Dictation across the key stages #LW2024

 

On Saturday I attended day 2 of this year's Language World conference.  I gave a presentation about dictation, giving lots of ideas to use from Key Stage 2 (age 7-11) all the way up to Key Stage 4 (age 14-16) and beyond.

It was much easier to make a video for you in order to share it than to paste all the slides into this blogpost!  Here is the video:

Other links:

Point à la ligne: dictation in primary languages - blogpost

Dictados: resources to introduce, support and practise dictation in Spanish

The place of the pillar of phonics in the Key Stage 2 Languages curriculum

 

Yesterday morning I delivered a 15 minute keynote session at the Teachmeet MFL Icons online event.  It was a great event to be a part of - packed with short, snappy presentations which covered all sorts of different topics.  This is my presentation in text form. The event is now available to watch online.

The national curriculum for Key Stage 2 (KS2 - age 7-11) Languages is not very long and it’s not as detailed as perhaps we would like. Its purpose of study and the aims sections are the same as for Key Stage 3 (KS3 - age 11-14), but the subject content is different.

In KS3 there is no explicit mention of phonics, although some of the attainment targets need knowledge of phonics and the sound spelling link to be able to do them. For example, students are required to “transcribe words and short sentences that they hear with increasing accuracy” and “speak coherently and confidently, with increasingly accurate pronunciation and intonation”. It is, however. mentioned explicitly in the KS2 national curriculum, implying that the main groundwork needs to be done in primary so that students can hit the ground running and achieve in KS3 and beyond.

The above is from the KS2 subject content introduction, and the orange highlights are mine.

First, we can teach any modern or ancient language (so we don’t teach MFL in KS2, but rather FL or just "Languages"). The ancient languages are excused the speaking and therefore the phonics. So children who do Latin in KS2 will be well prepared for modern European languages in KS3 in some ways, but not in others. The second point says “Teaching should provide a balance of spoken and written language”. Historically primary languages were more about speaking and tended to neglect writing, but writing is now a fundamental part of what we do. This is important for phonics, as it shows it’s just as important to be able to say the new sounds as it is to read them and represent them in writing accurately. The aims of the curriculum state that children have to use their knowledge of "phonology, grammatical structure and vocabulary" to enable them to understand and communicate. This is the first mention of the 3 pillars, and something that does not appear in the KS3 curriculum.

Above are the attainment targets that relate to phonics in the KS2 curriculum. It’s all about beginning and developing an understanding of the sounds in the new language and looking into the sound-spelling link. We start to develop accurate pronunciation and intonation, both so that children can speak accurately and be understood, and so that they can read aloud accurately. We are encouraged to use authentic resources such as songs and rhymes to help us to explore phonics, and to help us to make the sound spelling link. Songs and poems are mentioned briefly in KS3 but not with a view to explicitly exploring phonics.

The “3 pillars” of vocabulary, grammar and phonics was a term first coined by Ofsted in 2020, following the 2016 Teaching Schools Council Pedagogy Review of secondary languages.  They are now at the heart of the Ofsted inspection framework for languages.  If you’ve seen the leaked Ofsted aide-memoires for KS2 and KS3 languages, you’ll know that they are riddled with mentions of phonics. These 3 pillars have equal weighting and equal importance in the curriculum. The word “pillar” suggests that the three are separate entities, so be taught and learned in isolation, However we know that the three are inextricably linked and interwoven, and that you can’t teach one without touching on the others.

The more I’ve supported other schools with their curricula, the more I have come to realise that the 3 pillars are the Intent of our curriculum. They are what you set out to teach. The four modalities (Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing), Language Learning Strategies (LLS) and Knowledge About Language (KAL) alongside culture are your Implementation – what you are going to use to teach your intent. Then your Impact is how you assess how well you’ve taught your intent.

So the first answer to the question I posed at the beginning is that the pillar of phonics is firmly embedded in the KS2 curriculum, where the onus is very much on primary teachers to cover phonics systematically and thoroughly, in all four years, so as to enable children to be successful once they enter KS3.

It’s important then that KS3 teachers are aware of what phonics their new Year 7s have covered in KS2. They need to ask, and KS2 teachers need to tell! Transition is so important. Year 7 teachers can’t make assumptions about what the children have done and how they might have done it. It will help them to hit the ground running if they can continue in KS3 the way that they learned in KS2, even if they are going to be gradually weaned off it.  The ASCL Transition Toolkit (available for French, Spanish, German and Chinese) is a good way to start off the conversation.  

If primary schools use a bought-in scheme, then phonics will be included in that scheme somehow, and each scheme will do phonics its own way.  Physical French Phonics and Physical Spanish Phonics are widely used by specialists and non-specialists alike. The idea is that each phoneme has a corresponding image, which in turn shows the child the action they have to do. The action then reminds them of the sound. Once the children are familiar with the actions and sounds, after lots and lots of repetition, you can use the actions as a quick and easy prompt to correct errors or misconceptions. The books are full of great resources and information. They would be useful for KS3 too, and people even use them with adults.

Phonics are best embedded in each lesson, particularly at the initial presentation and practice of vocabulary stage. I choose to teach them explicitly right from the start, not leaving it to chance that the children will notice what I want them to notice. Time is precious in the primary languages classroom, after all. I have started using phonics to introduce new vocabulary, so that the children are seeing the written word at the very first stage and therefore not using English phonics to approximate a spelling of the word in their head, and so that we draw attention to the tricky sounds right from the beginning.  Then when it comes to practising the vocabulary with flashcards and images and so on they have already seen the words and are familiar with the sounds. The next stage will be putting the vocabulary into phrases or sentences by way of a sentence builder or similar. Because they are happy with the pronunciation they can focus on the grammar and structure. So the first pillar, phonics, leads to more successful learning of the second pillar, vocabulary, which in its turn leads to increased confidence with grammar and structure.

When I teach phonics I break the words down into their phonemes, and we then practise sounding the words out before having a go at blending them. I often take the phonemes we have been practising and put them into new, unseen words to show that the phonemes are transferrable. For example bonjour gives us the sounds to work out mouton. The thing we want of course is for children to see a phoneme in a new word and know straightaway which sound it makes. For French in particular (Spanish is so much more straightforward!) I have cards with the graphemes on that we have been practising. I hold up a card and the children have to make the sound.

I hope then that you can see the important place that the pillar of phonics has in the KS2 curriculum, and how this work can and should be built on in KS3 and beyond. Of course there is much more that I could say but hopefully it has started the conversation.

Want to read more?  Here are the other blogposts I have written about phonics.

Language Show 2021

The presentations from this year's Language Show have now been uploaded to YouTube.  You can watch my minibooks and vocabulary sessions:

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?

Language World 2020: Harnessing the Hive Mind

I had a great time at this year's Language World conference in Manchester.  I spent yesterday and today in the company of old friends and new friends, attending inspiring sessions and generally putting the world to rights.

My session yesterday was Harnessing the Hive Mind.  If you couldn't be there (for various reasons!) here it is for you now:

What is the 'hive mind'?  According to the OED, it's “a notional entity consisting of a large number of people who share their knowledge or opinions with one another, regarded as producing either uncritical conformity or collective intelligence”.  My working definition for our context is here:

A lot of us in the primary sector are lone practitioners, and a lot of us can’t access CPD for various reasons, so using your online community, your personal learning network, is often the way to go.  

This image represents my personal learning network.  You will be hearing about how I have used them to harness the hive mind.  Members of LiPS (the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group) are going to get the biggest mentions, hence the image.

Rather than list things that you could do, I’m going to tell you the story of how I’ve harnessed the hive mind during the last year or so in four different ways.  Hopefully this will give you some ideas of things that you could do or ways that you could contribute.

Joe Dale (@joedale on Twitter) and Noah Geisel (@SenorG) started the MFLTwitterati podcast, of which there are now 10 episodes.  I found Episode 4 (April 2019) particularly interesting.  Have a listen to the takeaway section, which features US Spanish teacher Martina Bex and her online Spanish magazine, Revista Literal.

I had a look at Revista Literal, and here’s an example of one of the pages.  The students’ writing is printed out and has a vocab list at the side, so that it becomes a reading resource as well as a celebration of writing.  I could immediately see how this model could be adapted for primary languages, to celebrate the writing that our children do, to raise awareness of the standards that children are reaching in Key Stage 2, and to give children the opportunity to write for a real audience.

I blogged about it the same day and shared the post to Twitter and to the LiPS Facebook group to see what others thought.  Reactions were overwhelmingly positive.

So, to start things off I put together a short survey on Google forms, which I blogged about and then shared the links for as before.  The responses indicated the direction that the magazine was to take – which Key Stages it should be for, how often it should be published, if the pieces of work should be originals or retyped, if children’s illustrations should be included, and if background information from teachers should be included.  After this there was a vote to establish the name of the magazine.  GDPR and safeguarding was a minefield to navigate.  Twitter friends especially were very helpful in this regard.

Then on 1^st May last year I fractured my wrist.  I couldn’t do much, especially drive, so I couldn’t go to school.  But I could do one-handed typing, so I worked on the paperwork and asked people for feedback on that and the design, logo and layout.  I put together the web page and so was able to put out a call for the first submissions in May.

I published Issue 1 at the beginning of June.  The contents and guest language appear on the opening page.  The pages are numbered using the guest language.  The structure is based on Revista Literal, with vocabulary lists at the side of the page, and photographs (from pixabay.com) where the children don’t provide illustrations.

Teacher’s Corner follows the children’s work.  Teachers tell the story of how the pieces of work came to be.  They say how long the children have been learning the language and how long their lessons are, then describe the sequence of the teaching and learning leading up to this piece of work.  They describe the support that the children had, and say why they particularly like the pieces of work that they have submitted.

The final part of the magazine is Puzzle Corner, where the puzzles are about languages and you get the answers to the previous one from the previous issue.

The deadline for issue 5 is Thursday March 26th, so please visit the webpage for more information and to read previous issues if you'd like to celebrate your children's work in this way.

Phrases of the day were conceived to give language teachers some meme-type picture resources to use and to display.  The first ones were phrases that I chose, but then I asked people via Twitter, LiPS and Secondary MFL Matters if there were any they’d find useful.  I did them in French, Spanish and German using the Canva app.  I published one a day in each of the three languages from 11th March last year until 5th July.  They’re all on the website (see the links on the homepage) if you want to download and use any of them.  There are a lot of classroom instructions and phrases, and also examples of plurals, adjectival agreement and so on.

The phrases of the day morphed into the #LanguageLinks, which started on 5th July last year, and there’s been a new one every day since, on the Light Bulb Languages Twitter, Facebook page and also on the new Instagram page.  Every week or so I upload a batch to the website.  They’re in French, Spanish, German and Italian. 

The links are something I’d thought about for a while, and which I had blogged about, in the context of improving English vocabulary.  I find it difficult to teach another language without comparing the words and structures in the new language with English.  For example, colours are often one of the first things that we teach new learners, and with my classes I look for clues, tips and hints that will help us to remember the words.  One of the most common ones is remembering blanco/blanc by thinking of the English word blank.  Quite often these clues, tips and hints lead us to high quality English vocabulary that I recommend to my students that they use.  In recent weeks we have mentioned azure, stupendous and phantom. 

This also links very well with the curriculum for English, where there is a big emphasis at the moment on improving and building English vocabulary.  The links are designed to stimulate interest in other languages while building English vocabulary and showing links to help students to remember the new words.

The L2 word on each poster is a translation of the first English word.  Then the second English word is linked to the L2 word (sometimes they are cognates but not always).  The two English words are always linked in some way.

Lots of people have sent me their ideas for links, for which I’m very grateful as my own ideas are starting to run a bit dry.  If you have any ideas I’d love to hear them!  I’ve also been sent a lot of pictures of the posters on display in different schools and colleges, which is great.

In November last year I saw this tweet from Samara Spielberg, who is a teacher in New York.  She asks colleagues to write short texts which incorporate certain set phrases, verbs and structures. Then her students read and analyse them before using them as a model for their own work. 

The following is a close-up of one of the texts that Samara made. I could see straightaway that this was something that could be adapted for Key Stage 2, with different teachers contributing texts to make a teaching resource.

I had just started gender with my beginner Year 4s, and decided to crowd-source some texts for them to use as a writing stimulus.

I put together a sample text with the key language that I wanted to use, and asked colleagues via my blog and via LiPS to contribute.

This is the resulting resource which I worked on with my Year 4s.  We looked at the genders of all the nouns mentioned and used a glossary to find out the meanings.  We then used the colour coding to help us to collaboratively build a text on the board.  Then I let them loose with a dictionary to write their own.  They had to make a list of their nouns and genders first, and then build them into their text.

This is an example of the work produced.  The majority of the children enjoyed using the colour coding to help them to build their sentences.  Colouring blocks like this was more successful than writing in colours, mainly because yellow writing doesn’t show up!

I did a similar thing for French.  All these resources are on Light Bulb Languages.

This is one to practise opinions of infinitives for Year 6.  We did this activity with it.  There are lots of other possibilities for texts like this – if you can think of one you’d like, let’s do it!

Deep dives won’t have escaped your attention.  As they’re new this academic year there’s been a lot of brainstorming and sharing on the forums and on social media.

In September a number of us received this in a marketing email from ilanguages.  I posted it in LiPS as I thought it would be of interest to members of the group in the light of the new Ofsted framework.  Jane Birtwhistle and I decided to post one of the questions each day for people to contribute their responses so that we could all help each other out.  Over the seven days of the seven questions there were a lot of really helpful contributions.  Of my three schools, two of them at the time were expecting Ofsted imminently, and the third, an outstanding school, was potentially going to get one of the special visits for languages, history and geography.  So these responses were very useful for me.  I went through the responses and pulled them together in a document, which I posted back into LiPS.  It meant that each member would have the basics which they could then shape to their own school.  The document covered the 3 Is and more.  All the posts can be viewed by searching the hashtag #ofsteddeepdive in LiPS.

I made the information specific to my school and shared it with my headteacher. This all led to a positive few weeks for me at school.  We had a “meet the governors” day, where a team of the governors spent the day in school talking to the children and also the leaders of various subjects and projects and so on.  Because my headteacher knew I had been doing this work into the 3Is and other aspects of leading the subject, she asked me to come to speak to the governors about Spanish.  During the meeting, the governors asked me about CPD, and came to the conclusion that other staff would benefit from some input on languages.  So in January I did a staff meeting for Spanish.  This is the message I shared about it on LiPS afterwards.

This is a brilliant example of what people can do when they all put their heads together.  More than one person has said that in their school languages are leading the way with this.  Maybe it looks like it's just me blowing my own trumpet but this could be you!

So as you can see I’ve had no qualms about using my online contacts and personal learning network for my own ends, but I have shared the outcomes with others as well.

What can you do?  How can you harness the hive mind to enrich your offering to your students or to make a resource that will be of use to lots of colleagues?

When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion – together we are invincible!

Southampton University Primary Languages #SUPL

Yesterday, 19th July, was the last day of the school year for many.  I spent it at Southampton University at the SUPL (Southampton University Primary Languages) conference.  SUPL is part of the RiPL Network.  I was honoured to be asked to speak about writing - you can view a copy of my presentation here.  It was great to catch up with old friends (and my sister!) and to meet new people and hear about what they have been doing in their classrooms.

Here are my sketchnotes from the day.

Engaging children with reading - Mike Dodson

Oral language development through technology and app smashing with Book Creator and Adobe Spark Video - Joe Dale

Scaffolding writing - Sarah Dugdale

#LW2019 Sketchnotes

Here are my sketchnotes from the sessions that I attended at the Association for Language Learning Language World conference this weekend.  Click on the images if you'd like to see the sketchnotes full screen.  My own presentation - Goosebump Learning - can be viewed here.