Planning for spontaneity

In this post, I want to look at how we can review the last term to see how pupils are using classroom language and how to use that to plan for this term and next September.  This is more about how pupils are interacting than how they are advancing in their content, or topic, language.  My goal is for pupils to become increasingly independent in making their own sentences as they interact, more fluent in their ability to transfer structures accurately across contexts and situations. Developing their classroom language or, as I prefer to refer to it, pupil-pupil language, is my methodological weapon of choice for getting towards that goal.  Put more bluntly, whatever their grade they come out with at the end, I want them to be able to speak the language they studied at school!

I’ll set out here how I go about it myself and then you can decide whether it’s an approach you want to use yourself.  If you’re reasonably new to using target-language teaching, hopefully it will be useful to you, even if only as a starting point for developing your own strategy.

As I look back over a the term for any one class, I ask myself three pretty straightforward questions:

1. What can they do?
2. What were the initial goals?
3. How do I account for the difference between the answers to those first two questions?

So, what exactly do I mean by this?

1. What can they do? What can they say spontaneously?  Which of the routines that we have been using have “taken root”?  Which phrases are pupils using without prompting from me?  And which ones will they use if I do prompt them a bit, either by mimes, starting off the sentence for them or just pausing to see if they fill in the communicative gap?  Which structures or phrases are pupils trying to transfer from one routine or situation to another on their own initiative, even if in doing so, they make some grammatical mistakes?  Are there any communicative patterns emerging?  For example, pupils are asking for things and spotting which bit of the sentence changes each time.  Pupils are asking you to do things, and they notice which bit changes, and they get it right.  Are there any linguistic patterns?  For example, they are using lots of questions which begin with the same interrogative: Comment? or Qu’est-ce que …?  There will of course be quite a bit of difference across the class as to who can say what.  That’s not a problem, although it’s important that I get a clear and accurate picture in my own mind about this – my own particular weakness as I think about how a class is doing is to home in on a handful of pupils who have really got their heads round the whole interaction thing, taking risks, enjoying the “game” of banter … and then to project that onto the rest of the class, ignoring the fact that a few pupils may not be much further on than they were half a term ago.  So, honesty is not only the best, it’s also definitely the most useful policy!
   One way I like to do this is to make a three-column list of my answer to the questions I’ve just set out.  One column is for phrases that pretty much everybody in the class uses, another for ones that most pupils use, and the last for phrases that just a few use.  This helps me with my perspective.  It’s important that I have an idea of what is happening, but also to what extent.  If I keep that list and update it at the end of each term (or half-term), it gives me a much clearer idea of progress than levels do.  Unfortunately the obsession in recent years of reducing everything (or everyone!) to a mere number in order to evaluate it and set it targets tends to obscure what is most useful to me as the class teacher.
2. What were the initial goals?  That’s easy to do if I wrote them down at the beginning of term!  If you’re new to using classroom routines and target-language teaching, your goals may have been no more specific than just to try it and see how it goes.  Personally, I think that’s justified.  It’s very difficult to set specific goals for something you’ve not tried before.  But, assuming you’ve done this before, what did you want to see or hear in this term?  Let’s not rush too quickly into evaluating whether these goals were fulfilled, that’s coming up, but not yet.  What did you want to see in pairwork activities, setting up activities, reviewing them, providing feedback, register routines, winning or losing games, pupils asking for things or for explanations?
3.  How do I account for the difference between the answers to those first two questions?  As important as the need for honesty is the need to approach this review with absolutely no sense of guilt!  Sometimes I can look at my review and realise that one class has made lots of progress whilst another has made very little, mainly because I have put all my energy and effort into a group that is really with me, and not been so thorough with a group where it’s a little hard-going and, frankly, it’s less motivating for me.  Or I find I have been less than realistic about what all of my groups could achieve in the time.  It’s easy not to take account of how heavily loaded a particular half-term will be where there is exam-marking or report-writing to be done in a few weeks’ time.  This is bound to affect how much we can prepare, plan and be creative in those weeks, at least to some extent (unless we sacrifice our family and friends – never, ever a good option).  Like most teachers, I’ve been through the guilts, but the reality is that a sense of guilt is a very poor motivator for pretty much anything, especially making progress in teaching.  I think it is much better to approach this from a practical point of view.  If the review shows up some gaps, then it has done an important half of its job.  (The other half is what I do about it!).  Remember the 3-column list?  If I separate each termly (or half-termly update with a horizontal line to make a grid, I find it useful at the beginning of the same term the following year to see at a glance how much is possible for me and the class with everything else and every other class that there is to juggle.  It may be that I choose to do a little less with one class in order to give myself the time to give a bit more attention to another which was lacking it, to even things up a bit.  This is part of what I understand by pacing myself. Sometimes my initial goals are not fulfilled because the class is set to take itself off on a tangent and I judge that it’s worth pursuing.  There have been some routines (most notably a register routine of some years ago, detailed in Something to Say, by James Burch et al, CiLT 2001) where the classroom interaction has developed in ways which are very different from what I had planned.  I had planned to have the class speculate on how long it would take to do the register, make some predictions and then compare the actual time it took with the predictions of individuals in the class.  In the event (over quite a few lessons), one particular class decided that what really got them going was speculating on why various individuals who they knew to be in school were late, or why others were absent (to be handled with care, that one). The reasons given were always totally outlandish and they were judged in terms of how possible or probable they were, and they used the present tense and related constructions (e.g., en train de + infinitive) in much more meaningful ways than any amount of gap-fills I could come up with.  Such digressions are worth it, if you feel you can handle them or you are prepared to have a go and see where they take you.  You can always call a halt to it when you need to, if you can see that it needs a bit more thought before it goes any further, and then let it run in a later lesson.It may be of course that my initial goals werefulfilled!  That gets easier as the years go past and the more we get used to using routines and classroom language and our initial goals become more realistic.  We can develop a feel for what is possible within a term, or how we can develop structures by building more complex patterns into sentences pupils are already using.  Those grids I’ve mentioned for reviewing the term have really helped me to do that.  When I refer to goals being realistic, I’m not suggesting that we reduce the challenge of them.  They can still be adventurous, but they are realistic in the sense that they take account of all the demands I need to deal with.One last point on the review grids.  I’ve used them for years, and I still do.  When I was a Subject Leader, I used to do this with my departments and we would, where possible, dedicate a meeting per term to thinking through all of our classes in this way.  (There were a couple of extra columns in the grid for other things we were working on, but that’s for another day).  I felt it was important to give people time to do this because it was intended to have a direct effect on planning, teaching and learning, and doing it in meeting time meant that time could be blocked off for it.  Speaking personally, I would probably have put it off and eventually not done it, with everything else there was to do if time hadn’t been allocated for it.  This made it a regular feature.  The other thing is that I didn’t ask to see what teachers in my department had written.  It’s less likely to be a guilt-free exercise if you know no-one else is going to see it!  I was more interested in the fact that everyone in the department was reviewing what was happening in their classes and responding to that, trying to respect their professional judgement, than being too invasive.  The only exception to that was with NQTs in the first couple of terms who benefited from a bit of guidance, but that was to help them to think it through, not to judge what they had written.  Accountability is important, but there can be too much of it.  We had these sheets bound into our planners so we’d got them for the next term – if there’s a loose piece of paper, I’ll lose it.

Next steps

In considering Question 1, we tried to work out if there were any patterns emerging linguistically or communicatively in what pupils were saying.  Now it would be worth looking for patterns in what pupils want to say but can’t yet.  I often find that difficult to work out when I’m in a meeting and not actually in the class with them!  I like to keep a pad of Post-Its handy in the lesson, and if someone comes up with something (usually preceded by Comment dit-on … en français?) I jot it down later at a convenient moment in the lesson before I forget it.  This is particularly the case if it reminds me that others in the class have also recently asked for the same or similar language.  The Post-It can go straight into my planner or diary and then later the same day I can do something about it (make a visual, think through a routine, look for how the situation/language can develop) before I see them again.  It was in a situation like this once that I realised I hadn’t taught pupils how to ask permission to leave the room for a music lesson.  Dealing with that also dealt with a number of similar situations which used the same language (i.e., leaving for music lessons, reading practice, the toilet, the nurse, and any number of other excuses for legging it out of my lesson).  It also gave us the opportunity to learn the vocabulary of a few musical instruments as I repeatedly guessed wrongly the music lesson the pupil was leaving for.  More importantly, in French it opened up the opportunity to point up the fact (and return to it frequently) that jouer takes de for instruments instead of the à they were more used to for sports, and in Spanish that jugar was for sports whereas in this context they needed tocar.  This led to some mirth in discovering that the no toques they had been using to control each other (I do like it when classroom control is a shared responsibility) when I gave out cards for a pairwork activity (to mean “don’t touch”) could also be used to say “don’t play” for a musical instrument.  This was particularly applied to the proudly less musical amongst the class.

If you’re wondering about some specific structures you could use to develop classroom language further, take a look at this quick, reasonably basic list.  If you find any that pupils aren’t using yet, or you haven’t introduced, I would start here.  It will help to keep more of the lesson in the target language:

• What’s the difference between …. and …..?
• Correction:  That’s right / that’s wrong / the correct version is …
• How do you say …? / How do you spell …? / How do you pronounce …?
• That was …+ adjectives (easy / difficult / OK / too [easy, etc.] / great / boring / interesting / fast / slow)
• Ready, steady, go! / I’ve finished / I haven’t finished / Have you finished?
• Could you repeat that / explain that / give me …
• Can I have … ? go …?
• Do we have to …? write / stick / copy / fill in / say
• Formal forms (Vous / Usted)
• Negative pattern: Je ne sais pas / Je ne vois pas / Je ne peux pas (I don’t usually teach Je ne comprends pas – it’s too easy a get-out!  I’d rather teach Can you say that again / explain it differently?)

Have fun!

Happy New Term!

Happy New Year!  ¡Feliz Año Nuevo!  Bonne Année !

Thank you for joining me again in a new term.  When I started writing this blog in February 2011, it was mainly as a way of forcing myself to be specific in my thinking about what I am trying to do with my classes as well as responding in some depth to some of the very varied questions that come up during consultancy visits to schools or in conferences.  I’ve always been a convinced target-language teacher and I’ve always been interested in the “Yes, but how?” perspective, but I had no idea how much interest there would be from others or how far afield it would stretch.  It has been a real encouragement, therefore, to welcome on board during the course of this last year readers of a whole range of experience, from PGCE students to NQTs, teachers with a couple of years behind them to Subject Leaders, senior managers, Heads and advisors.  WordPress tells me that readers of this blog are joining us from 21 countries, most of them from the UK, USA and Spain, but also from Ireland, France, Canada, Mexico, Antigua, Honduras, Brazil, Russia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Angola, Nigeria and Libya.  Thank you very much indeed for your interest and for the kind words I have received.

As we are at the beginning of a new year, it’s all about beginnings on this blog, too.  Next week, we’ll take a trip back to the start of the academic year and look at how an NQT or someone who is relatively new to target-language teaching might take stock of the autumn term with the benefit of hindsight and use that to plan for the spring term.  We’ll also think about how next September might be approached slightly differently based on what actually happened this year.  We’ll also be taking a look at some lesson beginnings, activities to blow away the cobwebs of English and focus pupils on communicating in the target language right from the beginning of the lesson.

2012 looks like a busy year ahead (is there any other sort?!).  This year sees the publication of two new DVD resources which have been 18 months in the making, one in the summer, a detailed guide to techniques for getting going with target-language teaching, and then another in the autumn, a step-by-step approach to teaching advanced grammar, which builds on the Teaching Grammar Through The Target Language: Mission Impossible? series released last year.  Also, once I have the nod from the organisations concerned, I’ll post information here about the public events coming up in London in which I will be providing a session or a day’s training.

So, batteries all re-charged?  Happy New Term!

Sticky Grammar! #6: The Sentence-Construction Game

The activity I’m going to describe in this post is the climax of a whole series of activities intended to teach pupils how to use direct object pronouns in the perfect tense in French with all the agreements.

Throughout this whole process, my aim has been to help pupils use this particular bit of grammar fluently, confidently and accurately, and as close to instinctively as I can get.  The sequence, exactly as I have described it, has been used in mixed-ability groups in Year 9 or Year 10, often with a very wide range of prior attainment, and a variety of combinations of learning styles.

Importantly, all of this has taken place entirely in the target language.  Yes, it would be quicker to do it all in English, but I think by doing so it robs pupils of the opportunity to learn to think in the target language by encouraging them to translate and those pupils who struggle when they go from conscious rules to sentences (especially rules in English to sentences in French), would find this all too much.

The context of this is that pupils will be able to write a letter to a shop to complain about some faulty goods and to demand action.  The sequence of learning that the pupils have followed so far has involved this:  they have learned (or revised) a list of vocabulary for Christmas presents by listening to paraphrase descriptions, working out what the visuals have represented and doing mimes to represent the nouns.  In between each item of vocabulary they have sung a song which has got longer with each new noun to the tune of The 12 Days of Christmas.  They have played a couple of guessing games (as repetition activities) in which they have also used the language of paraphrase which I used when I presented the vocabulary.  They have learned the genders of the nouns through the Gender Walls activity and in the next stages of the same activity they learned how to use a singular direct object pronoun, its place within the sentence and the effect is has on the past participle, before going on to do the same with plural nouns as well.  By the end of the last article on this subject, we had got to the stage where they had learned to distinguish between correct and incorrect sentences which used this grammar point.

And now… the Sentence-Construction Game, my favourite of the lot.  Whereas in the activity I’ve just mentioned pupils were distinguishing between correct and incorrect sentences, the focus here is on production in writing.  By the end of this lesson, pupils will be able to write a whole sentence which follows this pattern: “Le jour de Noël, mes parents m’ont offert une raquette de tennis, mais quand je l’ai ouverte il y avait un problème, elle était cassée.”  Of course, the idea is that they can change the occasion, who gives to whom, the noun, the verb, the agreement as necessary, and the problem.

The detail

The only new bit here is the language of problems.  It’s worth noting that at every stage of the sequence from the first article up to here, there is only one new thing added each time.  If I add too many different things at any one stage (breadth as opposed to quantity), I find pupils can miss the focus completely and it all becomes a jumble.  It all helps those pupils who were absent in the previous lesson to catch up quickly.

I introduce the problems in exactly the same way as I introduced the Christmas present vocabulary at the beginning of the sequence.  I have them categorised on my visualiser sheet according to how the sentence starts (Il / elle était… cassé, ébréché, déchiré, trop grand, trop petit, défectueux, dangereux; Il y avait … une tache, un trou; Il manquait …un bouton, les instructions), and within the category I keep the adjectives in groups according to how they change for feminine (i.e., défectueux doesn’t get mixed up with cassé, because there is an extra change apart from just the –e).   I don’t allow us to get too distracted by Il y avait and Il manquait not having an “Elle” form.  All of the problems must have a simple picture to go with them.  Once these have been introduced and repeated, this is what will happen:

Sentence-Construction Game

The class will work in pairs, each pair in competition with all the other pairs in the class.  At the end of the lesson there will be just one pair that wins, and they will have won by getting the most correct sentences.  During the course of the game, I will read as many sentences as there is time for, as fast as I possibly can.  On every table for two there is a set of cards with all the words they need, some of them represented by symbols, others with the words written.  Working together within their pairs, pupils have to choose the correct cards from their pack to “write” the sentence out in full, placing them in order on their desk.  I read each sentence 3 times, allowing a few seconds between each reading, and as each group finishes placing their cards, they cover them with their hands to prevent a neighbouring pair from copying (and they will try!) and I count down from ten to zero.  On zero, I sound a bicycle horn, everyone has to put their hands on their heads, ready or not, and I go quickly round the room dropping thumbs-up cards on the tables of all those who have the sentence 100% correct.  Before anyone is allowed to touch their cards again (whether they have it right or wrong), we go through it as a class, with the sentence now displayed on the screen.  Then on to the next sentence, and so on.

The wonderful thing about this game is that the class gets better and better as the activity goes on.  I have a clear picture, too, of who is “getting it” and who is not.  So, let’s look at some of the detail of this:

The cards:

You need:

• Le jour de Noël / Le jour de mon anniversaire (or, a Christmas tree and a birthday cake) (pink)
• Mes parents m’ont offert / je leur ai offert / mon frère m’a offert / je lui ai offert (I use the symbols you can find on the powerpoint that goes with this series, rather than the words written out) (white)
• The Christmas presents, one symbol on each card – I just photocopy my visualiser sheet (yellow)
• Mais quand (red)
• Je l’ai / Je les ai (light green)
• Ouvert / ouverte / ouverts / ouvertes (dark green)
• Il y avait un problème (orange)
• The problems (I use the pictures from the visualiser sheet with no vocabulary written out) (violet)
• Thumbs-up points cards

Each group of cards represented here by a bullet point needs to be a different colour for this to work well.  I’ve indicated the colours I use, but you can use any colour of course.  The only rule I make for myself, though, is not to use red or blue for any groups which could be affected by gender.  As I’ve used these colours earlier in the sequence, it gets confusing if a masculine noun presents itself to a pupil’s eyes on a red card.  Instead of coloured card you can print everything in coloured fonts on white card, but I much prefer the coloured card route.  It’s much easier for pupils to distinguish between the parts of the sentence, it’s also cheaper and it looks much better when everything is out and on the tables.  One potential hazard with this game is that cards will fall on the floor, so you need to keep an eye on that – all of the packs are identical, and you don’t want to get them mixed up.  Normally in pairwork card games I put each set on a different colour, but with this activity, the colours are important, so it’s not possible.

There’s a lot of cutting up with this activity, but once you have your sets prepared, you can use them year after year with no extra work.  You will need enough for half of your class (as they are working in pairs), although I always make about 10 extra sets so that as sets get ruined through use, I can just chuck one away and I still have enough for next time.

I always have my class set out horseshoe fashion, with a smaller horseshoe inside the larger one.  This also makes it easier for getting round and seeing who has it right and who does not.

Playing the Game

At the start of the game I give out all the sets and together, we put the cards on the table in groups of colours in the order that I give them from left to right.  This is much better than having a mish-mash of colours.  The only instruction I give them is to tell them that they need to listen and choose the words they hear.  If they don’t hear every word (and they won’t – that’s deliberate), they can calculate the words they don’t hear using the words that they do.  On zero, they will need to put their hands on their heads or they’re out!

I start off with the first sentence I will eventually (but not yet) display.  I read it as fast as I possibly can.  They will freak, but I just look smug and unperturbed!  I wait a few seconds and read it again.  Ignoring all requests to say it again, I wait a few more seconds, then read it one more time and count down loudly from ten to zero.  On zero, the horn sounds and anyone caught touching their cards, even for a split second, is out!  (They will, of course, join in for the next sentence).  As I go round and look at their cards, it’s actually surprisingly easy to see instantly if it is right or not.  This part of the lesson can be (and needs to be) very fast indeed.  Some will start to move their cards once I’ve looked at them, thinking they’re not needed anymore, but I stop them.  Some will realise they made a mistake and try and change it before I get to them, and they are instantly out!  Once I’m back to the front I project the sentence and we point out the number of the noun and look at the pronoun and the participle ending.  Then we point out the gender and look again at the participle ending.  For some, the penny drops at that moment.  And it’s on to the next sentence.

A couple of things to bear in mind

This gets rowdy!  But it’s a good rowdy.  I often play some very fast music while they’re making their sentences, dropping the volume sharply when I shout the sentence.  This helps to keep the pace going and makes stopping them easier.  It’s also very important to speak so fast that they cannot understand every word.  The first time round, they will hear the noun and the problem– with this information alone (just the noun, in fact) they can work out the “je l’ai / je les ai” and the “ouvert /ouverte / ouverts / ouvertes” – which is also what you are really testing in this activity.  Without everything else it would be too easy.  The second time they will pick up the occasion (if they haven’t already) and the other bits of the sentence.  The third time they have the opportunity to check everything.

I know I always need to leave at least a clear 5 minutes between the end of the game and getting everyone out of the door.  Winners need to be celebrated and the whole lot cleared up.  Clearing this up in a hurry is never good and a fun activity ends up with some being told off.  Much better to do it slowly and as you want it done, with plenty of floor-checking for stray cards before the envelopes are collected in.  I always use little pay envelopes rather than letter envelopes, they keep everything together much better, and the whole lot can go in an A5 or A4 envelope without anything falling out.  These 5 minutes also give me a chance to calm everyone down before I release them out into the jungle which is the corridor.  And their next teacher wouldn’t thank me for releasing them all hyper.

Well, that’s the whole sequence from start to finish.  Within the unit, there is still a fair bit to do.  In these articles I haven’t gone into the rest of the letter of complaint as my purpose is to focus on how I teach the grammar.  I also haven’t discussed grammar notes and how they are recorded in pupils’ books.  Suffice to say that the grammar note is in the target language, but it should by now be clear that any note that they write will describe what pupils now know, understand and can use confidently and accurately, as opposed to the more traditional note in English which pupils refer to in order to remind themselves how to use something they never quite remembered in the first place!

Thanks for staying with me through this, these have been long posts, but it’s the detail which makes the activities work.  Happy Christmas, and who knows, you might find yourself having a go at this in January!

Sticky Grammar! #5: Gender Walls

By the end of article #4 in this series, I had presented the new vocabulary for Christmas presents and repeated it with the class using a song (12 Days of Christmas) and various activities to be done in pairs, but we hadn’t looked at any techniques for remembering the gender of the nouns, and as that is particularly important in this unit (we’re coming up to using preceding direct object pronouns in the perfect tense and agreements), that’s what we’ll look at here.  Quite unusually for me, the song is basically a list of vocabulary.  There are all sorts of ways songs can be used… but that’s another post, another day.

Gender Walls

This activity is ideal for when you need learners to keep 2, 3 or 4 categories completely separate in their minds.  I have used it in French & Spanish and some colleagues of mine have used it in German and Italian.  I have used it in KS3, 4 and 5 to help pupils distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns, masculine & feminine adjectives where there is a difference in pronunciation (vert / verte; blanco / blanca / blancos / blancas), and for past, present and future tenses.  I have also on occasion used it for government of verbs in French in KS5 (distinguishing between those verbs which take à and those which take de) and between subjunctive and indicative forms.  As activities go, this has a very high success rate, success being understood here as the vast majority of the class remembering, internalising and using the concepts way beyond the lesson and unit in which they were encountered, and very reliable for me in terms of gauging within the lesson how many and who have grasped it.  It is also extremely simple to prepare and run.  You can use it with a whole class and, much more importantly from my point of view, run it as a pairwork game, thus increasing the intensity and involvement in the activity.  As such, it is my methodological weapon of choice when teaching these items of language.

Let’s set a bit of context.  I start off the lesson (the second or third in the sequence, depending on how long it took to present and practise the vocabulary) by setting the homework.  Always best to set it first thing, I find.  It gives pupils who don’t understand what I’m banging on about time to ask questions if they need to and I don’t set myself up for the stress-inducing situation at the end of a lesson where I’m frantically trying to set up the homework, the class doesn’t understand and I know I’ve got to get this lot out of the room and off the corridor before the next lot arrives.  And then the homework is a load of rubbish when it comes in!  So the start of the lesson it is.  I give the class a strip of paper, about 1/3 size of A4, with a dozen sentences on it (take a look at the powerpoint in the first post).  The sentence (repeated a dozen times) is basically this: “Le jour de Noël mes parents m’ont offert une chaîne stéréo mais quand je l’ai ouverte il y avait un problème.”  Each time there is a different present.  Some of the sentences contain mistakes, some don’t.  All of the mistakes centre around the direct object pronoun and the agreement.  The pupils have to work out whether the sentence is correctly written or not, and if not, correct it.

Step 1: Get the pupils to stick the sheet in their books.

Step 2:  Get the pupils to record the homework in their homework diaries: Il faut cocher les phrases correctes et corriger les phrases qui contiennent des erreurs.  Date limite: …

Step 3: Start explaining!  Normally I’d have a bit of back-and-forth with the class about the homework, negotiating (apparently) a deadline, arguing about how much I’m giving them, speculating on what they might have to do this week (before they’ve seen it) and so on, but not this time – I know I’ll be under some pressure of time to get to the end within the lesson, so full steam ahead.

Well, I say that Step 3 is when I start explaining.  In reality, the whole of the lesson is an explanation, or more accurately, a demonstration.  I like to get the whole administrative side of setting the homework out of the way first, then books closed, then I’ve got them all with me before I start.  As they look at the homework, they won’t know what to do.  I acknowledge that, tell them not to panic, that now at (for example) 9.00 a.m. they don’t know what to do, but at 9.45 a.m. (or whatever time the lesson finishes), they will, and these activities will make it possible.  Straight into Gender Walls:

Here, I want pupils to remember perfectly which nouns are masculine and which are feminine.  I need an A5 flashcard for each noun, preferably masculine ones on blue card, feminine ones on red card, because these are the colours I used on my visualiser sheet when introducing the vocabulary earlier.  Failing that, white card with blue/red ink.  There is nothing flashy about these flashcards – just the words will do.  You can have the pictures too, but you must have the words written down and large enough to be seen across the room.

Stage 1:

I blu-tack/attach with a magnet all of the masculine singular nouns in a line along the left-hand wall in a random order.  I tell them that all of those nouns constitute a category and I ask them what it is.  If they are used to this sort of thing they will tell me straight away, otherwise I might need to give them a nudge: Masculin.  I make sure they can pronounce un correctly.  (A small point, but the next stage will break down if this isn’t clarified).  I give the class 5 seconds to memorise the order of the flashcards and then turn to face me as I stand on the right-hand side of the room.  I pick on some poor, sleeping pupil and they have to tell me the vocabulary in order without looking at the flashcards: Le jour de mon anniversaire, mes parents m’ont offert un rasoir électrique, un jeu-vidéo, un appareil-photo…   5 seconds isn’t long enough to remember the order perfectly before starting the activity so that when they make a mistake I can jump in with: Menteur!  Tes parents t’ont offert… and then the item they forgot or got wrong.  They go back to the beginning and start again.  I keep a count of how many times they had to start again, and then it’s another pupil’s turn after I’ve jumbled the order again.  The winning pupil is the one who has to start again the least number of times.  Then it’s over to the class to do it in pairs with one (guessing) pupil looking away, the other looking at the cards.  That’s why you need the vocab written on the flashcards – it doesn’t work if there are any doubts as to the vocabulary.

At the end of the activity I put the homework back up on the screen.  Clear now?  NO?!  Of course not, but it’s not 9.45 a.m. yet.  Don’t panic.  On to the next stage of Gender Walls.

Stage 2:

Next up on the wall are the feminine singular nouns, but they need to go on the opposite wall to the masculine nouns.  Sticking cards up on a wall, like giving out books, collecting in work or just looking for something on my desk, is of course a transition, and in my book, any transition is a danger point for ‘losing’ a class or giving them a cue to start chatting which I’ve then got to step in and stop.  Especially so here, as I’ll probably have to turn my back on them, never a safe moment…  So, rather than do that, just before each card goes up, I give them a very quick paraphrase of whichever card I happen to be holding for them to guess before I show them what it is and stick it on the wall.  This gives me a pause between putting each card up, an opportunity for language practice (I always say the sentence very fast) and they don’t have time to “make their own entertainment”.  What is going on in their heads this time I paraphrase is different to what took place when I introduced the vocabulary in the first place – they know what all the answers are this time, they just don’t know which one is the right one, and the paraphrase will get them to their answer.  So why not talk as fast as you possibly can?  It ups the ante and it’s better than a CD for listening practice…

Again I say that these red cards represent a category.  What is it?  Féminin!  Alors, un ou une?  Une!   This time, pupils don’t have to remember the order of the nouns, but close their eyes and tell me which wall they are stuck to.  “Le jour de Noël, mes parents m’ont offert ****** chemise.”  (Beep out the article with a bicycle horn or some other noise you might even produce yourself).  The class responds with “un chemise / une chemise” according to what they think is right and point to the correct wall.  The pointing is very important and they may need a nudge to realise that they have to do it.  You can see quite clearly who’s getting it and who isn’t.  (Much more reliable than asking a class to give you a thumbs up / down response as to whether they think they understand something.)   I repeat the same thing with a few more vocabulary items, randomly switching between masculine and feminine nouns.  And then?  In pairs, of course!  They swap over when you say so.  Activities such as this don’t really need instructions, you just do them.  In fact, if you explain it, it’s more likely to stall.  Just do it.

This activity works so well because the feminine adjectives are the “new information”.  They have done so much with the masculine nouns that they know these words they are now including were not part of that first category.  Try it, you will be surprised!

At the end of the activity, up goes the homework on the screen again.  All clear? No?!  Of course not, it’s still only 9.25!  Straight onto  the next stage of Gender Walls:

Stage 3:

Exactly the same as Stage 2, except this time instead of pupils just giving you the indefinite article, they respond “mais quand je l’ai ouvert / ouverte” as appropriate.  Before I let them loose on this I need to make sure they understand what they are saying.  Take a look at the powerpoint in the first post in this category.  I back up the meaning with mimes and full sentences so that they get the context, and I point out that the word order is different in French compared to in English (Je l’ai ouvert / I opened it), but without actually using English.  This can easily be communicated by saying the French sentence correctly and then saying the same words in an English order (le at the end), and some arm-crossing to show how the sentence has a different pattern.  It’s important that the last thing they hear from me, though, is the correct version.  When I elicit the response, “mais quand je l’ai ouverte”, we make a T with our hands to emphasise the difference in pronunciation.  I do a couple of examples with the class, and then it’s back to doing it in pairs.  For all of these quick pairwork activities, I let them run for about a minute, or a minute and a half before getting pupils to swap over.  It’s tempting to stop them too early, but it’s important to give pupils the thinking time so that the activity can be effective.  It also gives me a break in the lesson to draw breath and think about where it’s all going and whether I need to go back a bit, hurry up a bit or put in another stage somewhere.  How often do we think about what we are doing as the teachers, when really it’s what they are doing as the pupils that really matters?

At the end of the activity, we take another look at the homework.  Ah!  It’s getting clearer now!  But there are still a few more holes to plug.  On to the next stage:

Stage 4: 

This time the masculine plural nouns are added to the wall, the same wall as the masculine singular nouns, but along a bit so they are clearly separate.  I go back to the powerpoint slide I used in Stage 3 and see if they can work out how the sentence should be different when, instead of using un rasoir électrique, we use des patins à roulette.  (Je l’ai ouvert > Je les ai ouverts).  Some of them will probably get it.  In any case, I need to show them.  Again they do the same activity, pointing to the right wall with their eyes closed and filling in the sentence.  This stage in the activity helps them to distinguish very clearly between Je l’ai and Je les ai, a tiny difference which would sail right past many pupils.  A quick pairwork, then the feminine plurals can go up on the wall, on the same wall as the feminine singular, but along a bit.  By this point, many more pupils are likely to guess how the sentence will look before they are shown.  Now the activity can be run with pupils pointing in up to 4 different directions, depending on whether the noun they are given is masculine, feminine, singular or plural.

Finally (almost), the homework goes up on the screen again.  All clear now?  Yes!

This may seem like a very long-winded way to do something which could be explained much more quickly in English.  I would agree, it would be much quicker to do it in English but, in my view, a wasted opportunity.  It gives pupils the chance to learn through the target language something they didn’t already know.  It’s not a mere re-labelling exercise, this is a concept they don’t already have.  It teaches them that the foreign language is capable of expressing complex things and not just ordering ice-creams.  It shows them that I don’t have to revert to English to express important or complicated things, and in this way it gives the language status.  A quick trip to the maths department will prove that pupils have to think very hard in that subject.  Why should it be so different for languages?  It also doesn’t have to be long-winded.  A lot depends on the pace we maintain as we present a lesson like this, and the back-and-forth between the teacher and the class, between whole-class work and pairwork, does a lot to maintain pace and sustain concentration in a way which keeps the class busy, breaks up the information input and gives me a break as well.

But there is still one more stage I want to put in before I leave it to the class to crack on with the exercise at home.  On the powerpoint you will find a number of sentences (some correct, some incorrect) which, as a class, we discuss very quickly:  Bonne phrase ou mauvaise phrase?

“Le jour de Noël, mes parents m’ont offert une raquette de tennis, mais quand je l’ai ouverte, il y avait un problème”

Raquette de tennis – masculin ou féminin?  Féminin!  (pointing to the right wall).  Ouverte, masculin ou féminin ?  Féminin ! Alors, c’est bon ?  Jusqu’ici, c’est bon.  Une raquette de tennis, c’est singulier ou pluriel ?  C’est singulier !  Ouverte, singulier ou pluriel ?  Singulier !  Je l’ai, singulier ou pluriel ? Singulier !  Alors, c’est une bonne phrase ou une mauvaise phrase ?  Bonne phrase !

And in this pretty straightforward way we look at the other sentences on the powerpoint, deciding whether they are correct or incorrect.  This helps pupils to see the relationships between the various elements of the sentence, and there is no need to go into English to do it.

Now they really are in a position to get cracking on their homework … and it’s just coming up to 9.45….

Next time?  My favourite activity of the lot!

Sticky Grammar! #4: 20 clues, 20 questions

Now, where were we?  In this series of posts we’re looking at ways to make grammar stick with classes of all abilities, especially the difficult bits that are often reserved for higher sets, by incorporating visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles into the way in which the language is presented and practised.  More briefly put, how do we make the tricky sticky?  (Did you see what I did there?!)  The idea is that by the time they get to use the structure(s) in a more open-ended activity, it’s more likely to be successful and it will stay with them way beyond the unit in which they learned it.

It’s an upside-down, back-to-front way of looking at grammar as well, because the learners don’t start with the rules, they end with them.  They use the language correctly in context first, their awareness is raised to salient grammatical features (gender, endings, number, word order, etc.), then they are put in situations where they have to recall, and then in situations where they have to decide whether what they see is correct or not based on how they have been using the language so far.  In this way, I lead them to discover the rules as they develop hypotheses and then go on to test them out.  Finally they are let loose on a less controlled activity where the grammar they have been learning in an almost discreet way is part and parcel of completing the task.

Just before we get to memorising genders, which is coming up in the next post, let me clarify a couple of repetition activities I mentioned very quickly in the last article and referred to in the powerpoint (first post in this category): 20 clues and 20 questions.

20 Clues

By this point, I have introduced some of the vocabulary, but the class hasn’t done anything with it yet.  In this activity, pupils have a copy of the pictures I used to introduce the vocabulary, photocopied onto card (I usually reduce them to ½ size) and cut up.  They don’t need to be colour photocopies, and you don’t need to cut them up – it’s a job of a few seconds for the class to do if you have a class set of scissors, but it will take you a good 15-20 minutes if you do it all yourself before the lesson.  Goodness, you could have had a cup of tea in that time!  I recommend photocopying onto as many different colours of card as your reprographics department has.  It’s much quicker to track down the right envelope if you find a card on the floor at the end of the lesson, however careful you’ve been about how the pupils are to clear up.  There’s always one…  Small pay envelopes are better than letter envelopes, and a class set will fit in an A5 envelope ready for next time.  I also photocopy enough for a class of 40, so that as sets get worn out and destroyed I can just throw them away without needing to remember to go and make another set.

The idea is that Pupil 1 chooses a card and gives Pupil 2 clues to guess what it is.  OK, you can do this without cards by getting them to choose a present off the screen and writing it down, but I find it always goes better when there are cards to move around.  Now Pupil 1 can use some of the phrases I have been using in presenting the language (have a look at post #3 in this category) to give their partner a clue.  If they guess it straight away, they get 5 points.  If they need a clue before they get it, 4 points, another clue, 3 points, and so on.  (As you can see, it’s not actually 20 clues at all, but I’ve always called it that!).  The same slide on the powerpoint that was used in presenting the language can be used in this pairwork activity.

20 Questions

By this point I have introduced a few more vocabulary items.  This activity gives you a subtle opportunity to keep recycling the vocabulary they learned earlier, plus the new vocabulary immediately before this activity.  The activity is exactly the same as 20 clues, and it uses the same cards (plus the extras) only this time it’s Pupil 2 who is fishing for clues by sticking Est-ce que… at the start of the sentence.  Of course, both of these activities can be dispensed with, and the amount of time you have and how it’s all going will determine what you can do.  It’s certainly beneficial to do them because they break up the Teacher-Class dynamic, they increase what is coming out of the average mouth in the room, it gives those who may have missed a lesson a chance to catch up a bit, and it pushes it all a bit further into the memory.  I only ditch these activities when I really have to.

You might be wondering how I have a powerpoint and a visualiser projecting on the screen at the same time…  If you can, it’s a good idea to have two projection spaces on the front wall.  In one school I was in that wasn’t possible so I had the left hand wall painted white so I could project onto that.  It means you need two projectors, of course, and for many that won’t be an option, but it could be a good use of department money one year to invest in some extra projectors.  Beaming onto a write-on whiteboard is not good if you can help it – the shine is too reflective and it isn’t good for pupils’ eyes.  I had mine moved to one side as I used it less and had the wall painted white where the write-on whiteboard had been.  It also gave me more space higher up on the wall to project than where IWBs tend to be fitted (it’s a pain when those at the back can’t see anything on the bottom half of the screen).

Well, with that done, let’s get onto learning the genders of nouns, which is going to be a bit of a long post, and for that, you’ll have to wait until next Friday!

Sticky Grammar! #3: Walking Backwards

The example I set out in this series of posts comes from a Year 10 unit in January lasting four weeks on three lessons per week, in which pupils will, at the end of it, write a letter to a shop to complain about some faulty goods they were given as Christmas presents and the unacceptable treatment they were given when they went to complain in the shop.  In this way the end-activity fulfils some important criteria for writing activities.  I think of them as writing activities on TAP.  That is, this letter has

• a sense of text (it’s a letter, not a report, not a postcard, not a set of instructions),
• a sense of audience (it’s to the manager of a shop, not to a friend, not to someone they know personally),
• a sense of purpose (it’s to complain and to demand action, with an element of narration, not to make someone smile, not to seek information).

All of this, therefore, has implications for the form of the text, how it’s set out and the tone of the text, formal and with the corresponding forms of address and verb endings.  To consolidate the sense of purpose and audience, where I have had time I have sometimes collected the letters in, shuffled them and given them out again so that the pupils who receive them write a reply to the pupils who wrote them.  The reply is much less prepared with the class than the initial letter and it is a good opportunity for pupils to do in writing what I often get them to do in speaking: communicate sometimes in situations they have prepared for, and at other times in a purely spontaneous way.  So sometimes they are aiming at fluency, and at other times at accuracy.  Eventually the two merge and this, I think, represents a much more reliable measure of progress for me than those daft level descriptors (a necessary evil) which assume that progress happens in a straight line.

Anyway, back to the letter of complaint.  This is my end-point, and I like to have it clear from the beginning, which also means writing one out and seeing what I feel the need to include.  Here’s what I came up with (it feels very grammatical, but there is plenty of scope for fleshing it out):

Monsieur,

Je vous écris pour faire une réclamation.  Le jour de Noël mes parents m’ont offert un pull noir en laine, mais quand je l’ai ouvert, il y avait un grand trou!  Je l’ai rapporté au magasin.  Pour mes parents, je leur ai offert des CDs, mais quand ils les ont ouverts, les deux CDs étaient cassés.  Je les ai rapportés au magasin aussi.  Mon frère m’a offert des chaussettes, mais quand je les ai ouvertes j’ai trouvé encore un problème.  Elles étaient déchirées.  Bien sûr, je les ai rapportées au magasin avec les autres cadeaux.  J’ai parlé avec le serveur.  Je lui ai dit, «Voici les problèmes», mais il m’a dit, «Je suis désolé, je ne peux rien faire, tant pis.»  Ça ne suffit pas!  Je voudrais me faire rembourser.

Salutations, …

 Always an eye-opening exercise, I find.  After the first couple of efforts at teaching this unit, I found this presented a good opportunity to teach pupils to use indirect object pronouns (je lui ai  écrit  / il m’a dit / je leur ai offert, etc.) and preceding direct objects in the perfect tense in French (Le Jour de Noël, mes parents m’ont offert une …., mais quand je l’ai ouvertE, il y avait un problème).  I’m not going to go into much depth here on the indirect object pronouns as the focus here is more on how I go about teaching the direct object pronouns with agreements.  However, from the powerpoint that goes with this session (you’ll find it in the first post in this category), you will see that pupils encounter indirect object pronouns through classroom routines.  Not usually in the first stage of a routine but at some later stage in its development.  For a much fuller treatment on how classroom routines can be used for introducing progression and their place in teaching grammar inductively, see the posts in the Classroom Routines & Interaction category on this blog and the DVD Teaching Grammar Through The Target Language: Mission Impossible? Volume 2.

With my end-point clear and written out, I have a clearer idea of where I’m heading and the “bits” that make it up.  That helps me to sort out a sequence as I work backwards from the end-point to the beginning both in terms of language and how much of the letter pupils can write at any particular stage.  It also tends to throw up possible areas of confusion or where they could mix up similar-looking grammatical items.  In this unit, the obvious one is confusing direct and indirect object pronouns.  It was for this reason that I decided I needed to have got pupils to use them at least one half-term before getting to this unit, so that the PDOs would be new information, and less likely to be jumbled up.  (We will see the same principle at work in the Gender Walls activity later).  The other, unexpected one (for me, anyway!) was that m’a and m’ont look, to the average pupil (and the not-so-average), identical to ma and mon, and they are pronounced identically.  Hmmm… that caught me out the first time.  Those apostrophes are easily missed and it can really throw a spanner in the works if you’re not expecting it.  Best to make a big noise about that before the pupils do.

If I work backwards linguistically I find it helps me to work out how I’m going to lead pupils to discover those grammatical rules for themselves.  Notice the apparent contradiction there (I prefer to call it a paradox, it makes it sound like I know what I’m doing!) – they discover the rules for themselves, but I lead them there.  It’s not left to chance, because some of them might not get there, and some of them won’t realise that pattern is important or what it means.  If I think about my sequence carefully enough, the structure of the language can be made quite clear.  And if I run activities which allow me to come back to the same language from different angles, or which allow me to graft new language/concepts onto old, it gives pupils more opportunities to go over the same ground without realising, and this is a particular help to those who need a little longer to get to the same place (or those who were absent last lesson).

For pupils to be successful at using PDOs, it depends, I think, on 4 things:

• knowing the vocabulary really well (it’s a pain where some know the words you are using and others don’t)
• knowing the gender of that vocabulary absolutely perfectly
• I need to use past participles with a clear pronunciation distinction between the masculine and feminine forms.  In this case, I’ve used ouvert / ouvertE.  It would be no good using acheté / achetéE.
• I need to lead pupils to distinguish between je l’ai and je les ai.

So, let’s start at the beginning of the lesson, presenting 15 nouns (Christmas presents).  I don’t always finish within the same lesson, and personally, I don’t think this is a problem.  (If your timetable allocation is tight-fisted, and you’re doing what you can with an hour a week, you may have to use fewer nouns).  I use a slow-reveal technique on a visualiser, rather than powerpoint, with paraphrase and mimes.  For a full description on how I’ve gone about that with vocabulary in a different unit, see the post comSIMPLEplexity: Presenting New Language.  I could bang through the nouns very quickly (most of them will already be known to a class by that stage anyway), but if they are not well known the activities later will stall.  In any case, I think there is a lot of real communicative progress to be gained by interacting with the complex language around those easy nouns, which is a basic idea behind comSIMPLEplexity.  The pressure for grades, grades, grades often encourages us to zoom ahead and do things as quickly as possible, but the genius that is James Burch has convinced me that you can go faster by going more slowly.  Linger longer.  They become better linguists and the grades will follow.

My contextualising question is: Qu’est-ce que mes parents m’ont offert?  In amongst the language I use to describe the various presents, I use expressions for size (c’est grand/petit, etc), materials (en laine / en plastique, etc), what the item is used for (on l’utiliser pour communiquer avec les autres / pour écouter de la musique / pour aller au college et prendre de l’exercice en même temps) and what sort of thing it is (C’est un bijou / un moyen de transport), because these are expressions I want the pupils to use in a subsequent lesson where they are giving clues to each other to guess a chosen article (20 clues) or where they are fishing for clues (20 questions) to guess the item.

If you have seen this session in action, you will remember that I used a song as a repetition activity to the tune of The 12 Days of Christmas.  If you want, you can allocate a different present to groups around the class, and they have to stand when the class gets to “their” present in the song.  If your class won’t sing, just use another repetition activity!  Anyway, this is that song:

12 Days of Christmas

The song is used after each item is presented, and after every three, a repetition activity drives home the vocab learned so far.  This could involve covering the items up and the class has to guess what’s where, putting the visualiser out of focus, dropping pens/keys/coins randomly over the sheet to obscure what they can see and so on, race-reading, charades, whatever seems appropriate and makes them think rather than just drill.  One last thing to say about the song: I often take the opportunity after each line of three “boxes” on the sheet to change the pronouns.  The first three: Le jour de Noël, mes parents m’ont offert…  The next three: je leur ai offert; the next three: mon frère m’a offert; the last three: je lui ai offert.  You’ll see on the powerpoint that there are different symbols to represent each of these sentences.  The person common to all symbols is supposed to represent “moi”.  You can probably find much better ones than I have!  However, these symbols will be used in the very last stage of the sequence in a sentence-construction game, and it helps if I introduce them now.

The song sheet (the second of the two in the pdf file) is also the sheet I use with the visualiser to present the vocabulary.  You will notice that masculine nouns are written in blue, feminine in red.  It doesn’t matter which colours you use for colour-coding genders, as long as you are consistent with yourself (even better if there is consistency across the department, but the likelihood is that others don’t do it at all, rather than that they use different colours to you, and so less of a problem).

The first page (without the vocabulary written down) is the one pupils stick in their books (I give them an A5 size sheet) and label themselves using as their support a vocab list with of anagrams.  First they solve the anagrams, then they associate them with the correct pictures.

Well, that’s probably enough for now.  Next time: Getting pupils to use the structures the teacher uses, and making sure the genders stick.

Sticky Grammar! #2: What makes it sticky?

This series of posts is intended as a reminder for those who attended my seminars at ALL Cornwall Regional Branch in July, at The Schools Network Languages Conference in Warwick or the Language Show Live in London in October, and as an explanation for those who were not there but are interested in an approach to teaching grammar inductively through the target language.  As a rule I work on the principle that if someone who wasn’t at the session can understand everything about it just from the powerpoint that was used, it was a pretty poor session.  Have you sat through seminars like that, too, where they just read to you what you could read for yourself?!

The session at the Language Show Live, at Olympia in London, was filmed and will be available soon to watch at www.LanguageShowConnect.co.uk.  It was also filmed when it was presented at University of Warwick earlier in October and will be available next summer as part of a 5-hour DVD course on target language teaching together with a full set of teaching materials and resources to help you extract the principles and techniques and apply them to other situations, contexts and language items.  But more on that next year!

Part of the thinking behind “Sticky Grammar” is that grammar teaching is no good at all if its effectiveness only lasts for a couple of weeks.  We’ve all had the experience where we’ve taught our little hearts out, working really hard on making something as clear as possible, only to find that as soon as we move on to another topic or situation which is quite different from the one in which pupils first learned the grammatical item, they either can’t use it, can’t transfer it, or they can’t remember even having done it in the first place!  Or am I the only one?  The other part of my thinking on this is that the syllabus or scheme of work changes more often than I change a light bulb, but the language itself does not.  If all of my planning goes in to the transient scheme of work but not into how I teach what a verb is, or when the subjunctive is used, or how to connect sentences, I create a lot more work for myself and I may never realise how pupils spot pattern.  The danger then, of course, is that I might end up teaching grammar in a decontextualized approach, and there is very little sticky about that.

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that the problem about grammar teaching’s all-too-common lack of stickiness is not clarity but rather intensity, relevance and accessibility.  I think most of us with a couple of years’ teaching behind us can make a pretty good stab at explaining a grammatical item clearly.  Doing that through the medium of the target language raises the challenge both for us and for the class, but with careful planning and a learning environment in which the foreign language is used as the normal means of communication all of the time, clarity doesn’t have to suffer.  Indeed, I think comparing the foreign language and the native language can make explaining a grammatical item much less clear, particularly at an early stage of learning.  Several times I’ve heard the same thing from people not connected with each other about trying to explain what an infinitive is.  Not at all straightforward for learners who are English native speakers.  The second most common one I’ve heard is the messiness of explaining that avoir means to have and être means to be, but in their first half term the poor souls have to get their heads round the fact that avoir  and not être is used to state age (J’ai 11 ans) and soon after that être and not avoir  is used to express “I have” in expressions such as “I have gone” (Je suis allé).  In any case, what I don’t want to do is start with a crystal clear explanation of the grammar with my classes – that’s the end point for me – I’d rather start with a clear experience of the grammar.  The two are not the same thing.  If I start with a clear explanation, and to be honest it sounds like a common sense approach, I encourage my pupils to think in terms of grammatical rules when they speak.  Many pupils just can’t cope with that without their fluency suffering severely.  It’s the opposite of how we learned to speak our own language and, I’ve found, it’s just not necessary.  Grammatical rules are much more securely learned when they are discovered, when they describe what pupils already know and can use based on what has gone before in lessons and where pupils have been led to spot patterns.

Accessibility can best be increased by incorporating visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles in everything we do.  To make this really work without making lesson preparation ridiculously time-consuming or the teaching of the lesson exhausting for the teacher, it’s a good idea to get some specialist training – now that would be a good use of a training budget and an INSET day…!  However, failing that, there are some pointers we can bear in mind as we plan our teaching.  For example, is it really a good use of our time to spend hours on preparing an amazingly beautiful powerpoint?  Incidentally, I don’t agree with the view that if something takes longer to prepare than to teach, we’re not using our time well.  I would agree with that if the resource/activity that we were preparing could only ever be used once, but if we are thinking through an important building block of language or a foundational grammatical item and how it can be developed over time, I think it can be a very good use of time.  Some of the teaching I’ve done on the perfect tense in French, for example, which I have used for years I couldn’t possibly have done if I hadn’t put the thinking time in all those years ago.  True, some of the resources and contexts have changed, but thinking it all through in the beginning has made life so much easier since then.

My point is rather that if I put an extraordinary amount of time into fiddling about with animations, transitions, pictures and text, I may not have the time to think through how I am going to make my predominantly visual activity truly multi-sensory.  So just as in the olden days before IWBs when at least some (many?) teachers did a lot of talking but there wasn’t much to see (so the auditory learners did well, but the visual learners didn’t get a look in, as it were), now the visual learners have got more of a chance (and lessons are probably more consistently planned in advance rather than being winged because a powerpoint is de rigueur).  But what is still common to both the before and the after of all this is that kinaesthetic learners are frequently left out.  And as their opportunities for accessing and retaining what is presented are denied them, an artificial gap arises in their performance and attainment compared with their classmates.  Ever wondered why there are so many fidget-bums (technical term) in the lower sets but many will sit pretty in the upper ones?

Relevance and intensity can be addressed through the use of classroom routines.  Some of them can really raise the roof (if you want!).  My particular favourites in that category are a lateness routine and a forfeit routine, whereas others are much more calm.  At the end of the day we have to be ourselves and do what suits our personality – there is no reason why we have to be extroverts if we are not, and it isn’t necessarily better.  I’ve seen some lessons where the pupils were having an absolute whale of a time as they engaged in a routine, but were then so over-excited that control was lost or learning didn’t take place afterwards.  Light and shade (or stirrers and settlers) help here.  The point here is that where language is used meaningfully and communicatively in the classroom, language is more acquired than learned.  If we plan those routines in such a way that the language is deliberately developed and taken to a more advanced stage, and where pupils’ awareness is raised to notice the salient features of the language they are using, the grammatical rules end up explaining something they already know, rather than being a starting point for making sentences.  There are so many situations we can exploit for linguistic purposes, from taking the register or setting & reviewing homework, to asking for equipment, announcing room changes/exam arrangements and classroom management.  This is the type of communication which allows us to use much more advanced structures at an earlier stage than any amount of teaching grammatical rules or teaching topics does.

But we also have to teach topics (or whatever your scheme of work requires).  These posts will look at some strategies for going about teaching grammar within them, all the time trying to address the issues of accessibility, relevance and intensity, and of course clarity, through the medium of the target language.

In the next post on this subject later this week, we’ll start looking at a unit of work, the one I used in my seminar, for Year 10, how the vocabulary was introduced and repeated and a song that helps drive it all home.