Words and Pictures?

When I was preparing my presentation about writing for Language World, I re-read Patterns and procedures: focus on phonics and grammar by Heather Rendall.  Those who attended the presentation will remember that I quoted Heather a couple of times.

Heather says that learners will store an image of what a new L2 word looks like as soon as they hear it, and, especially if they are beginner learners, they are likely to use their pre-learned system of English phonics to do so.  It is likely that English will interfere with learners storing an accurate image of this new word.  

Heather goes on to say that:

"Every word has three attributes: a meaning, a sound and a spelling.  Target language nouns will also have a gender.  All four attributes should be presented immediately and simultaneously and repeatedly."

I trained as a teacher in the mid-1990s, when the communicative method was all the rage.  The thinking at the time was that you should introduce learners to the spoken word first, and to the written word considerably later.  Seeing the written word too soon apparently confused the learner.  In addition, phonics was something they apparently absorbed by some kind of osmosis.  This proved to be largely impractical and unsuccessful, and at the turn of the century I was part of a local working group who looked at the systematic teaching of phonics and much more focussed attention on the written word.

As a primary practitioner, I always present new language using a visual focus, which enables me to present the new language without the need for English until we spend a little time checking understanding.  This image shows one of the A5 flashcards that I use:

The picture indicates the meaning of the word, learners will hear the sound of the word when I say it, and the pink stripe at the bottom of the card indicates its gender.  Of Heather Rendall's four attributes, it is therefore missing the spelling.  This flashcard is for una plaza - a word with a phoneme/grapheme that is specific to Spanish.  It's likely that, despite some extensive work on phonics over three years, the Year 6 learners who hear this word will store the image platha in their heads.

An alternative is to keep the image but add the written word:

The fourth attribute is now present at the expense of the gender, which could, I think go somewhere else on the card as a coloured dot.  I wouldn't want to colour-code the words as that would make them less visible from the back of the room.  The image has to be smaller if the text is present and ideally I would like the text to be bigger too.  If I presented the words via PowerPoint slides then the words and images would both be bigger, but I really prefer the versatility and immediacy of low-tech flashcards.  So the exact design of a flashcard with all four attributes leaves me in a quandry - what to include and how?  It's possible that I would want two sets of flashcards - one with text to present the new words and a second with picture only to aid recall.

Do you introduce the written word at the same time as the sound and meaning?  What are your thoughts?

Language World 2018: Putting pen to paper

Putting pen to paper from Clare Seccombe

Here's my presentation from this year's Language World conference, which took place yesterday and the day before.

Starting to write in another language isn't as easy as simply picking up a pen or pencil, especially for younger learners.  This presentation looks at the difficulties they may face and how we can best support learners as they begin to write in their new language.

These blogposts explore some of the points further:

Trace the letter: learning to write new letters and characters

The Interference of English: How mother tongue and other languages affect spelling in the new language

Phrase du jour

Practising spelling and structure

Kagan Rally Table: for peer supported writing

Writing without a pen

Starting to write in a new language

Don't forget your PIN: writing frames with numbers

How important is spelling?

Short, sharp repetition

The Interference of English

Some time ago I wrote about the importance of spelling.  I asked if it was more important to spell accurately or to get your message across with some errors.  I included a list of the words in French, Spanish and German that are commonly misspelled by students.

Over the last few weeks I have been looking more closely at the issue of spelling in the new language.  While it's true that a considerable number of spelling errors are a result of carelessness, many others can be ascribed to the interference of English.

By the time students start to learn a new language in Year 3, they have undergone four years of rigorous training in English spelling and phonics.  The new language has different letter clusters and sequences, but the students can, often unconsciously, replace these patterns with more familiar English spelling patterns.  The four formative years of learning English spelling is enough to build a muscle memory, so that it feels more natural, for example, for a student to write rough than rouge, as the -ough letter cluster occurs in some frequently-used English words and the -ouge cluster is unfamiliar to English native speakers.

Spelling errors of any kind are exasperating for the languages teacher, especially when they are of the je m'apple variety which turn up again and again.  A systematic learning of phonics is one of the keys to ensuring more accurate spelling in the new language, but do we also owe it to our students to anticipate the sorts of errors that they are likely to make due to the interference of English and practise these words in a more focussed way?  

It is worth noting that this interference may also come from other languages that the student has learned, for example if they are in Year 7 and starting a language that is not the one they studied in Key Stage 2.  Any new language will have combinations of letters that are entirely unfamiliar to the beginner student and which they will need to practise in order to build their confidence and to start to build the new muscle memory.

We already draw direct comparisons with English in order to teach grammatical structures such as adjectival word order and the genitive, so should we now extend this to spelling?

Many thanks to the members of the Secondary MFL Matters Facebook group who joined in the discussion about this recently and who also provided many of the examples below:

FRENCH:
French word	often misspelled as	reason?
amusant	amusement	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English ‘amusement’
anniversaire	anniversarie	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English ‘anniversary’
blanc	blank	students remember the meaning of blanc by associating it with the English ‘blank’ but this in turn means that the word is often written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
bleu	blue	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English.
copain	complain	-m- probably added because of the influence of the English ‘companion’
danse	dance	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
déteste	detest	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
équitation	equation	the word is obviously unusual looking (and hard to spell/say for an English-speaking learner) so it is corrected to the nearest known English word
heures	hueres	-ue- is much more common in English than -eu-
histoire	historie	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
il	ill	the nearest known English word
intéressant	interestant	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
je m’appelle	je m’apple	the nearest known English word
magique	magic	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
maison	mansion	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
manger	manager	the nearest known English word
montagne	montange	-gne words often cause problems for English-speaking learners, as -nge is a much more common letter sequence in English than -gne.
natation	nation	the nearest known English word
neuf	nerf	apart from the obvious phonic influence, some of the influence will come from the well known Nerf guns….
oui	qui	these three vowels are never seen together in English.  It’s much more common to have q+u and then another vowel.
rouge	rough	English words ending -ough are quite common, hence the change to the nearest known English word.
vacances	vacancies	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
vingt	vinght	-gt is not an English word ending, but there are quite a few words (eight, knight etc) that end with -ght, hence the correction

SPANISH:
Spanish word	often misspelled as	reason?
centro comercial	centro commercial	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
difícil	diffícil	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
favorito	favourito	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
fútbol	fútball	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
geografía	geographía	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
me encanta	me enchanta	the nearest known English word
seis	sies	rigorous application of the “i before e except after c” rule!
tecnología	technología	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
vamos	vamous	few English words end with -os, so this is often written with an -ous ending, which is more familiar, from words such as famous
veinte	viente	rigorous application of the “i before e except after c” rule!

GERMAN:
German word	often misspelled as	reason?
es ist windig	es ist winding	-ig as a word ending is not seen in English, so it is corrected to resemble the much more common -ing ending
Katze	Catze	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
langweilig	langweiling	-ig as a word ending is not seen in English, so it is corrected to resemble the much more common -ing ending
lernen	learnen	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
nicht	night	the nearest known English word
Schwimmbad	Schwimmenbad	the extra -en- is added to make it resemble more closely the English ‘swimming pool’.
zwei	zwie	rigorous application of the “i before e except after c” rule!

Practising spelling and structure

I've written before about ways of supporting children as they start to write words, phrases and sentences.  We can give them letter cards to try out spelling and also arrange the parts of the sentences into writing frames or dice grids.

Sometimes, to assist children in collecting together a series of correct sentences to act as a model, I give them an activity like this one:

For the first four sentences, the letters are in the right order, but there are no capital letters, finger spaces or punctuation.  The children have to rewrite the sentences, adding those aspects.  The second group of sentences have the finger spaces, but no capital letters or punctuation.  Oh, and the letters in each word are not in the right order.  The children have to unmix the letters so that each sentence makes sense.  All 8 sentences have the same structure, though, and at the end of the activity (which they usually self- or peer-assess) they will have 8 model sentences to help them when they come to do their own writing.

I've recently rediscovered a website that will allow you to create a variation on this kind of activity - the Reverse Text Generator from Text Mechanic.

If I take the basic sentence il fait chaud aujourd'hui, I can:

• reverse it: iuh'druojua duahc tiaf li
  
• reverse the wording: hui'aujourd chaud fait il
  
• reverse each word's lettering: li tiaf duahc druojua'iuh
  
• write the sentence upside down!: ınɥ,pɹnoɾnɐ pnɐɥɔ ʇıɐɟ ןı

Making sentences using some of these methods would again require children to transliterate the sentences to make them correct, and again provide them with an accurate model which they can then adapt.

Writing without a pen

This morning I was having a look back at a post from 2009, the beginning of this blog.  In this post, I listed things I'd like to try in the classroom that I hadn't already tried.  Number 9 on the list of ten:

I've experimented with cut out letters to spell out words before (for example in my Soy prehistórico series of lessons) but haven't tried this particular activity.  I've made an activity for my Year 3 Spaniards, with whom I've just started Food and Opinions:

It'll take a bit of printing and cutting to get it ready (I pay my own children to do that kind of thing!) and we might do some other activities like these ones to help to memorise the spelling.  Children could also work on the words independently and photograph their work for evidence.  A similar activity could work with word cards, where the teacher says a sentence in English and the children have to put together that sentence in the target language.

"Writing" in this way is non-threatening for children, as they are not faced with a big empty page, and mistakes are easy to erase.  Writing with word cards rather than letters would work for older students for dictation and translation purposes.

If you'd like a copy of the above activity to try for yourself, you can download it from here.  There is also general set of Spanish letters here and French here.

How important is spelling?

If there's one thing that makes a language teacher scream in exasperation and apply lots of red pen to children's work, it's poor spelling.  There is a big emphasis on correct spelling (and punctuation and grammar - SPaG) elsewhere in the curriculum, so we should expect careful spelling in languages too.

However, if we look at the Making and Marking Progress document for Key Stage 2, we read the following:

"Spelling may not always be completely accurate but your meaning will be clear."

So just how important is spelling?

Here are the results of a #mfltwitterati crowd source about common spelling mistakes:

FRENCH:
nerf	neuf
beucoup / beacoup	beaucoup
familie	famille
blue	bleu
souer	soeur
jamie	j’aime
interestant	intéressant
compains	copains
chevaux	cheveux
fréré	frère
collage	collège
je mapple / jem’appele etc	je m’appelle
trios	trois
mecredi	mercredi
jabeet	j’habite
vancances	vacances
SPANISH:
abburido	aburrido
me enchanta	me encanta
anos	años
viente	veinte
mardre	madre
GERMAN
Ich speile	Ich spiele
Wochende	Wochenende
Fruende	Freunde

Some questions:

• Are there more French examples because French is harder to spell than Spanish and German?
• What do the exemplified errors tell us about what the students find difficult about the languages?
• How much is English to blame?
• How much are spell checkers responsible for?  (see above image!)

I would be interested to hear your thoughts, and of course any other cracking examples.