Highland Modern Languages Subject Support

About 27 sad people gave up their Saturday to attend the SCILT outreach event in Inverness today!  Actually it was good to see so many there as only a couple of weeks ago, I heard that only 13 had booked for the event and so I was worried it might be cancelled.

There were four sections to the day, which I will go through and hopefully give a brief commentary on below.

1. Teaching Scotland’s Children - modern languages.  Fiona Pate, currently an Associate Assessor for HMIe talked us through some of the findings on current good practice in the document ‘ML - A Portrait of Current Practice in Scottish Schools’.  In small group discussions it was pointed out that the bulleted list of good practice in ml teaching lacked one thing without which we felt no classroom, especially a very interactive subject such as ours, could ever be successful: good relationships.  All other things can flow from that foundation.  Another interesting point that Fiona Pate made, quoting someone else’s excellent analogy of a successful learning environment:  A good lesson is like a news bulletin.  It starts with the headlines, so that the listener knows what is coming next.  It then uses a variety of inputs to get the information across to the listeners - interviews, pictures, background explanations, reports, opinions, etc.  To finish up with, some questions were put to Fiona Pate from some schools.  Invergordon asked if it was a good move to make/keep languages compulsory to S3.  The answer given was that given the relaxation of age and stage rules, this was certainly acceptable, depending on local circumstances.  However, a school’s reasoning and aims in doing this must be clearly thought out and the implications and impact must be known.  It must also be done in consultation with parents. 

NB - if you fear you are about to be inspected, remember there is an excellent guide on the MFLE.  To read it click here.

2. A Curriculum for Excellence  This seminar was supposed to give an update on ACE and how it relates to AifL.  Apparently there are lots of publications that we class teachers haven’t read.  No further comment.

3. CLIL - Content and Language Integrated Learning This session switched between watching clips from a DVD, small group discussions and plenary discussions on the suggestion that ACE is a wonderful opportunity for us to engage bored learners by delivering other subjects through the medium of a foreign language.  The old topics of family and pastimes are deemed boring, and so we should find ways to present the real issues of the 21st century through French/German/Spanish.  The suggestion was made that we use real families in e.g. Algeria, Congo, Pacific islands and Quebec to pull Scottish learners out of their European comfort zone and be faced with the realities of life in other parts of the globe.  Some interesting possibilities here…???  Seems perhaps to lend itself well to the primary context, but meaningful cross-curricular projects in secondary require a great deal of planning with colleagues.  Time perhaps that our HTs simply cannot afford to free up.

4. Listening  Bob McKinstry reminded us of some of the difficulties faced by learners in listening activities.  This is proved by their own admission as well as the clearly lower results that pupils get in listening elements of their exams.  While he stated at the beginning we would hear nothing new, just some reminders, I have to say that this was for me the most useful part of the day with some practical truths and advice.

• apparently 1 in 20 of us has hearing impairment of some kind.  That’s 1 or 2 in every average ML classroom.  Bear this in mind - don’t confuse hearing and listening!
• nowadays we are all, especially youngsters, surrounded by background noise, be it music in the shops or at home or the fact that our cars normally play us music the minute we turn the ignition.  All this has dulled our ability to listen.  We assume we are listening, but actually we have got so used to only hearing.
• we then listened to a piece of Shostakovich’s music.  Not being an expert at all on classical music, especially Shostakovich’s, I suppose I was being put into the same shoes as my pupils when they’re confronted with one of the HSDU listening activities!  On the first hearing, it was just a dramatic piece of music, which even in my ignorance I knew sounded very much in the Russian tradition.  After an explanation of the intended meaning behind the various sounds, the music really came alive and I could understand it.  Such an experience, if repeated often enough, would help me listen to and understand more of his music, were I confronted with it.  Similarly, surely if we provide our learners with scaffolding before they hear the recording, they too will gain confidence.  Try using phrases like ‘Listen out for the bit about…’,  ‘You’re going to hear so and so giving 3 reasons why…’.  Notice that this is mostly only applicable to practice in the language, not summative assessment.  However, even in summative assessment now, pupils get the chance to anticipate answers before they hear the recording - SQA questions give them that scaffolding, especially at Higher and AH where they have a couple of minutes to work out possible answers in advance.
• Why is listening so hard?  There is a certainty that every child will have even fleeting lapses in concentration.  Adults do this all the time too, but we enjoy an ability to fill in the gaps that we missed, we give ourselves a sort of  ‘cloze exercise’.  But pupils don’t think like this.  Also, words combine together in speech (especially in French) and the clearly visible spaces between words on the written page are not there to help us break up the sentence.  Furthermore, the spoken lamguage is transitory - once it’s gone, it’s gone.  And the types of listening activities that we usually do are completely false - there are no facial expressions or visible contexts on which we all rely day by day to understand others - even in our native language.
• How are listening skills developed at home?  Children are surrounded by talking from birth.  Even if we know our babies won’t understand us, we still speak to them. [My aside - you can see where this is leading, but remember we cannot immerse our pupils 24/7 over the period of a number of years...].  In the classroom, could we not then try story telling and train our pupils to listen better?  As with toddlers, there is comfort in learners hearing the same story again and again.  Each time they will understand more, and often be eager for ‘that one about the…’ again. [some truth here perhaps]. 
• the quality of the audio equipment in ours rooms is important.  Think of the hearing impaired who inevitable gravitate to the back of the room!!!  Get a speaker extension to the back of the room.
• in the real world, we rarely separate speaking and listening - compare this with the new ACE guidelines on language - almost reducing from four to three skills - reading, writing and listening/talking.
• what can we do in the classroom then?  Use the target language sometimes.  Research shows that a mixture works best, and the tl is mostly effective when the pupils are hearing routine things.  Tell familiar stories, e.g. Harry Potter. [ My aside - this idea (NOT Harry Potter!!) worked well with my AH class last year.  I got them to watch the BBC news first, then the TV5 news so that they would be familiar with the content first].
• other strategies:  learning vocab is essential - e.g. 10 a day with a test on Friday; read and repeat these words, interconnection of the 4 skills; best way to learn lots of vocab = to read and listen to lots of the target language; create a cultural awareness which helps pupils to fill in the gaps of their understanding as they listen (cf the point about adults and their cloze exercise above); teacher should prattle in tl more in class - doesn’t matter if they don’t understand [careful with those classes that love to use this as an excuse to mock or misbehave]; teachers should use their own voices more and rely less on recordings, thus giving real intonation and emphasis where needed;  simplify the language as much as possible; introduce a listening activity by first using a linked reading text.

I hope that gives an adequate summary of the day.  If any of you who were there have anything to add, change or take away, just let me know.

Alasdair