Adaptive and responsive teaching: how it might look in primary languages

This week I have been reflecting on how I teach the children in my classes who have special needs and disabilities (SEND).  They are exposed to the same input as the other children, mostly listening and speaking in the first instance, with a significant phonics component, then moving on to reading and finally writing.  When it comes their speaking and writing output, they have support in the form of knowledge organisers, sentence builders and other paper-based support, as well as extra support from me as they need it, and, if we are lucky, from a teaching assistant.

Until comparatively recently, the way that we catered for a wide range of abilities in the classroom was to offer multiple differentiated tasks.  This was clearly time consuming for teachers and often difficult to implement effectively and successfully.   

Teachers were often juggling different curricula, and different tasks with different levels of challenge, and therefore different expectations and outcomes.  Differentiation frequently limited opportunities for achievement for some groups of children, and  was responsible for setting low expectations of children with learning difficulties.

Adaptive and responsive teaching maintains high expectations for all children at both the planning and the teaching stages; it doesn’t make any preconceptions about who the lower ability children are and who are the higher ability.  It’s more sustainable than differentiation and ultimately not such a burden on the teacher.   It has now gained much more traction and is embedded in teachers’ Early Career Framework. 

Let’s dive more deeply into how adaptive and responsive teaching might work in the primary languages classroom.

Adaptive and responsive teaching aims to meet the needs of all children.  All children should meet the high expectations that we set, and all children are able to keep up so that nobody is left behind and needs to catch up.

It’s vital to recap prior knowledge each lesson, going back as far as necessary to make connections between prior learning and the new learning.  We can’t assume that those connections and the memory will be there automatically.  We need to ensure that all the children are in the same place for starting the new content.  Revisiting prior learning will ensure that all children begin the new learning on the same playing field, ready to build on those foundations.  It will also enable you to challenge any misconceptions that arise.

Language lessons are often far apart.  Even lessons a week apart will mean that children have had a week to forget the previous week’s content.  Every language lesson should begin with some kind of recap or revisiting of prior learning.  Even if you are starting a new topic or unit, an effective spiral curriculum means that there will be some aspect of the new learning in the new unit that the children have seen before somewhere.  This revisiting often takes the form of speaking and listening activities, but reading and writing activities can also be used to repeat and practise prior learning. 

Ensure that the order of the units in your scheme of work allows you to refer back to learning in previous units as well as previous lessons, and also ensure that their order and your time allocation doesn’t oblige the learning to move on too quickly without sufficient revisiting and reinforcement taking place.  The language needs to be truly embedded before you move on.

Some ideas for revisiting prior learning:

•  Speaking and listening  Ensure that children have the opportunity to hear the vocabulary several times first, and then practise saying them.  A good resource to use is a numberedgrid.  Use the numbers for listening practice – you say one of the words and then children have to tell you which number it is.  Later you say the number and the children tell you which number it is.  Children can continue these activities in pairs so that all of them are involved in the recap and not just one at a time.
  
  
• Talk about the language  Are there any links that can be made, either with prior learning or with English, or with any other language that the children know, to help them to remember the vocabulary?  For example, we can remember the colour blanc / blanco by thinking of a blank page.  Talk about the words you are practising.  What part of speech are they?  Are they masculine or feminine?  How do they know?  Don’t shy away from metalanguage.  Children will be using a lot of the same terminology that they hear in their English lessons.
  
  
• Reading  Short reading activities are a useful way to recap prior learning.  Try activities such as “Who says…?” or tracking down keywords in the text.
  
  
• Mini whiteboards  Check everyone’s learning by asking them to write something on their white board and show it to you.  Whiteboards can also be used to record and show answers to multiple choice or reading questions.  Children like to write on their whiteboard as it is easier to edit, less permanent, and less threatening than a page of their exercise book or workbook.

All these activities will help you to formatively assess the class’s learning and also the learning and understanding of individuals, so that you can start to identify where further support will be necessary.

It’s also important that children are aware of the bigger picture: what are the learning intentions of that lesson, and how does it fit into the bigger picture of that unit?  How does it build on what they already know?  Tell children what you want them to know and what you want them to be able to do.  It’s likely that this introduction to the lesson will include mention of the three pillars of vocabulary, grammar and phonics, of course in child-friendly terms.

As children come onto the language production phase of the learning, whether it be speaking or writing, it’s important that they know what success sounds like or looks like.  Modelling the activities is therefore very important.

Modelling an activity:

1.    ‘I do’  Teacher takes the lead while the children observe the ‘expert’.  While you are modelling the activity, think out loud, explaining why you are choosing certain words or structures.   
2. ‘We do’  Teacher and children share preparation of the writing/speaking.  Break the model down into small steps and ask questions throughout to check for understanding.  
3. ‘You do’  Children use the two previous examples to help and support them as they create their own output.  The teacher circulates around the room to give immediate verbal feedback and address any misconceptions.

One of the key differences between differentiation and adaptive and responsive teaching is that teachers should pitch the lesson high and then provide appropriate support for those who need it in order to enable them to reach the goals.  Children should all have the same high-quality tasks but with varied scaffolds.  Such scaffolds help all children to access the challenging and ambitious content and make the lesson inherently inclusive.  All children will have the opportunity to be successful.  Ideally any support that you provide should be temporary and should be gradually withdrawn as the children become more confident.

Some kinds of support, in no particular order:

•  images
• colour coding
• talking time
• word mats
• knowledge organisers
• pre-teaching
• TA support
• translations
• sentence builders
• sentence strips
• working walls

As has already been said, time is often short in language lessons, and therefore every activity and task that we plan must have a clear purpose within the framework of the lesson.  Each one needs to allow children to demonstrate what they have learned, that they can achieve a given step of the lesson so that you can proceed to the next one.  They also need to be planned to have a clear ‘product’ so that you can see clearly what they can do and what they have understood.  This in turn will provide evidence for you in case you need to respond and adjust your teaching.

Adaptive and responsive teaching is all about making adjustments to your teaching methods, materials and language, based on real time assessment of the children’s understanding and their needs moving forward.  It is rooted in and reliant on solid formative assessment.  In language learning we need to adapt our explanations and questions to suit the needs of individual learners, their levels and how they learn best.  Specialist language teachers, often secondary trained, will have the experience and the subject knowledge to do this.  However the majority of the teachers of foreign languages in Key Stage 2 (children age 7-11) are non-specialist, and may well not have the confidence or the knowledge to be able to do this.  Your scheme of work, if you are non-specialist, should include comprehensive information and explanations to help you to understand the content before you teach it.  It would also be ideal if it were to have alternative explanations or suggestions in the case of having to make adjustments.  Adapting from one lesson to the next might be more straightforward, but how to non-specialist teachers feel about having to adapt in the moment?  There is clearly a case for additional training and CPD here.

It has already been mentioned that the learning should be built up in small steps, checking for understanding at the end of each of those small steps before proceeding to the next one.  Each lesson will comprise a small step within the bigger picture, and each lesson will also comprise a series of even smaller steps to arrive at that objective.  It’s crucial to check for understanding at the end of each step and sample the children’s responses at each stage of the learning.  This will show quickly how well the children have understood and absorbed the learning.  Identify the activities in your scheme of work which will enable you to do this.

It's important that we foster in our classrooms a positive learning environment which has a culture of safety and support, where children feel comfortable to take risks and make mistakes.  This will reduce their anxiety and motivate them to have a go.

To summarise: adaptive and responsive teaching requires children to all be taught the same ambitious curriculum, using the same tasks with the same level of challenge and high expectations, but children will have appropriate support to enable them to achieve.

 

Further reading:

Adaptive Teaching: Moving Beyond Differentiation for MoreEffective Learning, Dr Katy Bloom 

Spinning the plates: Responsive and Adaptive teaching inthe mixed MFL classroom, Esmeralda Salgado 

Adaptive Teaching: Understanding the Barriers andEnablers, Imogen Barber 

What does inclusive teaching look like?  Adaptive and responsive teaching strategies, Matt Bromley 

Support for early career teachers: Adaptive teaching 

Dialogues

 

In September I began teaching unit 1 of Cycle A of my mixed age Spanish scheme of work (we started with Cycle B last year - don't ask).  Lesson 1 was all about saying hola and adiós, saying our name using soy... and introducing the question ¿Quién eres? 

The learning was brought together towards the end of the lesson using a simple dialogue, as seen above.

Here's how we used it:

• Using escuchad y repetid (listen and repeat) we practised each line several times, going through the whole thing twice.  When I use more complex dialogues I split some lines into chunks to start with.  The children were very good at copying my intonation.
• We discussed the meaning of each part.
• We read all the dialogue all together three times.
• We split the class in half - by tables and then girls/boys - and performed the dialogue in teams, half the class being person A and the other half person B, then swapping roles.
• I asked the children to practise the dialogue with their partner.  We talked about what they might change in the dialogue when speaking as themselves.
• While they were practising (I only gave them a few minutes) I circulated to help as necessary and to listen in.
• Quite a few pairs of children in each class volunteered to perform their dialogue in front of the class.

Practising a dialogue enables children to ask and answer questions, engage in conversations, speak in sentences and speak with increasing confidence, as required by the Key Stage 2 national curriculum for Languages.  It also enables children to speak an extended passage of the language, in this case at the end of the first lesson of the term.  

We revisited the dialogue in the following two lessons.  A highlight was a Year 3 beginner reciting the entire dialogue perfectly to his class teacher and me in the corridor, with excellent pronunciation and intonation.

Dialogues like this will work with most topic areas and most levels of language.  I recommend giving them a try!

The usual in an unusual way

This year in both my schools I have Year 3, Year 4 and Year 3/4 classes. For that reason I have had to devise a mixed age, two-year scheme of work. All three classes are working on the same curriculum (Cycle A of the scheme of work) this year. Because I have Year 4 children with one year of formal Spanish learning in the same class as Year 3 children who are beginners, I have had to seek a different context in which to introduce basic greetings, saying your name and first phonics, so that everyone can learn something new.

I chose the context of animals and the continents that they come from. This means that I can use soy instead of me llamo for saying their name (something new for the Year 4s) and then reuse soy in sentences such as Soy de Europa.

I chose the animal vocabulary and the first names so that they cover all the main phonemes/graphemes that we cover in Key Stage 2 Spanish, and also ensured that there was a good spread of names ending in -o, names ending in -a and names ending in neither for our first look at grammatical gender.

This video is designed to play at the beginning of a lesson while the children are getting ready, to introduce them to the animals and to begin to show them which continents the animals come from.

Do you adapt your scheme of work to cater for a range of student experience of language learning? Do you do the usual in an unusual way?

Reflecting on the DfE Writing Framework

This week I have been reading the DfE's document The writing framework, which came out on 8th July this year.  The document provides non-statutory guidance for primary schools, initial teacher training providers, early years providers and secondary teachers who will be building on the learning of their new Key Stage 3 students.  This framework has been published before the arrival of Professor Becky Francis's Curriculum and Assessment Review which is due at some point this autumn.  The authors of the framework acknowledge that it will have to be updated as necessary to align to the revised national curriculum.

When the framework was first published (just before the school summer holidays!) it met with a mixed reception.  The English Association identifies some strengths and some weaknesses, while an article in the TES refers to it as "over-simplified".  Writer Michael Rosen is not keen on it.  Whatever our view, it is useful, especially as a specialist of a subject that is not English, to have it as a summary of how the primary children that I teach will be taught to write in their English lessons and elsewhere in the curriculum.

Therefore I have read the document with a view to establishing the parallels with, links to, and potential implications for the teaching of writing in the primary languages classroom.

Writing by hand

The first section of the framework (page 13) talks about the cognitive benefits of writing as well as the value of writing by hand as opposed to typing:

"Writing helps thinking and learning.  It helps pupils to consider information more deeply than when they are simply reading it; it enhances the learning of the subject matter and helps cement that learning in long-term memory."  

I have written before about the benefits of writing by hand rather than typing during language learning.  In addition to what I said there, the framework says that: "Research suggests a reciprocal relationship exists between creative acts and well-being, and writing is a highly creative process, allowing people to create imaginary words, entertain others and paint with words." (page 13)  Therefore whenever we allow children to be creative with their new language rather than just completing drills, we are potentially contributing to their well-being.

Transcription and fluency

There is a significant focus in the framework on transcription (handwriting and spelling), which is taught via phonics for spelling (in Early Years and Key Stage 1 mainly) and explicit handwriting practice which is taught throughout primary school.  It is emphasised that this should start in Reception (age 4-5).  

Transcription then builds writing fluency.  It says: "Writing fluency refers to how smoothly and quickly a pupil can write down their thoughts in words.  Fluent writers show automaticity in writing words, allowing them to convey their intended meaning."  A child who has to concentrate on their handwriting and spelling will find it difficult to say what they want to say in their writing.  A more fluent writer will free up their working memory to focus on composition.

It is worth noting at this point that while handwriting is taught "regularly, explicitly, precisely and cumulatively" (page 7) in primary school, it does not appear in the national curriculum in secondary school.  Many Year 6 children (age 10-11) have beautiful handwriting, but there are others who would still benefit from some input later on, if only to help to build automaticity.

By the time children arrive in Key Stage 2 and begin their formal language learning, we assume a certain level of handwriting, in other words an ability to physically form the letters.  They will already have practised this aspect of "learning to write", but will not have had any experience of "learning to write" in the new language.

Part of building automaticity in writing a language other than English is building confidence in making the shapes of the characters, shapes and punctuation that English does not have.  The writing systems of the most commonly taught languages in primary schools have quite an array of these:

Before the children do any formal writing in Year 3, we spend some time looking at the accents, the tilde and upside down punctuation.  

First we write them in the air with our finger pencils, narrating what we are writing while doing so.  Secondly the children have the opportunity to explicitly practise these shapes and letters:

I don't think that we can expect these inexperienced learners to (a) notice the accents etc. and (b) replicate them accurately without some explicit practice.

Dictation and spelling

The framework recommends dictation as a way for children to practise their transcription, and I know that this is being used more and more in the primary English classroom.  It suggests asking children to write individual letters or words, or to write a sentence after saying it.  These removes the threat for the less confident writer of having to think of their own words to write.  It says that dictation as part of phonics teaching should begin in Reception, in order to improve spelling (page 41).

In the primary languages classroom dictation could certainly be used in this way and for the same reasons.  Children could practise writing the language-specific accented letters on their mini whiteboard and hold it up for you to see.  Writing words from memory (as specified in the Key Stage 2 national curriculum) would also work.  To practise phonics, children could listen to a L2 word and fill in the missing phoneme/grapheme.  

I don't explicitly practise spelling the vocabulary with the children (due to time constraints more than anything) but I can see how this could work in the initial stages of composition.  Spanish is a transparent language, and therefore spelling is not as much of an issue as it might be when the children are writing in English.  I am almost proud when the children mix up their b's and v's or miss off a silent h, as these are errors that Spanish children make.  The framework does say, however, that spelling difficulties increase the cognitive load (page 40).  So is this something to which we should be dedicating some time, especially for the more opaque languages like French, in order to facilitate more fluent writing later on?  I have written before about how English spelling can interfere with spelling in the new language, and have also blogged about some ideas for practising spelling with Key Stage 2 children.

The framework talks about morphology and etymology as important components of working on spelling (page 43).  Certainly when teaching Spanish I talk about the origins of words a lot (usually links to Latin and therefore to English) although morphology has a somewhat less prominent place in the primary languages classroom, simply because of the much reduced number of words that are being learned.

I have written before about using dictation in the primary languages classroom and compiled a list of ideas for dictation classroom activities.  My Spanish dictation publication is available here.

Talking for writing

The documents begins with a discussion of the importance of talk for writing, something that is already a feature of the national curriculum for English in primary schools.  From Reception, children should be taught to compose orally, in other words to say out loud what they want to write.  "In the early stages of learning to write, sentence-level composition should be practised orally" (page 8).

Talk is used to generate and discuss ideas for the writing.  Oral composition reduces cognitive demand when children do eventually write the sentence or phrase, as they have already had the opportunity to formulate their ideas and vocabulary and grammar choice.  They are able to test out ideas before they commit them to paper (page 49).

However it goes on to say (on page 14) that "Writing is not merely talk written down.  Learning to write involves developing control of language in a way that, increasingly, is different from everyday, conversational speech and must be explicitly taught."  This, I think, is where the teaching of English, the mother tongue for the majority of the children, differs from the teaching of the new language.  The language and structures that we practise orally tend to be the same as the sentences that the children will later write, and I think this continues until way into secondary school languages.  It will be some time before students can confidently speak conversationally, different to the language that they write.

Composition

Articulating and structuring ideas in written form is referred to as composition in the national curriculum.  Composition and transcription are summarised in the framework as "The Simple View of Writing". (page 16)  It says that proficient writing will not be possible without developing these two aspects.

Research has suggested (see page 19) that "planning, composing and rewriting a text is twice as mentally demanding as reading a complex text".  This is something that resonates with writing in the new language.  I think that sometimes, particularly if we are a visiting specialist teacher, we can underestimate just how difficult it can be for some children to produce sentences in the new language.

"An effective writer has to attend to numerous elements simultaneously. This can present an overwhelming challenge for pupils’ working memory, that is, their limited workspace for thinking, learning and remembering. This is particularly the case for novice writers. As they become more skilled with the individual components, they are more able to manage all of them but it can be overwhelming while they are learning. Writing should not be rushed: pupils should concentrate on the quality of their writing rather than producing large amounts of lower-quality text." (page 19)

The framework recommends beginning with sentences which can later be built into paragraphs.  It also recommends using visual prompts such as pictures from a story book and sentence stems.

Talking for writing and modelling responses before written composition takes place are crucial to success in English and also writing in the new language.  As the framework says: "Pupils who are expected to write with minimal preparation are unlikely to succeed." (page 57)  It breaks composition down into four steps:  Drafting, Revising, Editing, Sharing.

Before the first draft of writing in the new language is written, it is crucial that a typical response is modelled for the children, whether this is for a set of phrase or sentence drills or for a longer paragraph.  The framework says "Pupils need to have the whole process demonstrated for them and see 'the struggle, the thinking, the pondering, the messiness of it all - because most struggling writers believe good writers are born, not honed through practice'" (page 64).  

As the first step, the teacher takes the lead while the children observe the 'expert writer'.  This is the modelled writing or 'I do' phase.  The teacher thinks aloud, explaining why they are choosing specific language or structures.  After this comes the shared writing or 'we do' phase where the children build a text with the teacher.  I must admit that I begin with this phase - I don't compose a text myself and talk the children through how I am doing it.  Something to consider for the future I think.  When I build a text with the children, I show them how we can start simple and then embellish with conjunctions, intensifiers and other previously learned words.

You can see in these examples (for Year 4 and Year 6) that we started with basic sentences and then added to them to increase the complexity and the quality.  

The third phase is the independent writing or 'you do' phase, where the children use the two previous examples to create their own piece of writing.  The framework also suggests a fourth phase - guided writing - where the teacher works with a selected group of pupils, helping them to draft their writing while the rest of the class works independently.  I choose to circulate constantly around the class, addressing any misconceptions and answering questions as they arise.  Guided writing is something that I do with certain children but not formally and not usually sitting with them.  Children need frequent and timely feedback on their writing, and I choose to do this by moving around the room.

Writing across the curriculum

Writing skills are incorporated into many other subject areas in the primary timetable, and children are expected to use their English skills to write about what they have learned elsewhere in the curriculum.  The framework says that it is important that "the complexity of the task [in the other subject] matches their stage of development in writing" (page 86).  In other words, if children are writing in geography, the task they are given should enable them to write at the same level as they do in their English work.  This is something that is not possible in languages, the grammar, structure and complexity of which are usually at least a key stage behind the work in English, because of the starting point and the frequency of the lessons.  We can, though, embed many of the writing routines and models described in the framework into our subject.

"The power of writing as a means for thinking and remembering should be embedded throughout the curriculum." (page 86)  We can certainly play our part in this.

Transition

Secondary teachers will need to know how primary children have been taught to write, not only in English but also in their language lessons.  To facilitate a smooth transition, secondary teachers are advised to use some of the same strategies in their lessons.

There are clearly a lot of parallels that can be drawn between primary English pedagogy and methodology and what we do in the primary languages classroom.  I think it will help teachers - non-specialists, class teachers and specialists alike - to reflect on the recommendations of the framework and how they can enhance our teaching of writing in a language other than English.

Worksheets: colour or no colour?

 

If you are familiar with my work and/or this blog, you will know that I am a prolific creator of worksheets and other classroom resources for the teaching of languages.  If you use the resources that I make available free on Light Bulb Languages, you'll know that the vast majority of the student worksheets are black and white. 

Why do I make them in black and white?  Mainly because black and white printing and photocopying is a lot cheaper than colour.  I have to limit my colour printing at school because of the cost - it's no secret that schools are struggling financially in England at the moment.  I break up text with carefully chosen images, but very rarely is their colour important.

Because I am a prolific creator of worksheets, I often take a professionally curious look at what other providers are offering, to see how it compares to my output.  I often see worksheets that are in colour.  So whereas, for example, I create a black and white sentence builder that looks like this:

I often see examples like this:

or this:

or perhaps a combination of the two!

Cost aside, what does the addition of colour lend to the student learning experience?  Does it make for better learning and better production of language?  If the colourful worksheets have to be printed in black and white, will their effect be the same?  Will they be as clear?

In the primary classroom there has recently been a move away from too much colour.  Brightly coloured displays have been replaced with quieter affairs on hessian-backed boards.  This is in a bid to prevent a sensory overload for children.  Should resources also be "quieter"?

Some children also use coloured overlays on their worksheets or view them through glasses with coloured lenses in order to make them easier to read.  Others have their worksheets copied on paper that is not white.  Will the colours on the worksheet look the same to these children and have the intended impact?

An internet search on the benefit of using colour on worksheets reveals quite a few webpages by print companies, who have a vested interest and perhaps not quite so much educational experience. I found this article, which mentions colour being beneficial for colour coding activities, such as using colours to group certain items.  But surely children can add their own colour coding to a black and white worksheet?  Using the sentence builder examples above, what would be the benefits of the students adding the colours themselves?  In the primary classroom, Colourful Semantics is becoming more popular, and colour coding words by class is certainly not an alien concept in the language classroom.

What do you think?  Do you favour black and white or colour for your worksheets?

Lengua de Signos Española (LSE)

https://www.colegiovelazquez.es/lengua-signos-aulas/

I've recently started teaching my final unit with Year 6 - Así soy yo. It starts off with quizzes about languages and then learning how to use the verb hablar to say who is speaking which languages. One of my Year 6s asked me if I knew about Spanish sign language, and I had to admit to her that I didn't know about it, but would find out.

Research revealed Lengua de Signos Española (LSE). There are some good websites and YouTube videos that show some of the different signs. This one is particularly primary-friendly and clear https://www.fundacioncnse.org/educa/bancolse/index.php#gsc.tab=0  Year 6 and I had fun yesterday signing the Spanish alphabet.

This website has a dictionary with the signing for a lot of words: https://fundacioncnse-dilse.org/index.php (I still can't find a sign for español or castellano though).

This YouTube video is one of a good series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6FWFF4fEsg

You might find the signs useful for your multimodal or multisensory approach, when you need an action or gesture while practising vocabulary. It might be wise to give the sign for sacapuntas a miss though.... 😉

Reading aloud in Spanish: more dabbles with AI

 

I've just completed a brand new resource called Reading aloud in Spanish, which I have designed to support all students, but especially those studying for GCSE, in reading aloud with accurate pronunciation.

Each page of the resource follows the same format:

• A QR code provides a model of the sound ('ll' in this case) 
• In the Prepárate section, students can listen via a second QR code to the pronunciation of six sample words containing the focus sound.  
• The final step - ¡Lee! - is the group of phrases and sentences, all containing the focus sound, the sounds from previous pages, and those sounds which are more or less the same in Spanish and in English (C (/k/), CH, F, L, M, N, P, S, T, X), for students to practise reading aloud.  
• The sounds included are those which make Spanish significantly different to English - a, o, ll, ñ, e, i, u, ce/ci/z, d/-d, qu, b/v, ge/gi/j, r/rr.  These are gradually built up, so that students are only ever reading aloud the focus sound, sounds from previous pages and the ten sounds which are more or less like English.

When I was writing this resource, I use some of the notes and word lists that I had from my Spanish phonics resource, but also incorporated as many words as possible from the Edexcel GCSE prescribed vocabulary list.  I use AI as a way of making the composition of phrases and sentences quicker and easier.

I alternated between ChatGPT and Claude AI (thanks to Jérôme Nogues for the tip!) for the sentence generation, with a little bit of Google Gemini towards the end.  I found Claude AI the most reliable.  ChatGPT tended to go through my alphabetical vocabulary list and use each word in turn to create a sentence, meaning that all the sentences started with A and many did not make sense.  Claude AI generated more varied sentences and it was easier to adjust the prompts.  Generally speaking, I didn't use many of the AI-generated sentences, but rather used them as a starting point for the sentences that I included.  Even so, it was much quicker than writing all the sentences from scratch myself.

In the past when creating resources which include sound, I have recorded the audio myself and have had to edit the sound using Audacity, and insert them into the resource.  This time I used the text-to-speech generator TTSMaker, which I heard about from Jérôme at Language World last month.  I found a couple of the European Spanish voices which gave accurate results, and then linked them to the resource using QR codes - I used QR code Monkey.

The only difficulty I had with audio was getting the AI to say sounds rather than letters of the alphabet, such as /x/ instead of jota, so I used recordings I already had for those sounds.

I first experimented with AI in August 2023, and wasn't very impressed.  I can see that the AI generators have developed and moved on since that time, and now give better results.  I'll try again to use it to develop new resources for the classroom, and also to create more audio for the LiPS Listening Project.

Making a paper puppet - a #LW2025 takeaway

 

At Language World on Saturday I enjoyed the two talks about puppets that I went to.  In particular I'd like to thank Lavinia Dos Remedios, who showed us how to make a puppet out of a piece of A4 paper.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I am very keen on making things with one piece of A4 paper, namely minibooks, so this was right up my street!

Above, you can see a short video of the puppet that I made during the session and quickly decorated to look like a Moomin, in honour of Lisa Stevens and the box of biscuits I just ate, ahem.

Here is the YouTube video that Lavinia referenced with the instructions on how to make the puppets:

Language World 2025 #LW2025

I returned yesterday from the 2025 Language World Conference with a head full of information and ideas, and a notebook full of notes.  Well, full-ish of notes, as there were some sessions (for example the ones I was chairing) that I decided to just listen to.

The title of my talk was A rich tapestry of adaptable lesson ideas!  (The theme of the conference prompted a lot of weaving and stitching analogies as well as AI-generated pictures of the same!)

I had time to talk about 20 different activities:

1. Which one do I not say?
2. Sentence builder bingo
3. Listening Chests
4. Pointing game
5. Trapdoor/Cluedo
6. Sit down when yours is different
7. Working off the grid
8. Guess my sentence
9. Listen read write
10. Rapping
11. Dialogues
12. Messing around with text
13. Describing a poster
14. Odd one out
15. Analysing text
16. Post-It grids
17. Pair writing
18. Pictogram sentences
19. Dice roll activities
20. Kim's game
    

You can read more about these activities and 100 others here.

Here are my notes from some of the other sessions I attended:

Which one did I not say?

 

Recently I've been doing a lot more listening with my classes before we start speaking (here's why)  This activity can be done before you start the speaking, or afterwards as a recap.

I've called it "Which one did I not say?" for want of a better name!  I say all of the words that we are practising (not in any particular order) except for one.  The children look at the grid on the board while listening, and then have to tell me which one I didn't say.  It requires a lot of focussed and careful listening, and I am always impressed that they get the right answer - I'm not convinced I would be able to!

So far I've used it for single words, as in the example above, which is for Year 4 (age 8-9).  However I think it could be used with any age or experience of learner, and could be used with short phrases or even sentences rather than just words.

It is a low-prep idea, but I'd recommend preparing it in advance, so that you know what you've said!  I jot them down on a sticky note or make lists like this: