Making Every MFL Lesson Count

Six principles to support modern foreign language teaching

James A Maxwell, Andy Tharby, Shaun Allison

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785834806
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

James A. Maxwell's M aking Every MFL Lesson Count: Six principles to support modern foreign language teaching shows modern foreign languages (MFL) teachers how they can take their students on a learning journey that both educates and inspires.

Writing in the practical, engaging style of the award-winning Making Every Lesson Count, experienced MFL teacher James A. Maxwell empowers educators with the strategies and know-how to boost their students' attainment, engagement and enthusiasm in the MFL classroom.

Making Every MFL Lesson Count is underpinned by six pedagogical principles challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, feedback and questioning and helps MFL teachers ensure that students leave their lessons with richer vocabulary, a better grasp of grammar and the skills and confidence to put the language learnt into practice. Bursting with templates, examples and flexible frameworks, this gimmick-free guide provides educators with a range of practical techniques designed to enhance their students' linguistic awareness and help them transfer the target language into long-term memory.

James skilfully marries evidence-based practice with collective experience and, in doing so, inspires a challenging approach to secondary school MFL teaching. Furthermore, he concludes each chapter with a series of questions that will inspire reflective thought and encourage teachers to relate the content to their own classroom practice.

Suitable for MFL teachers of students aged 11 to 18 years.

Chapter 1

Challenge

It’s the first French lesson of Year 7, and Mrs Pentland introduces herself to the twenty-eight eager, enthusiastic 11-year-olds seated before her. Having taught for nineteen years, she recognises that familiar frisson of excitement insider her at the thought of being in a position to instil a love of languages and language learning in these students and of being the person charged with moulding them into competent and proficient linguists.

As she does every year, Mrs Pentland asks the class if any of them know any French. About half the hands in the room shoot up. Harry tells her that they learnt French for two years in primary school, and proudly tells her that he can count to 50. She dutifully commends him on this, but seeing the glint of panic in the eyes of Serena, the little girl beside Harry who did not attend the same school, she does not ask Harry to display his knowledge. Jason speaks up to say that he attended the languages club at his primary school and knows the words for lots of animals. When Mrs Pentland then asks the class who has been to France, again approximately half the hands in the room go up. Molly announces that she goes with her family every year for three weeks to Provence, and speaks with gusto about her morning excursions for delicious pain au chocolat in the village bakery and about watching the daily games of pétanque in the early evenings. Mrs Pentland also knows from experience that some students in the class have probably never travelled abroad before.

Turning to the board to explain the lesson’s learning intentions, she has another familiar thought – the same thought she has every year. In the modern languages classroom, teachers are not starting with a blank canvas. Each student is bringing with them into the classroom varying degrees of knowledge, cultural experience and preconceptions. In ensuring that all the students are challenged in their language learning, she herself will be challenged to adopt the most effective teaching approaches and strategies. Mrs Pentland knows that she is well up for the challenge!

The example of Mrs Pentland’s Year 7 class, as they transition to secondary school, highlights how it is not always an even playing field in our MFL classrooms. Some students will come with prior exposure to the language at primary school, either through formal curricular time or extracurricular opportunities such as a languages club. While these students often look forward to their secondary school language learning experience and are initially keen to demonstrate their prior knowledge, let’s bear in mind all the potential ‘Serenas’ who have not been exposed to languages at primary level, and who may already be forming a preconception that they are at a disadvantage or behind in their learning. Sometimes during our teaching careers we may also, of course, teach bilingual young people who have grown up in a household where the foreign language is a means of communication, either primarily or partly.

Alongside these varying levels of knowledge, there is the question of the cultural capital which our students have gained before transitioning to secondary school. Some will have visited the target language country, either once or twice or on a repeated basis. They will have gleaned cultural experiences which will, in turn, have fashioned their perceptions of the country’s culture and language in a mostly positive manner. They will have formed an array of anecdotes which will act as a point of reference as they study the language further. This melange of prior experience, cultural capital and varying degrees of knowledge can make the provision of challenge for students in the MFL classroom a complex affair. Large class sizes and having to teach MFL within the constraints of a rigid school timetable can add to that complexity.

Challenge as a concept is slightly different from the other five principles in this book. While there are certainly specific teaching strategies that can be employed to ensure that challenge is appropriate for all students at a given time, the concept itself is much more to do with our long-term teaching approaches and therefore should overarch everything. It should run through everything we do – the culture we establish, the teaching strategies we utilise, the routines we embed, the academic register we develop in the classroom (particularly the features of vocabulary and grammar) and the language we use in order to communicate expectations to our students. A little like the fruits, nuts and spices which permeate an exceedingly good German stollen, appropriate challenge gives our lessons their core essence, texture and flavour, and is simply crucial in order to ensure successful outcomes.

Challenge in the modern languages classroom can be defined as the provision of work which causes students to think deeply and engage in healthy ‘struggle’. Struggle is healthy when it challenges students in a manner which allows them, over time, to learn effectively. In the specific case of modern foreign languages, appropriately pitched challenge will afford our students opportunities to develop the procedural knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and discourse rules of the language. Ultimately, such challenge will allow them to develop automaticity – being able to draw on long-term memory in order to use and manipulate the language quickly and fluently.

When faced with a difficult class or a class with motivational issues (perhaps on a Friday afternoon!), it may seem like the simpler option to opt for ‘quick win’ strategies in which students experience some superficial success without struggle. However, this may come at the expense of high challenge and deep thinking, as it often happens within students’ comfort zones. An example of this could be spending entire lessons focusing on the acquisition of single-word vocabulary. While this is important as a building block for a student’s cumulative linguistic development, our aim should be to provide students with structured opportunities to use vocabulary in context as quickly as possible.

As we will explore further in Chapter 2, vocabulary needs to be owned, used, assimilated and practised deliberately within structures very soon after it is first encountered. The Teaching Schools Council’s Modern Foreign Languages Pedagogy Review reflects this:

Teachers should know that errorless teaching techniques (when pupils are unambiguously told the meaning of a new word) are effective, providing that rapidly they are required to use the new words in comprehension and then productively. The more times a pupil is required to recall a word, the more securely it will move into the long term memory. Activities or tasks where pupils need to recall or find a particular word in order to complete communication, so filling a genuine information gap, are very helpful in assisting memorisation. Vocabulary should be reinforced by having pupils incorporate it into new sentences they compose themselves. 1

Putting language into context as soon as possible, strong modelling strategies, effective questioning, high-quality opportunities for students to practise and robust feedback will all help to develop procedural knowledge and automaticity of skill in long-term memory, thus facilitating success and boosting motivation.

The need for our students to experience success in the MFL classroom is cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Challenge
• 2: Explanation
• 3: Modelling
• 4: Practice
• 5: Feedback
• 6: Questioning
• Final Thoughts
• Bibliography
• Copyright