Concept Mapping

Concept maps are organisations and visual representations of knowledge.  They show the relationships between concepts or ideas, or rather in the case of language learning, between the lexical items that you have chosen.  Each word or phrase has a shape drawn around it, and then the shapes are joined with arrows.  The nature of the link is often written on the arrow.

Concept mapping obliges students to think about the characteristics of a word or phrase and how it might be related to other words or phrases. Like with the other Thinking Skills strategies mentioned, it is intended to go beyond just the meaning of the word and requires students to use grammatical terminology to explain and justify the links that they have made.  It has elements of both classification and odd one out in that students are looking for the links between words. 

Concept mapping is ideal for pair or group work, and is useful for checking students' understanding of grammar and structure, and any misunderstandings they might have.

Have a look at the group of words at the top of this post.  How would you link them together in a concept map?  This is a possible arrangement:

Classification

Classification, sometimes also known as Categorisation, is another Thinking Skills strategy that I used to use back at the turn of the century.

It works best with students working in pairs or groups.  They need a collection of words or other lexical items, ideally cut up so that they can move them around the table.  They then work collaboratively to sort the words into categories, where each category contains words that have some characteristic in common.  Like with Odd One Out, it obliges students to think beyond just the meaning of the words and to discuss their choices using grammatical terminology.  Different groups of students may have different categories, but it's the explanation and justification of the categories that is the important thing - as with all Thinking Skills strategies there is more than one possible correct answer.

If you were given the words above to classify, how would you do it?  How many categories would you have and what would the category titles be?

The classification can provide a useful starting point for grammar teaching or written work.  The words above, for example, can also be used for teaching adjectival position and agreement.

A variation on this theme is Trash or Treasure, which I have written about before.  The difference here is that you tell the students which category to look for each time.

Odd One Out

Yesterday I was reminded about the Thinking Skills strategies that I used to use in the secondary classroom (here are some Spanish examples, and here some French ones).

In the very early years of this century (!) I was part of a local authority working group which investigated how to use thinking skills strategies in the language classroom.  Thinking Skills were to become part of the Key Stage 3 Strategy and were used effectively in the humanities at the time.

The strategies encourage students to look for patterns and rules in the language, and to articulate their understanding and their findings using "technical" terminology.  When I first started to use these strategies, the expectation was that language lessons should be carried out in the target language, but the resulting discussions of these strategies really has to happen in English.  It seemed like cheating almost to be using English in the classroom, but the students were discussing the language so it could be justified.

One of my favourites of these strategies is Odd One Out, of which you can see an example at the top of this post.  Odd One Out encourages students to examine the characteristics of words, to think about the meanings, similarities and differences.  Students are expected to use grammatical, technical language to explain and justify the choice that they have made.  It's also ideal for pair or group work.  One of the best lessons I ever had was a thinking skills lesson.  A group of four Year 9 girls had a stand-up argument about the solution to the thinking skills mystery we were working on in the lesson.  (It was better than I've maybe made it sound!)

Odd One Out activities are easy to produce, although to make a really good one you need to make it so that there is more than one possible answer.  Encourage students to look beyond the "it's the only one without an A" or "it's the only one with an accent on" type of answer.  Sometimes they manage to find an odd one out that you hadn't even seen, but as long as they can explain why it's an odd one out, they're right!  I always include the "why?" box for students to write in their reasoning.

Odd One Out can be set up using pictures, single words, sentences.....  There is a possibility to suit all learners.

Can you find the odd ones out here?  Why are they the odd ones out?  There is often more than one correct answer!

How many words?

Yesterday I watch two episodes of Steve Smith's series of videos about second language teaching.  (Have you watched them?  You should!)  I watched the two about vocabulary.  For Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 learners, Steve recommends introducing 10-15 lexical items in one go.  These lexical items may be single words, but they could also be short sentences or other chunks of text.

When introducing new lexical items, I've always kept to the maxim "the magic number 7 plus or minus 2".  Generally speaking, primary learners are in the "minus 2" bracket, and I consider 5 or 6 words to be a good number to introduce to them at once.  With the list of 11 main colours, for example, I split them into a group of 6 and a group of 5 and introduce and practise the two groups separately.  If the words or phrases comprise a considerable number of cognates, it's possible to introduce more than 6.

It's occurred to me that this significant difference between expectations in Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 could create difficulties for Year 6 children going into Year 7 and what they are used to.

What do you think?

Messing around with text!

In the past I have written about practising word and sentence structure by mixing it up in some way and asking students to sort it back out into the correct order.  I have done this most often with missing out the spaces and making anagrams.

I have also asked my students to rearranged jumbled sentences into the right order so that they make sense, one of the ideas in my search for ideas for translation.  When I was preparing resources for Studio 1 (French Key Stage 3 course book) I put together worksheets like this one where I had jumbled up the sentence myself.

I was really pleased to see this tweet from@EClaire71247211 recently:

One of my favourite hacks - paste a load of TL sentences into this site and it instantly creates a sentence unjumbling exercise - good for making your own Conti-style 'sentence puzzles' or for scaffolded translations into L2. #mfltwitterati #langchat https://t.co/QhkT38WoCQ

— eclaire (@EClaire71247211) May 4, 2020

The Scramblinator is so easy to use - type in or paste in your sentence, hit the "Scramblinatorize" button, and it does all the work for you!  Resources are quicker and easier to put together.

It reminded of the Reverse Text Generator which is useful for messing around with text.  It also has a "Disemvowel" tool, which you can use to remove vowels or any other letters from your text quickly and easily (and which makes your sentences look like they belong in Only Connect) and a Word Scrambler / Descrambler amongst its Obfuscation tools.

Here are some of the effects you can get:

ORIGINAL SENTENCE	Je joue au foot avec mes amis.
Scramblinator	joue / foot / au / Je / amis. / mes / avec
Disemvowel	J j  ft vc ms ms.
Word Scrambler	Je euoj au ootf vaec mes asim.
ORIGINAL SENTENCE	Il fait chaud aujourd’hui.
Reverse	iuh'druojua duahc tiaf li
Reverse the wording	hui'aujourd chaud fait il
Reverse each word’s lettering	li tiaf duahc druojua'iuh
Upside down	ınɥ,pɹnoɾnɐ pnɐɥɔ ʇıɐɟ ןı

UPDATE 13.5.20:  I've found some more sites which can do similar things to your text:

To create word shapes, click here

NimbleText does disemvowelling and reverse text among other things (scroll down the list)

LingoJam puts your text upside down for you

The LingoJam Number Generator makes a number code out of your words

LingoJam will also disemvowel your words

Spellbackwards will reverse your text in various different ways 

Flowchart Sentence Builders (pt. 2)

Since Joe's brilliant post about Flowchart Sentence Builders I have been starting to put some together to accompany my new scheme of work.  I've been sharing back and forth with Joe and with Carmen, who I first met at a Consejería event and who, it turned out, had been trying out a similar thing.

It takes a while to put the flowcharts together, especially the first few, and they go through a few incarnations before you are happy with the layout.  Once you've done a few, they are quicker to put together as you can start copying and pasting and moving existing boxes around.  I use Microsoft Publisher to create mine (I use Publisher for nearly all my resources).

Here are the ones that I've done already.  All comments welcome!

FLOWCHART by Clare Seccombe

Flowchart Sentence Builders

At the weekend I saw a post on the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group by Joe Barnes Moran.  He showed a picture of a sentence builder presented as a flowchart.  Immediately I could see the benefit of this for my young learners.  Over to Joe to tell you more about them:

I am honoured to have been asked by Clare to write a guest post on flowchart sentence builders. Between Spanish lessons, I am also a Year 6 class teacher and SLE at Parkfield Primary School, Middleton.

Convenient timing brought me to the world of sentence builders. There was a big push around knowledge organisers at my school and I was tasked with sourcing or creating them for Spanish. Knowledge organisers – or sentence builders as they are known in language circles – are by no means an entirely new concept. Everyone has their own idea of what a knowledge organiser should look like, and how it should be used. This is just me putting my hat into the ring. Take it or leave it.

I studied the work of Dr.Gianfranco Conti and, with the wonderful support of Dylan Viñales, head of Spanish at Garden International School, I put what I had learnt into practice and produced my first set of sentence builders! Proudly, I presented a sentence builder to each of my classes. Here’s a Year 6 example that I created a year ago. Yikes!

The impact was…mixed.

Students really liked them but what I found disappointing were the occasional errors that students continued to make even when the pathways to a coherent sentence seemed so logical to me. In hindsight, it was just too complex: there were too many possibilities with their own, grammatical intricacies that presented a minefield for my students – cognitive overload would strike!

Back to the drawing board I went. 

With lockdown offering me the perfect opportunity to devote some significant brainpower to the problem I was faced with, I diligently set about to simplify and streamline my sentence builders. For a sentence builder to facilitate real learning it had to be easy to follow, and without all the grammatical possibilities crammed into one table. In the words of Señor Viñales, creating the ideal sentence builder meant it had to, “avoid the possibility of impossible combinations.”

At this point, I have to take time to mention my wonderful and supportive husband, Mark. One evening, seeing how frustrated I had become with a particular sentence builder focusing on prepositions, he offered to help. Owing to the mathematical and scientific kind of person he is, he actually understood the explanation ramble on the grammatical possibilities and faux pas that the humble preposition would inevitably create.

“Give me half an hour and I’ll see what I can do!’ he said to me as he disappeared, determined to help his floundering husband.

What he presented was to be the lightbulb languages moment (see what I did there?) I had been trying to create. This was a simplified, easy-to-follow-and-impossible-to-make-impossible-combinations sentence builder. We named them ‘flowchart sentence builders’ owing to the similarities they present with the traditional flow chart (apologies to any purists out there). Any grammatical exceptions are studied in a separate sentence builder. This way it’s possible to maintain the simplified view. By providing the English equivalents, the possibility of cognitive overload is reduced further. I raise awareness of any recurring grammatical patterns (plural, masculine or feminine) by highlighting appropriate endings. Children will be able to follow the arrows and come up with a possible combination, safe in the knowledge that it will will be correct. I feel the space is freed up to focus on what’s important – modelling a high quality, grammatically correct sentence.

Since this initial creation, Clare and I have chatted about the possibilities and I have since spent this portion of the lockdown busily devising flowchart sentence builders for each of my classes. I can’t wait to use these with students when schools return to normal!

What can word frequency tell us about culture?

I've mentioned before that I'm in the process of overhauling my Key Stage 2 scheme of work for Spanish.  So far I've filled in my template for units 1-4 and a bit of 5.

In accordance with the TSC MFL Pedagogy Review and the new Ofsted Framework, I am setting out the language to be learned in each unit under the headings of Vocabulary, Grammar and Phonics.  I am colour-coding the vocabulary to see the spread more easily.

I'm also adding the frequency of each word to ensure that I am focussing on high-frequency vocabulary (see the presentation by Rachel Hawkes about this).

I've purchased the Routledge Frequency Dictionary of Spanish, which lists the top 5000 words as well as giving topic-based lists of words like colours, family words, verbs and so on.  The frequency values of some words have proved interesting.  I think that the ranking of certain words tells us something about Hispanic culture.

The box at the top shows the vocabulary and frequency for my unit 4, which is pencil case and gender.  I was interested to see that bolígrafo/boli, which I have always taught for 'pen', wasn't listed, while pluma comes in at number 2605. 

There then followed an interesting discussion on Twitter about boli vs pluma.  Because here in the UK we teach castellano, we teach bolígrafo/boli as that is commonly used in Spain.  In Central and South America, however, there are a variety of different words, as this infographic shows:

https://www.speakinglatino.com/spanish-language-words-for-pen/

While I've been looking up other words (usually while waiting for Zoom meetings to start!) I've some across some other interesting things which I think tell us about Hispanic culture:

• Veinte is #819 and treinta is #829.  Veinticinco is #2643 and veinticuatro is #4059.  None of the other 20s feature in the top 5000.  I can see why veinticinco would be quite frequent, but what makes veinticuatro more common than, say veintiuno?
• Café is much higher than té (#961 vs #2552)
• domingo is much higher on the list that all the other days of the week (lunes #1370; martes #3101; miércoles #1816; jueves #1650; viernes #1259; sábado #1179; domingo #693)
• julio is the highest month on the list (#659, the next month down is agosto at #931)
• Perro (#888) is considerably higher than gato (#1728), perhaps reflecting the preferred pet in Spanish-speaking countries (the dictionary uses data from all of them) or indeed the frequency with which those animals appear in phrases and sayings.
• Hermana (#3409) is much lower than hermano (#333), probably because of the use of hermano(s) to mean sibling(s), but abuela (#783) is much higher than abuelo (#4796).

I'm sure I will unearth some more interesting ones as I complete more units!