake, because of the greater contact time you now have, and because students are usually highly motivated, the progress they make at A-Level is enormous. I was always very gratified by the level of comprehension and fluency students showed after just a year of A-Level.

Translation

Finally, a word about translation since this has been another area of debate in our field. We have (for now) moved on from the idea that lessons need to be 100% in the target language. There are good reasons for using translation from time to time, and since it is part of the A-level exam, you need to practise it based on the principle that you get better at what you practise). But I would caution against spending too much time doing translation. This is about what's called 'opportunity cost'. If you do lots of translation, this is bound to be at the expense of other tasks which involved input and interaction, our two main priorities.

Gianfranco Conti wrote an interesting blog post about translation here.

In the next post, I'll apply these general principles to the nuts and bolts of working with texts.