Highland Modern Languages Subject Support

 Thanks to Stuart Fernie (Invergordon Academy) and Fiona Taylor (Glen Urquhart High School) for sharing their ideas on how to use film in the ML classroom. Apparently there were some pretty gruesome pictures of former S3 pupils in there…

Here are Stuart’s presentation and his notes:

stuart-extended-viewing-and-writing.ppt

stuart-ext-viewing-and-writing-notes.doc

And Fiona’s handouts:

fiona-ace-ventura.doc

fiona-walt-disney-vous-presente.doc

fiona-la-gloire-de-mon-pere-workbook.doc

For this session, a group of 12 teachers got together to learn some of the basics about podcasting and how it can be used in a classroom.

Here are some examples of class podcasts:

http://abauld.edublogs.org/

http://mfle.typepad.com/highlandpodcast/ 

The keen twelve then put together their own first multilingual podcast, talking about their journey through the snow, their impressions of coffee on arrival and their thoughts on whichever first session they attended.  Listen out for French, German, Italian and even a little Gaelic!  Click below to download and listen to their work.  Depending on your computer’s settings, one of the two versions you can click on here may sound like les Schtroumphs!!  If so, try clicking on the download version.

This podcast was recorded using very simple and cheap mp3 voice recorders from a well known supermarket (cost less than £15 each), and then edited using Audacity, an excellent piece of free software that you can download here.  Here’s what it looks like when it’s running:

To finish with, Alison Campbell (Gairloch High School) showed us how we can easily and freely download podcasts from the internet via iTunes to use as listening activities in class.  Install iTunes to you Mac or PC, go to the podcast directory and under education, do a search on French, German, etc. and you’ll be surprised what you can get for free!  Alison also showed us one of her set of video iPods which she uses with senior pupils to do listening/viewing homework on.

Thanks to Thea Pallut (Grantown Grammar School) and Hiltrud Macleod (Dornoch Academy) for doing a re-run of the sessions they had delivered back in November.

Here are their handouts:

http://mlsupport.edublogs.org/files/2006/11/thea-on-blogging.doc

how-to-create-a-blog-new.ppt

Thanks to Una Drinkwater (Millburn Academy) for holding the fort while Kate Aitken (Kinlochbervie High School) braved fierce weather and windy roads to make it to this session!

If you were there and have any comments to make, click on the ‘comments’ link below and make your contribution!

Gisela Cumming (Kilchuimen Academy) and Pat Crippin (Inverness Royal Academy) led a discussion on issues facing teachers of Advanced Higher Modern Languages, including folios, speaking tests and discursive writing.

If you were there and have any comments to make, click on the ‘comments’ link below and make your contribution!

Thanks to all who came and helped out at the conference the other day to make it a success.  Thanks especially to the staff at Charleston Academy who helped with the preparations for a fairly smooth run!

I’ll create a new post for each of the 9 sessions.  Please add your own notes and comments as the notes I have been able to gather from various people are not exhaustive.

Here are some photos from the day - click to enlarge.

 Alasdair

Despite the last minute venue change, today’s Bain de Langue went well thanks to the great participation of the pupils from Glen Urquhart High School and Charleston Academy.  Here are some photos from the event - click on the thumbnails for an enlargement.

Just back from a successful Sprachbad run by Manuel Blechschmidt and Pia Schütz from the Goethe Institut.  Following some initially embarrassing ice-breaker activities, some twenty-five pupils and their old(ish!) teachers from Charleston, Grantown, Glen Urquhart, Dornoch, Fortrose, Kilchuimen and Tain got together to go through the following programme:

Das Deutschlandspiel: An interactive ‘board’game about German culture and geography.
Popmusik in Deutschland: A closer look at contemporary German/Austrian artists/bands who all sing in German.
Junge Leute in Deutschland - “Was geht ab?”: This workshop takes a detailed look at what young people in Germany are up to.  What are they interested in? What do they think about things? How do they spend their time?
Richtig sprechen - ohne Zunge brechen: A pronounciation workshop full of tricky tongue twisters and ’strange’ sounds.

Here are some photos of our dear Schüler hard at work - click on the photo to enlarge it:

Manuel and Pia also took a photo of the whole group which I’ll post here when I receive it.

Vielen Dank Manuel und Pia!!

S5 and S6 pupils from Ullapool and Fortrose got together yesterday for the first Highland Bain de Langue of 2007.  Thanks to Christine Mitchell from Inverness Royal Academy and our three FLAs, Eva Pauly, Thibault Sigiez and Guillaume Navarro for helping to run a successful day.  Here are some photos of what we got up to:

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