So what are these basics of language learning?
I googled it and most of the hits I got were from blogs and
websites aimed at maturer learners wanting to return to language learning in
later life. The basics that they are
recommended are perhaps different to what we would consider fundamental to our
learners’ experience in the classroom.
Let’s have a look, then, at what is recommended by these
organisations.
High frequency words
The first is high frequency words. Another site phrases this as “learn the word
you will use”, in other words the words that are high frequency for your requirements
– keep the language learning relevant to you – while yet another says “learn
the right words”, the ones that are going to help you most to say what you want
to say. As well as “frequently used
vocabulary”, another site specifies key verbs.
Adding a bit more detail, another says you should look at those “phrases
and patterns that come up all the time” but acknowledges at the same time that
you won’t necessarily know what those are in the early stages!
This is something I know that we have all heard about a lot
recently, especially with regard to the proposals for the revised GCSEs. It initially came into our consciousness
following the Teaching Schools Council Pedagogy Review in 2016, and has of
course been adopted by NCELP in their rationales and resources. It was certainly something that I took into
consideration when I revised my Spanish Key Stage 2 scheme of work in the
summer of 2020. I have incorporated as
much high frequency vocabulary as possible, while still acknowledging that
there are some items of vocabulary that are comparatively low frequency that
young children are still interested in.
For example, Key Stage 2 children love to talk about their
pets and their smelly Smiggle pencil cases.
However, the word chat languishes at #3138 in the frequency top
5000, while trousse and most of its contents aren’t even frequent enough
to make the top 5000. If a 9 year old,
though, had the good fortune to chat to a French child their own age, they
would want to exchange notes about pets and their pencil cases, so these words
are useful and high frequency for them.
Pencil case items are not, though, as
important for students in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4, unless you are my
daughters who have inherited their mother’s love of all things stationery.
As the above articles suggest, then, we should be tailoring
some of this vocabulary to that which is high frequency for the user, keeping
the learning relevant to them, helping them to say what they want to say.
Does your scheme of work and/or your text book have in it
vocabulary that is both high frequency and that which will be of interest to
the students that you have in front of you?
Are you teaching the right words for them?
Use it every day
Another of the basics listed by these blogs and websites is
“use it every day”. They say that an
essential part of learning a language is to make sure that you use that
language every day, perhaps dedicating up to an hour each day to it. This every day practice could take a variety
of different forms:
• practising
with a native speaker
• reading
books or magazines in the language
• going
to where the language is spoken
• watching
films or TV programmes in the language
• watching
and listening to native speakers, paying attention to how they say different
sounds, to their intonation, and to their mannerisms…
Of course we know that little and often helps the language
learning to stick. But who teaches a
certain class every day? I never
have. The only people in this fortunate
position are Key Stage 2 class teachers who are doing the language
teaching. Dr Rachel Hawkes has recommended
(and there is very similar guidance in the old Key Stage 2 Framework as well)
that class teachers should aim for a 30-40 minute dedicated languages lesson
once a week, and then timetable 5 or 10 minutes on all the other days to
reinforce and embed the learning from the dedicated lesson. Imagine if you could do that! But I’m not even in the same school every
day, let alone with the same class. How
can I get my little students using the language every day?
The honest answer, as I expect it is for you, is that I
can’t. Languages is just one of the
subjects that they study in their busy curriculum, and with the best will in
the world they aren’t going to do a little bit every day either at home or at
school, when it has to compete with Times Table Rockstars and daily reading and
stuff.
I imagine you’re in the same boat. There is one glimpse of light in this darkness though.
I always listen to the Wittertainment podcast (now Kermode
and Mayo’s Take) while I am doing my planning and marking on a Monday. I’m not
hugely into films, but rather enjoy the Kermode and Mayo banter. Recently (can’t remember exactly when) they
were talking about the accessibility or not to the British public of
foreign-language films, and chatted about the use of subtitles. They mentioned that it has been noticed that
a lot of young people these days are watching programmes (usually on streaming
services) with the subtitles on. I
thought it was just my 14 year old! She
watches everything with the subtitles on.
Her father and I find it really annoying, probably because we are old
fogeys. An article in the online
magazine The Week in January says that 80% of Netflix viewers regularly
use subtitles or closed captions on that platform. The majority of users under 25 use subtitles
“all or part of the time”. Younger users,
then, are more accepting of subtitles than us oldsters, and are used to taking
in more information quickly (though I do much prefer subtitles to dubbing,
which I find infuriating, especially if it’s dubbing over a language that I
know, as I keep trying to read their lips to see what they actually said). This mainstreaming of subtitles is ultimately
doing more good than harm. If young
people watch English language content with subtitles, it’s not too much of a
stretch for them to watch foreign-language content with subtitles. And we all know there is plenty out there! This is something that our youngsters can do
to catch up with their European counterparts, many of whom regularly watch
English language broadcasts with subtitles in their own language, and listen to
English language music. So there may be
a way to address this basic of language learning that the students actually
quite like!
Decide on the level of mastery you want
The next basic that occurs in several sources is an
interesting one. They suggest that you
should work out what level of mastery you require – what do you want to be able
to do? Perhaps speak to people in Spain
and order in a restaurant? Read journals
in your chosen field that are written in French? Live and work in Germany? Another source says that you should “focus on
what you want to learn”.
Do our students get to decide on and choose the level of
mastery that they want? Do they get to
focus on what they want to learn? Or is
this something that we decide for them when deciding on our schemes of
work, on our text books and on our grouping and setting?
Do our students know what the level of mastery that they are
heading towards looks like? In a lesson,
in a year group, or ever? Are they aware
of how they are doing in the grand scheme of things? They may think they are doing badly because
they are not “fluent” when actually they are doing pretty well within the
requirements of GCSE, for example.
Should I, each September, be showing Y3 students a model
piece of work from Y6 and saying “This is where we are heading, folks!” or even
a piece of end-of-Y3 work to say “This is what you’ll be able to do by
July”? They know what our medium-term
big pictures are, but I’m not at all sure they are aware of our long-term big
picture.
How about your students?
Do they know what the standard is that you are expecting of them at each
stage and at the end? Do they want
to know? I’ll leave you to ponder that one.
Have fun!
The final basic proposed is: Have fun! Uh oh, I’ve used the F word! But for these blogs and websites, having fun
while learning a language is considered one of the basics.
I suppose none of us would have continued to be involved in
languages this long if we didn’t find it fun in some way. Adult learners are instructed to have fun
learning the language that they have chosen.
Is it possible that a lot of these mature learners gave up while at
school because they weren’t finding language learning fun? Devil’s advocate there.
What is this “fun” of which we speak? The Oxford English Dictionary says
that fun is “amusement, especially lively or playful”, and “exciting or amusing
goings-on”, that something that is fun (because of course it’s a noun and an
adjective!) is “amusing, entertaining and enjoyable”.
Why should a language learner have a “fun” experience?
For example, I have just taught a lesson on the paradigm of
AR verbs using the infinitive chupar as my example. In case you don’t know, chupar is the Spanish
verb to suck, i.e. sucking a sweet to make it dissolve in your mouth. It’s this verb which gave us the name of the
lollies Chupa Chups – they were originally just called Chups, but then an
advertising campaign slogan said “Chupa Chups” – “suck Chups” and the name
stuck. Because of the translation of the
verb being a little bit risky and skating on the edge of being a bit rude, Year
6 really enjoyed it and were motivated to have a go (I heard a few mutterings
of “You suck, no you suck” while they were working). We created tonguetwisters with chupar and
other CH words, and then recorded a selection for the British Council#CelebrateSpeaking campaign.
Things happen in our brain when we experience “fun” of this
nature.
Firstly, there is dopamine, a neurotransmitter often
referred to as the “feelgood brain chemical” which offers a secret advantage to
learning. When our brains release large
amounts of dopamine, which is created through play and humour, it creates
feelings of pleasure. This reinforces
the action that created it and motivates a repetition of this behaviour. Dopamine is also released any time humans
feel they are on the right path. So
humour and play release dopamine, so does “feeling you’re on the right
path”. These things make you feel
pleasure, better connections are made in the brain and better learning takes
place. Neurologist Judy Wilkes says that fun experiences increase levels of
dopamine, endorphins and oxygen, all of which promote learning.
Secondly, the amygdala in your brain can trigger
overwhelming emotional responses and stress, which over-ride active
thought. This stress hampers our ability
to take on board and process new information.
Fun activities can help to foster a stress-free flow of information and
learning to the brain, and we also know that laughter lowers stress and boosts
immunity.
A study in the journal College Teaching found that
students could recall information more easily when the lecturer added jokes or
anecdotes about relevant topics , and researchers, such as Krashen, and Dulay
and Burt, have found that people learn better when they're feeling strong
positive emotions. This is down to your
Reticular Activating System.
Your Reticular Activating System, or RAS, is at the top of your spinal column,
where it's a small piece of your brain about the size of your little finger that
acts like your brain's bouncer. The RAS
controls how much information and what information is transferred into our
conscious thought. It basically lets
through what you are focusing on the most.
Have you had the experience where you are watching TV and reading
something on your mobile device at the same time, then when you’ve finished
what you were reading you realise that you have no idea what has just happened
on the TV programme you were watching? I
have! That’s your RAS at work, thinking
“Aha, you’re focussing on reading now, I shall block out the TV until you have
finished.”
You can't pay attention to everything around you -
during every waking second your senses are being bombarded with hundreds of
pieces of information - so your Reticular Activating System decides what's
important, what can be transferred into your conscious thought, and what can be
ignored. This transfer of information
can be stimulated by novelty, so new and exciting or “fun” experiences can get
to the front of the queue and be let in first by the bouncer, meaning that
students will therefore retain more of this kind of learning.
So because of the way your brain works, it can be argued
that yes, lessons should be fun. However
we all know only too well that if we strive to make all lessons fun,
then we as the teacher are going to burn out very quickly. We all know that it takes a tremendous amount
of work to plan just one lesson which contains humour, novelty and
excitement. It’s not something that we
can sustain longterm. We’re teachers,
after all, not children’s entertainers.
In this digital age it is very tempting to use all of the bells and whistles at
our disposal to make lessons fun and entertaining. But then we are effectively creating a rod
for our own back, as students are going to expect lessons that are always
entertaining and colourful. We can argue
that having these kinds of lessons all the time will eventually overstimulate
students, and end up actually not being novel or exciting at all. It’s better to keep them for an “every so
often”, when the novelty will make them more effective. And it will be less work for you.
It's certainly true that “fun” lessons can disguise the fact
that there is hard work to be done. They
are perhaps perceived as easy. They are certainly engaging and motivate students. It’s also true, though, that students can get
a buzz out of learning something really challenging even if it isn't perceived
as fun.
Learning needs to be perceived as a fun activity in itself – learning for
learning’s sake.
In the document Excellence and Enjoyment from 2004, the then Education
Secretary Charles Clark said: “Children learn better when they are excited and
engaged - but what excites and engages them best is truly excellent teaching,
which challenges them and shows them what they can do.” It is certainly true that a deeper enjoyment
of learning comes from students seeing that they are being successful and that
they are making tangible progress.
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