Most years I do a round-up of the blogs I have written over the year. It’s a chance for me to look at the stats and to see what most interests readers. Although I post less furiously than I used to (blogs are less in vogue just now, it seems), I still write about four a month on average. It used to be around 10. Personally, I find blogs more digestible than podcasts, since I like to read at speed and can assess what I think of a post pretty quickly. The only podcast I occasionally listen to is Liam Printer's engaging The Motivated Classroom. as I write this, he has done 112 episides - quite a commitment!
So here are the FIVE most viewed posts this year, starting with the most viewed at number one.
After NCELP's contract to improve GCSE take-up and language teaching pedagogy came to its end, the DfE put out a tender for a new more generously funded initiative. This is the National Consortium for Languages Education (NCLE), now in operation. They say on their site:
...we must leverage the value of all our languages by providing high quality language teaching in schools; increasing languages uptake at GCSE; levelling up opportunities for disadvantaged pupils; addressing the performance of boys; and better recognising and supporting the rich diversity of languages in addition to English spoken by one in every five of our pupils.
There is a specific aim to increase interest in German too.
The NCLE oversees and supports a set of hub schools, who in turn, support other local schools. In this sense the model is similar to what happened before, but this time it looks to me like the messaging is different. Despite ostensibly adhering to the principles of the TSC Review (Bauckham, 2016) - think lots of explicit phonics, vocabulary, grammar - the people at UCL who are running NCLE have a track record (as I read it) of a different view of language teaching, more focused on communication, more pragmatic, maybe more consensual? See this article by Caroline Conlon, for example.
So far, NCLE has been rather low low-profile on social media, and I've read of no intention to produce a bank of resources as NCELP did. As I write, NCLE have been requesting bids for a second tranche of schools to be hubs.
2. A look at the GCSE dictation mark schemes
Whenever the letters GCSE appear in the title of a post, I tend to get more views and this year is no exception. Many schools have been looking at the new exam specifications for first teaching 2024, first exam 2026. Two new aspects in the exam are the reading aloud in the speaking test and dictation in the listening test. This post compared two quite different ways of assessing the dictation. Edexcel have gone 'full DfE phonics' and would mark as correct "Ile faux mangez" since that is an acceptable phonics-based transcription of "il faut manger". This seems crazy to me. This post looked at AQA's and Pearson-Edexcel's. At the time of writing the Eduqas specification has not been accredited.
Should dictation be in the exam at all? I doubt it. An argument in favour is the do-called washback (aka backwash) effect. If something is in the exam, teachers will do more of it in class. If this means teachers do more transcription, maybe that's fair enough, but time doing dictation is time not spent doing input-focused, interactive, communicative work. I hope teachers don't end up spending TOO much time doing dictation sentences.
3. Why has EPI become so popular?
The rise of Gianfranco's EPI (Extensive Processing Instruction) approach has been quite remarkable, notably in England, but in some other countries too. Some departments have gone full-fat EPI, trying to follow the MARS-EARS sequence in detail, others do watered down EPI, notably by incorporating the use of sentence builders and some signature EPI 'chunking aloud' activties, such as Sentence Stealers.
I have had a hand in this too, as co-author of books which delve into EPI, especially Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (2019). We included a specific chapter on EPI in the new edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit (2023).
In this post I tried to explain the factors behind the success of this methodology, which has now been referred to specifically in the Language Trends surveys, e.g.here.
In a more recent post, I explored the whole idea of 'best method'.
Funny how a simple lesson idea (not original) generates a lot of views. In the last couple of years, I've devoted a good deal of time to producing simple, zero prep lesson starters for my site. This is an easy example.
The idea is that the teacher reads aloud a sentence minus the final word. The class has to add that missing word. This could be done orally, on paper or with a mini-whiteboard. I suggest the whiteboard since pupils then need to show you their response (if they have one). To add a sense of urgency and encourage fluent recall, you can put a strict time limit on each response. Say 10 seconds - you could even do a countdown.
Last year I did a series of blogs on low prep starters, for example here and here.
5. Why does grammar teaching fail for so many students?
It's so hard to for teachers, myself included, to get out of the grammar mindset. The idea many of us share is that we can teach a structure, practise it and then assume there is a good chance students will produce it themselves with no prompting. Although little is certain in second language acquisition research, it is widely accepted that it is hard for structures we teach explicitly to become available for implicit (unconscious, automatic) use. It's called crossing the 'interface' in the research literature.
This post examined the issue. Anecdotally, I found that, even with moderately able students (GCSE grades 5-6, say), time spent drilling grammar was time more or less wasted. More useful, for exam purposes at least, was rehearsing over and over again useful chunks of language which would stick in pupils' long-term memories.
Does that mean that a grammatical PPP-style approach fails for all pupils? No. But it seems that only the most able have the motivation and study habits to make it successful. I taught many, many pupils of this type, but in the end, when I saw them mature into outstanding university-ready linguists, was the grammar teaching or the masses of input and interaction whoch got them to that level? Largely the latter, I suspect.
So that's my little round-up. Wishing you a happy and healthy festive season.
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