Presenting new language - an update years later!

In February 2010, I wrote a blogpost here about presenting and practising new vocabulary.  At the time I had been in the primary classroom for a term and a half.  Now, 13 years later, I can see that my practice has morphed into something different, and something that I think is more effective.

In January I read an interesting article about the benefits or not of learners learning new words in the foreign language by repeating them out loud.  Here is the summary of the article:

This paragraph explains it a little more:

Reading and reflecting on this article has caused me to modify the way that I introduce new vocabulary and then get the children to move towards saying it out loud.

Here is what I now do, and I am definitely seeing the benefits, with better pronunciation and recall from both my more experienced Spanish learners and my beginner French learners.

1. I present the new vocabulary via Physical French/Spanish Phonics.  My PowerPoint slides show the words, the sounds that make them up, and image to show what it means.  We sound the words out, repeating each one at least 3 times.  We don't blend them at this stage, although I do hear some learners quietly saying the words.
   
   
2. On a new PowerPoint slide I put all the words in a numbered grid, along with the images to again show meaning.  I say the words firstly in order and then randomly, and ask the children to point to them on the screen.  Engagement is always good and it is a quiet activity.  Here's an example of a grid:
   
   
   
   
   The pointing game could be used as an alternative for this, and would be a useful resource for further practice later.
   
   
3. Next we use the numbers for listening practice.  I say the word and the children have to tell me which number it is.  It's also a good way to practise numbers!  We cycle through all the words probably two or three times.
   
   
4. Next it's time for the children to start saying the words.  We use "don't repeat until I click".  I say the words in order, but the children aren't allowed to repeat them back until I click my fingers.  I give them a good few seconds to mentally rehearse the words first.
   
   
5. Finally we do some choral repetition in the usual way.

We repeat some of these steps the following lesson, and gradually reduce the amount of practice that we have to do.

Do you have any other go-to activities that you do at this initial "getting to know the words before saying them" stage?

Read all about it!

In case you weren't at Language World yesterday and the day before, here is my presentation Read all about it.

When we read, what exactly is it that we do?  This is the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

We infer meaning from a series of (usually) black squiggles on a page.  We have to learn what each little squiggle is and how it combines with other little squiggles to form blocks of meaning, and how these blocks of meaning (words) go together to create greater meaning.  

We want children to read aloud and in their heads, for pleasure, for comprehension and for information.  We want children to distinguish the different words in the new language and to understand them, and then to understand the meaning in English of a word, phrase or sentence.  

For reading aloud, phonics are crucial to confidence, and it is by reading aloud extended passages of the language that children can hear and practise the intonation of the language.  Once the children can decipher the sound of a word, they can link that sound to the word they have already learned and begin to build the meaning and understand the writing.  They can also use clues like capital letters, layout and pictures to help them to deduce the meaning.  Therefore we read with our eyes, our ears and our mouths.  (Thanks to Vicky Cooke for this!)

These are the objectives for reading from the National Curriculum programme of study.

Phonics of course invaluable for confidence in reading aloud and helping to decipher new words.

The "words, phrases and simple writing" part echoes the progression that is built into the old Key Stage 2 Framework, which advocated building up from single words in Year 3 to short texts in Year 6.

"Authentic sources for reading" can comprise children's story and non-fiction books, poems, texts from the internet, magazines, newspapers, publicity material from shops, adverts, leaflets, posters, letters and emails from children in schools in another country.

What would be in "a range of writing"?  Perhaps handwriting, machine text, stories, letters and news articles.  Also, writing that has been written by a language teacher for practising a particular point, as opposed to authentic materials.

Via reading children will see some of the “patterns, grammar and words” of the language in action, and will also see the grammar points in action that are mentioned in the National Curriculum.  Dictionary skills are specified for developing skills for children to help themselves to understand what they are reading.

WORD LEVEL

We’re going to look at ideas and possible resources for word level reading, phrase and sentence level and then text level.  Activities are of course very adaptable!

It’s often worth showing children an extended passage of the language – they don’t have to be able to understand it – for them to notice differences in conventions in text.  There can be some significant differences in punctuation, accents and so on.  This way they are going to be more alert to things as they start to read more.  I also get them to practise writing accents and upside down punctuation very early on to make them aware of these special characters which they will see in text and have to replicate for themselves.

• We mention cognates in passing while teaching new vocabulary, but don’t necessarily spend a lot of time examining them.  They are very useful as a strategy for reading and understanding unknown words.  Children often don’t trust themselves that cognates are as straightforward as they look!  We can see a lot of cognates just by looking at the headings of the El País website.
• When children are starting to read, small pieces of paper, where you can only fit a little bit of writing on, are perceived as less threatening.  One example is dominoes, where you can match the L2 and English, or L2 and pictures, or a mixture if you’re feeling mean.  Tarsia puzzles are also useful here.
• I like to use flashcards in the presentation and practice phase of new language.  Children can think of lots of games to play with a partner if they have a set of the same picture cards and corresponding word cards. 
• Trash or Treasure
• Animal sounds to practise phonics
• Festisite for word spirals and snakes
• Understanding and sequencing: good for anything that can be sequenced, e.g. numbers, times, part of a story.  Children work in groups to put the items into the correct sequence and then have to read them out in the right order.  This is particularly useful for French numbers to 100!
• Reading information from a table.  Cross-curricular maths.
• Multiple choice.  Good for addressing meaning, spelling and also phonics misconceptions.
• Quizlet
• Studystack  
• Educandy

PHRASE AND SENTENCE LEVEL

• Use prior knowledge and known information to fill in the gap in a sentence.

• Post-it grids
• Trapdoor and Cluedo
• Odd one out
• Spot the errors

TEXT LEVEL

• Parallel texts: Good for detective work.  There are quite a few published books that have texts in both English and the L2, which are also good for children to look at independently.
• Knowledge organisers
• Make your own texts
• Authentic websites
• Poems, rhymes and songs are specified in the Key Stage 2 programme of study.  I have written my own anthologies of poems for French and Spanish as suitable authentic ones are hard to find.  When we learn a song or a poem, the words are always on the board and the children often have a little copy for their books.  We practise it together word by word, chunk by chunk, line by line, then read it all together, then perform.  This one is like a dialogue so we might split into groups.
• Dialogues.  Reading and speaking, and children can adapt them.
  

• Authentic books in the L2
• Commercially available translations of English-language children’s books.  Often the children will already know the story, which will help with understanding.
• Books in English that will sometimes open up a topic.
• Raid your children’s bookshelves and do your own translations.
• Make your own stories in PowerPoint.
  

• Storybird
• Storyjumper
• Minibooks
• Text analysis: Texts offer the benefit of extended language, a model to follow.  Emphasis is on core language and structure with a view to helping students to create their own work afterwards.  I have included one in a lesson pack I wrote about sports and opinions.  Children look for and circle the different categories of words.
• Write Away:  Read other children's work and submit some of your own!

Substantive and disciplinary knowledge: what does it mean for Languages?

In 2021 Ofsted began publishing a series of curriculum research reviews.  The Languages Curriculum Research Review (Languages OCRR) was the fourth in the series, and was published in June 2021.

The first in the series was Science, which came out in April 2021.  It featured substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge.  This is an excerpt from the Science OCRR:

The terms also appear in the OCRRs for History, Geography and RE, while disciplinary knowledge only is mentioned in the OCRRs for Art and Design, and English.  There no mentions in the OCRRs for Computing, PE, Maths, Music or Languages.

These terms appear to be replacing the "knowing more and remembering more" maxim.  I have found out this week that it has permeated into other subjects, and I have heard anecdotally that it has come up in some recent Ofsted inspections.  Schools have already rewritten their curricula to accommodate the "3 Is" (Intent, Implementation and Impact), language teachers have had to factor in the 3 Pillars (Vocabulary, Grammar and Phonics), and schools are now being encouraged to revisit their curricula and reframe them in terms of substantive and disciplinary knowledge.  We will all need to think about what substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge look like in our subject.  

So what are substantive and disciplinary knowledge in Languages?

Christie Counsell, in her article Taking curriculum seriously, says that "Substantive knowledge is the content that teachers teach as established fact".  Disciplinary knowledge, on the other hand, "is a curricular term for what pupils learn about how that knowledge was established, its degree of certainty and how it continues to be revised by scholars, artists or professional practice."

She then goes on to say that "This substantive-disciplinary distinction works to differing extents and in very different ways across subjects. The disciplinary dimension is barely relevant, for example, in school-level modern languages."  It is possible that this may support its omission from the Languages OCRR.

Despite this, a Google search for "disciplinary knowledge in languages" reveals that a number of schools have already rewritten their subject paperwork to include mention of substantive and disciplinary knowledge, and it is clear that they have interpreted the two kinds of knowledge in a number of different ways.

I've been reading around the subject, and have put together a list of bullet points for each type of knowledge:

Substantive knowledge	Disciplinary knowledge
Teacher input Focus on meaning Vocabulary Grammar Phonics The content that is to be learned Carefully chosen and sequenced factual content The facts Rules and methods “Knowing what”	Learner output The big ideas Thinking like a linguist Thinking like a French/Spanish/German speaker Practising the language Using the language creatively Asking questions Planning Evaluating Presenting Problem-solving Critical thinking Choosing and selecting Making connections “Knowing how to”

To put that into some context, I'll use a series of lessons I've recently completed with some Year 4 (age 8-9) beginners in French.  The substantive knowledge that I taught them was 10 animals with the indefinite article, including the phonemes in each word.  Then I taught them the difference between masculine and feminine nouns, and how to use the indefinite article to differentiate between the two.  Finally, as per the scheme of work we are using, I taught them je suis, which enabled us to practise short sentences such as Je suis un oiseau. and Je suis une souris.  I then wanted the children to take what they had learned and to apply it in their own work.  I gave them a bilingual glossary with many more animal words, and asked them to use their knowledge to write je suis sentences, and work out the correct indefinite article for each animal.  For this task they called on their disciplinary knowledge, applying the rules they had learned to solve a problem.

This shows how important it is to build into our schemes of work frequent opportunities for the children to demonstrate what they have learned, to be creative with the language, to "think like a linguist".

How does this picture of substantive and disciplinary knowledge fit in with yours?  All constructive comments welcome!

Finally, many thanks to Dr Gianfranco Conti for pointing out the similarities here with Krashen's Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis, which was a great help for me in getting my thoughts in order.

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.

Small Business Saturday 2022

 

This coming Saturday, 3rd December, is Small Business Saturday here in the UK.

I am a small business. Ideas Education Ltd is so small that it only employs me!

So what does this small business do?

• provides teaching of Spanish and French in local primary schools
• provides consultancy services and training for schools and teachers locally and across the country
• consults for educational organisations such as the BBC, Oak National Academy and TTS
• pays for, hosts and maintains Light Bulb Languages, a website packed with free resources for languages teachers
• offers for sale high quality, and now award-winning, resources for Spanish and French via Sellfy
• offers for sale language-themed goodies and more via LumenMakes on Etsy

To celebrate Small Business Saturday, I am offering you:

• A 25% discount on all my Sellfy resources, using the discount code SBS22, on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th December
• A 25% discount on everything in my Etsy shop, using the discount code SBS22, on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th December

Why not also support some of my lovely friends and family who also run small businesses?

• Laura Anne Photography
• Nattalingo
• Crowd Insight
• A Cuerpo
• ReStitchy
• A Tantôt