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Working with bilingual students at A-level

 I weas recently asked if I could prepare some thoughts about how best to integrate and work with bilingual students in your A-level MFL class. This was a situation I encountered quite a few times in my career and one that A-level teachers should be prepared for. I'm talking about students who have moved from their home country to live and study in the UK, perhaps as a boarder at an independent school or at an international school. These students have a huge mnatural advantage, of course, but also particular needs. Typically, they are orally fluent, have excellent listening and reading comprehension skills, but their writing may be inaccurate, and their knowledge of the particular requirements of the exam syllabus may lead to underperformance.

I did some thinking about this, canvassed some ideas on thr A-level French Facebook group and got Chat GPT to suggest some points.

Here are the bullet points I came up with and shared on Facebook with colleagues. I hope some of you find them useful.


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Steve Smith
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Diagnosis: - Give an article containing errors and ask students to identify and correct them (with French include badly spelled homonyms)
- Have them write their own article on a topic and analyse their errors
- Find out how much cultural knowledge they possess (e.g. with an AI-designed questionnaire)
Steve Smith
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Useful tasks: - Transforming spoken into formal written language
- Comparing informal and academic registers
- Sentence/paragraph upgrading exercises
- Essay phrase banks
- Tailored support on written accuracy (grammar workbook)
- Alternative work during some exercises, e.g. listening
- Use their skills in class to support others (“assistant teacher” or “cultural contributor”)
- Special attention to mark schemes when preparing essays/ IRP
- Consider taking exam at the end of Y12 with high attainers.
Steve Smith
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Possible pitfalls: It is tempting to rely on bilingual students to:
- model pronunciation
- explain vocabulary
- settle disputes about “correct” usage
This can create problems:
- pressure and embarrassment
- resentment from peers
- oversimplified ideas of “correct” language
- dialect prejudice (“That’s wrong French/Spanish/German”)

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