The Frayer Model

The Frayer Model is a graphic organiser of information which was developed by Dorothy Frayer and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in 1969.  It is intended to support students as they analyse vocabulary in an engaging way.  This webpage has a good overview of the model.

This visual representation comprises 4 boxes:

• Definition: defining the concept, word or term
• Facts: describing its essential characteristics.  When I was creating my examples, I found it difficult to differentiate between Definition and Facts.  However Facts is sometimes shown as Characteristics, which I think makes the difference clearer.
• Examples: providing examples of the concept or word
• Non-examples: knowing what a concept or word isn't helps to define what it is.  This box is sometimes shown as Common Errors or Misconceptions, which are sometimes more suitable.

I first found out about Frayer Models thanks to a tweet by @i_teach_things:

I shared some examples of using the Frayer Model for Maths last week and was interested in seeing if they might work for English too! I have now created these SPAG versions and think they could work well in class for pupils and display! Happy to share these and format if useful! pic.twitter.com/RGGRsyZtuK

— i teach things... (@i_teach_things) April 24, 2021

Seeing how useful they can be for English, maths and science, I decided to have a go at creating some for Languages.  

The first one I did was for Spanish accents:

Spanish accents are pretty simple compared to French, and I was able to fit them all on one Frayer Model.  However, having done further examples for the French accents (like the cedilla one above) I think it's better to have one single concept per Frayer Model.  Then the text can be bigger and the information clearer.

Languages Frayer Models can be used as display resources or for information for students.  I think there would also be value in students using the format to demonstrate their understanding of key grammatical terminology and core vocabulary, perhaps as part of the revision process.

 

Things to do with sentence builders in the primary languages classroom: part 2!

 

In my last post, I talked about some of the activities that I do in the primary languages classroom with sentence builders, and asked readers if they have any primary-friendly activities that they recommend.

I'll be starting my planning for the week shortly (at the top of this post is one of the sentence builders I'm going to be using this week, with Year 5) and so will be looking to incorporate some of the activities that people have recommended:

And some others, from the Facebook group and blog comments:

• Trapdoor 
• Slalom listening - You give them a copy of the sentence builder and they highlight/ underline words they hear, then they have to read the whole sentence.
• Flippity 'fruit machine' style activity, particularly the fact that sometimes there are 'nonsense sentences appearing (with food likes and with clothes you wear in specific weather conditions.
• Pyramid translation
• Delayed repetition or writing

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to respond.

Things to do with sentence builders in the primary languages classroom

 

Writing frames, sentence builders, whatever you call them, are enjoying considerable popularity in the languages community at the moment, due mainly to the work of Gianfranco Conti.  If you are a tweeter or if you are in one of the languages Facebook group, you'll have seen lots of posts about them and ideas for using them.

You can see at the top of this post one of the sentence builders that I have been using most recently.  I nearly always use the flowchart format (thanks Joe!) in primary, as I find with the tabular format it's too easy for them to miss columns out.  I also make them in black and white, as colour photocopying is only for special occasions at my schools!  If it's not clear enough without colour, it's not clear enough, I think.

I've been experimenting with using them and knowledge organisers this academic year to facilitate our work in class at a time when I have to stay at the front and not go to help individual children.

We have been trying out different activities with them, for example (in no particular order):

• I say the Spanish sentence, children tell me the English
• I say an English sentence, children tell me what it would be in Spanish
• Children test each other in one of the above two ways 
• I say a Spanish sentence, but leave it incomplete, either just saying the first sound of the last word or stopping at a suitable place, and children need to complete the sentence with the correct word or with suitable words.
• After a little practice, I show a sentence from the sentence builder with a random extra word in it.  The children have to tell me which word is unnecessary.
• I say a sentence in English and the children write it in Spanish on their mini whiteboards and hold it up for me to see.
• I write a sentence from the sentence builder on my mini whiteboard, and the class between them have 10 attempts to guess the sentence, which I then reveal after the 10 attempts or when it is guessed correctly.
• I prepare a sentence from the sentence builder and conceal it.  The children all prepare a sentence and write it on their mini whiteboards.  The children stand up.  I reveal my sentence word by word.  As soon as the children have a word in their sentence that is different to mine, they have to sit down, until we reach the end of the sentence and hopefully there is someone left who has the same sentence as me.  Thanks to Sue Cave for this idea - Year 3 loved it this morning, although one of the boys saw through my strategy of not wanting to repeat words!

Do you have any favourite activities when using sentence builders?  There are some that I have seen that are a bit reading-heavy for primary children; I'd love to increase my repertoire!  Please leave any ideas in the comments.

Frequency dictionaries

 

There has been a lot of talk in recent days on Twitter and in the Facebook groups about word frequency.  This has arisen from the release of the proposals for the new languages GCSE (read Steve Smith's blog for excellent in-depth analyses of the proposals) which mention a vocabulary for Foundation Tier of 1200 high-frequency words, and 1700 for Higher Tier.  I also mentioned word frequency during my presentation at Language World 2021.  I was telling the story of my new scheme of work for Key Stage 2 Spanish, where I checked the frequency of the vocabulary I included.

I have been using the Routledge Frequency dictionaries, which you can see in the picture above (the Spanish one proudly bearing the sticky note which marks the end of the numerical list and the beginning of the alphabetical list).

Some people were asking how these frequency lists were arrived at.  The preface to the Spanish version (the one I have used the most) gives as sources for the Routledge lists:

• the corpus, of 20 million words from fiction and non-fiction texts, the internet and transcripts of spoken language
• words from all 21 Spanish-speaking countries
• recent language (the words for this edition were collected in 2014-15)

Most telling, I think, are the subtitles of the dictionaries.  The Spanish one is A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners", thus acknowledging that learners and users will want to use other words outside this list of 5000 to say what they want to say, depending on their interests.

As well as the main numerical and alphabetical lists of the highest frequency 5000 words in the language, the dictionaries also contain some useful lists of different groups of words, such as this list of French animals:

Animals are of great interest to primary children, yet many of the animal words that we teach are relatively low frequency and indeed outside the top 5000.  They are usually accompanied in speech and writing, however, by much higher frequency words, such as determiners and key verb forms.

I have also been seeing some interesting links between word frequency and culture.

Language World 2021: sketchnotes

 

This year's Language World was an all-online affair, which made the feel a bit different, but the sessions were of just as good a quality.  Here are my sketchnotes from the sessions that I attended:

Turn that frown upside down: practical tips to motivate learners in Key Stage 3 and beyond
Claire Wilson

British Council Language Trends 2021 - interim results
Vicky Gough and Ian Collen

The 20 Keys: Giving Grammar a new lease of life
Elena Díaz

Using CLIL and MFL strategies to maximise the curriculum for EAL learners
Jane Driver

International Partnerships and Exchanges
Vicky Gough and Brian Stobie

Multilingualism, language learning and social cognition
Professor Li Wei

Language learning: Learning from the past
Professor Nicola McLelland, Dr Simon Coffey, Dr Lina Fisher

A rich curriculum for all: the pressured yet pivotal position of languages
Dr Michael Wardle, HMI

The missing link: transition between KS2 and KS3
Suzanne O'Farrell, ASCL

Challenges and rewards in the CLIL unit design process
Dr Marie Petersen

Making connections between languages with translation skills for easier KS2-KS3 transition
Helen Stokes