Category: primary languages

Following on from my 30 minutes on the International Dimension on Tuesday, the assembled group were treated to a session led by Pam Haezewindt, HMI, on inspecting Primary Languages.

Here are some of the points, comments and observations that she made.

Subjects are not inspected as separate entities in setion 5 (whole school) inspections but
issues arising from the school SEF and preinspection briefing may be investigated, so PMFL may be visited to probe generic points eg behaviour.

Pam pointed us towards the following document which can be downloaded from the OFSTED website using the number quoted.

The changing landscape of languages
(An evaluation of language learning 2004/7)
July 2008
www.ofsted.gov.uk
report – ref no. 070053
(Also details some generic findings from whole school inspections – at least a 3rd of all inspections mentioned MFL in some way.)

Some comments from the report –

‘The French language pervades the school’

‘A pilot scheme to teach Spanish in y3 and 4 broadens horizons, builds self esteem and adds to pupil enjoyment’

‘Recently introduced Spanish lessons have spurred on pupils’ interest i another langauge and this is having a good effect upon their understanding of letter sounds in Spanish as well as English.’

Subject inspections are carried out as part of the survey inspections OFSTED is required to do. These are inspected according to the headings of section 5 schedule but each subject also selects an issue to look at in more detail.
In languages, the current subject issue is ‘progress toward entitlement in KS2’

Evidence collected -2005-7
In half the schools the effectiveness of the introduction of languaegs and progress towards good
enthusiastic pupils enthusiastic teachers

Improvement needed in –

• sound spelling links
• ICT use by pupils
• assessment
• monitoring
• reliance on external providers
• liaison with secondary schools

One third of schools identified were not visited because they had not begun languages, or, significantly, had begun but stopped due to staff leaving.
These schools have all been telephoned this term and only two have not now introduced a language.

2007-8 – what has changed?
This is most recent report

The context –

• mostly language spoken to Y3 and or 4
• if provided in y5 and 6, mainly similar to Y3 and 4
• few schools with progressions from Y3-6 – it’s early days
• the large majority teach French, 30-40 minutes a week, plus some extra provision.

• Effectiveness is good or better in 2/3 schools
• Achievement and provision were graded good or better in 2/3 of schools
• Personal development nearly always at least good, and outstanding in 1/5
• almost all schools fostered excitement

strengths-

• listening skills good
• speaking skills developing well
• Pupils will respond with confidence and enthusisasm to instructions and questions
• teachers use a variety of mean to help students pronounce well
• in some schools KAL and ICU developing well (still some way to go) – some still 4 skills not 5 strands
• teaching and learning good overall
• senior leaders commiteed
• self evaluation good

Areas still to improve and develop

• sound spelling links
• reading from early in learning
• writing (some reluctance, wishing to leave until Y6?)
• building on pupils’ own languages
• teacher confidence to build the language into everyday teaching and learning contexts
• time (some schools managing to find 50 minutes a week)
• self, peer, continuous and summative assessment
• working with secondary schools (what happens to all these pupils who have been learning languages for years)

In 2008-9 the key issues under consideration are entitlement and curriculum models.

The process of a primary subject visit is as follows-

• phone calls to school (2 weeks notice)
• pre-visit letter
• timetable in school
• visit (no requirement for subject SEF) – talk to staff, coordinator, pupils (you can choose to certain extent), observation (can be from 1 to 4 lessons!)
• oral feedback
• written feedback = post visit letter – no headings in letter so no ‘outstanding’ ‘satisfactory’ etc

The Rose Review – Interim report
A language is to become compulsory in primary schools from September 2011. (Not to be confused with 2010 deadline for entitlement!) The children who are currently in Reception will be the cohort with compulsory entitlement.
Languages currently sit within the area for learning; ‘English, communications and modern languages’
Current debate about which and how many languages is ongoing.
Do respond to the next consultation

I found all this information really useful and hope that it will be useful to others too.

Hot on the heels of CILT’s Primary Language Show, Birmingham’s ELL RSG meeting at the Martineau Centre in Harborne on 9th March was led by Helen Leigh from Worcestershire LA and was full of ideas for five to ten minute language activities that can be done in the classroom. Whilst the recommendation of one hour per week language learning has been understood as a discrete lesson by some, the ideal is that the hour is spread throughout the week. Not only because an hour is a loooong time to maintain attention and energy, but also because little and often fits well into the already packed primary curriculum. Helen suggested the term ‘language exposure’ too as a good way of viewing it.

The session was jampacked wth ideas which Helen related to the KS2 Framework.

Here are some exmaples –

O3.3 – perform simple communicative tasks using single words, phrases and short sentences
‘Snail stories’ – can be done in many languages as so simple! Un escargot (actions draw s – drive a car – point GO!)
Un escargot….deux escargots…..bonjour….bonjour…… kiss kiss……au revoir…au revoir
Un caracol…… dos caracoles…..hola…….hola……..kiss kiss……. adiós…..adiós
could add to it by asking how you are, name etc

Brain gym –
a)letters and number – using the chart (right), say the alphabet whilst lifting arms and legs as indicated by the number as below –
1- right hand and left leg
2- left hand and right leg
3- both hands

Kids could make up their own versions, have a competition to see how fast they can do it correctly? It also fits the idea of Daily Physical Activity. See also Take Ten en français / en español.

b. colours – Dr Kawashima-like stroop test – as a timed test perhaps, or inter table competition?

Another idea was a Mexican wave of word cards and/ or pictures?

O3.2 to recognise and respond to sound patterns and words O4.3 to listen for sounds, rhyme and rhythm

‘Phonics’
eg Une poule sur un mur (see here for song mp3)
focus on ‘ou’ sound – touch your head when you hear the sound.
then ‘u’ sound
actions

Helen then used pictures of Marge and Homer Simpson, breaking the sad news that they were splitting up and had to split their belongings, to demonstrate an activity with phoneme. Homer was in a house labelled ou and Marge in one labelled u – the task was to divide all the things in the home. eg Marge got la jupe, Homer la tortue, Marge le mur etc

Dans la forêt lointaine is a good song to use for reinfrcing the phoneme ou – pupils stand up and sit down each time your hear ‘ou’
This also covers ICU as traditional song. Helen reiterated that it is not necessary to understand every word.

“Splat’
A simple activity – two pupils compete to splat the number, animated on PPT to pop up and down. Make it harder by asking pupils to splat multiples of 3 for example.

L4.1 to read and understand a range of familair written phrases
O5.1 to prepare and practse a simple conversation, reusing familiar vocabulary and structures in new contexts
Fishing rods – hook a fish – on the back of the fish is a number – the team that gets the number closest to x that wins.
Add them orally! Alternatively, make it harder by allowing the use of all operations to reach a more difficult number.

Helen also showed an idea using an alphabet mat – give two people a word to spell out by ‘dancing’ on the letters. their partners cmpete to write the word phrase down.

Another idea was to ask questions with three possible answers. Someone is sent out. whilst they are outside, the group decide on the correct answers. When they return, the person has to get all three right or start again. This allows the class to practise the question form which the part they often struggle to learn.

Above is a slide about a game of Cluedo that could be played with the class – involves colours, classroom objects and rooms, and pupils repeat the same vocabulary over and over until someone gets the correct answer. And a bit of blood and gore always go down well ;o)

O3.4 listen attentively and understand instructions, everyday classroom language and praise words

‘spells’
Helen then showed us some magic! Dice that changed colour, books that lose colours and regain colours, disappearing things, psychic displays – all the usual stuff!
We made up a spell about colours –

We then had a look at the story Je m’habille et… je te croc! all about a wolf who gets dressed then comes to eat us! Helen had found a Powerpoint in French already prepared – there are lots more great ideas on the site too!

The final activities involved the Months of the year – firstly, using a mgaic bag – everyone wrote their birth month on a slip of paper and put them in a bag. Helen then got someone to choose a month and wrote the month that she thought it would be on a magic board. of course she was right as there was a secret compartment n the bag! The other activity involved betting on the month that disappears forst from the board, then, once they’ve all gone, which comes back? The disappearing involves pupils copywriting on a whiteboard, and reappearing involves recall.

Loads of ideas!! Thanks Helen x
pass the bomb!

One of the sessions I attended at the PLS was all about using Fairytales and Fables in PLL and employing children’s thinking skills. It was led by Louise Harty from Northumberland, and spoke to the wonderful resources available on the NGfL – particularly Riccioliodoro and Les souris courageuses

As I admitted to Louise when I saw here later, I’ve used the resources on the NGfL, specifically Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood in Spanish, and have made use of some of the activities discussed during the session without really grasping the full power of them. So it was good to discover the thinking and theory behind it all.

This has implications for thinking skills – Louise opened by reflecting that learning should be active, meaningful, challenging, collaborative, mediated and reflective. She talked about Lev Vygotsky and his zones of proximal development. Vygotsky felt that it is children’s interaction with others through language that most strongly influences the levels of conceptual understanding they can reach. He also believed that we can learn from others, both the same age and of a higher age and developmental level – learning is a social activity and thinking skills could be the road to better language learning.

The progression of learning in PMFL was said to be

• nouns
• words to describe nouns
• short phrase
• making own sentences
• able to use verbs confidently

and the scheme of learning activities that Louise was presenting follow this pattern.
At each stage, opportunities are given to explore concepts behind the knowledge in an unthreatening manner.

Here are the success criteria for each objective-

• nouns – I understand gender (not teaching it but exploring it)
• adjectives – I understand how adjectives work
• short phrases – I understand simple word order.
• sentences – I understand sentence construction
• use verbs confidently – I understand how verbs work

By using scaffolding early on, pupils in PMFl can reach level 5 equivalent skills. Louise questioned why, if pupils are conceptually able to reach level 5 in Maths science and Literacy, we limit them in MFL?

By moving from fairytales to fables the pupils are moving from familiar to less familiar stories with more complex language.

Ricciolodoro è i Tre Orsi was the first story in focus.
By using Storyboarding pupils were developing sequencing and deductive skills. They went on to classifying nouns, exercising sorting and clasifying skills, using language of similarity and differences whilst making connections. They ahve to articulate their reasoning with everyone bringing their own learning and skills
We did an activity in which we were exploring gender – not being taught it but discovering it. If you present ‘the cognitive conflict’ children discover for themselves and it much more powerful than being told.

Les souris courageuses – une fable
We began looking at the activity Map from memory, a visual, walking dictation type of activity in which we were communicating the position of items in a picture from memory wthout touching. The key was – How did we tackle the task? Were we methodical and divide the picture into sections? Did we look for likely places to put words? Did we match adjectives in advance of instructions?

We then moved onto the construction of phrases and sentences using a grid, then joining with connectives. Although some may not be strictly correct in terms of likelihood or sense, in the feedback you get quality of language. Louise emphasised that the teacher’s role is facilitating in thsi scenario rather than giving learning. In this exercise, the thinking was interpreting and oragnising info whilst the children were talking about how to work together as a team – team strategies lead to spontaneous language.

The next activity involved a Venn diagram which we used for making deductions about adjectives. Conclusions reached included that you often add an e to make feminine adjectives and ones that are the same end in e already. The exercise then gave opportunities for more sentence making opportunities.

Sadly Louise ran out of time to explain the Fortune line and Fact or fiction, but we did have a quick look at classifying verbs, matching infinitives to verb forms and then splitting the verb cards as we saw fit. We were encouraged to split them into description and action verbs, and then to discuss our conclusions.

The interactive stories and SMART notebook files of characters and for retelling the story are available on the NGfL website and the accompanying resources are available for purchase £149.
I’ve used the Goldilocks stuff in Spanish very successfully with Year2 who discovered all sorts of things about language through it. And now I understand why!!

I was very privileged to be invited to present this year at the Primary Languages Show in Liverpool, not once but twice!

I promised at my two sessions that I would post my notes and resources on my blog for people to download and use.

So here’s my first presentation. If you download it, the hyperlinks all work – or did when I tried them. However, if they don’t, remember that I have bookmarked all the sites to which I referred (and more) on Delicious tagged PLS09 – http://delicious.com/lisibo/pls09

The Powerpoints I used are also below –

I have blogged this unit previously here and you will find my worksheets, the SoW and more ideas here and a fuller description of how we animated our animals here.

A couple of things I mentioned but didn’t put in the presentation – the masks were downloaded from Sparklebox and the animation was done using FramebyFrame on my Macbook. You can also use SMAnimator (free to download on a PC) or ICanAnimate (for PC or Mac costs about £40)

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!

As I write, it’s Day 2 of the Primary Languages Show and I’m in a really interesting session by Louise Harty from Northumberland who is talking about Thinking skills in Fairytales and Fables – blog post to follow!

I was asked to speak at the conference this year – I did my first presentation yesterday (repeated) about El Carnaval de los animales and this afternoon I’m going to present You and Youtube (twice)

As promised, I’ll be blogging my sessions and uploading the resources to which I refer so if you were in Liverpool and want the resources, they’re there, and if you weren’t in Liverpool, you can benefit too! Any questions, feel free to ask.

I’ll also try to blog the sessions I attended – really interesting they are too! and I’m hoping to cadge some notes from others too!

Mark Pentleton of Radio Lingua Network fame has one more worked his magic and a few days ago, launched a new addition to the plethora of products already available to help you learn languages.

Called School Run French, the series of 6-7 minute episodes allow you to take advantage of the school run, football run, Brownies / Badgers / BB run – in fact, any short journey to learn or practice your French. As Mark explains

Many of our listeners have been asking for materials which they can use
with their children or grandchildren, and we’ve been working for some time
on the development of materials aimed at this group. We’re delighted to
announce “School Run French” as the first in a series of shows which will
be aimed at younger language learners.

Picking up a language at an early age equips children with valuable skills
for life, and just as our many hundreds of thousands of adult listeners are
learning a language in their coffee break, so too can children learn a
language while they’re doing something else, for example in the car on the
way to school, football practice, ballet class, or whatever.

School Run French breaks down the French language into short chunks of 6-7
minutes, and every episode contains an interactive audio game which helps
children consolidate what they’ve learned.

School Run French is available on iTunes to download and sample audio
episodes will be put there on a weekly basis. However, the first ‘pack’ of five
lessons with colourful pdf puzzle sheets is now available for £5.00 (+VAT for EU customers).

I’ve had a listen and I love it – so do my ‘testers’ – marvellous having two kids who are a acaptive audience! They like the fact that it’s fun and there are games and challenges to test whether they know the answer.

Just itching for Mark to do School Run Spanish as I am constantly asked for such a resource by the parents, grandparents and carers of pupils at school. How about it, Mark? ¡Por favor!

I love stickers! I love sticking them on my books, and I love sticking them on children as rewards!

So I am always looking for funky stickers, particularly in Spanish for my classes.

There are lovely ones available from
Language Stickers in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, Welsh, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian and Latin
Superstickers in French, German, Spanish and Welsh
Linguascope in French, German, Italian, Welsh, Mandarin and Spanish.
Brainwaves in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Turkish and Welsh.

But some of my favourites come from …

Perhaps it’s my juvenile nature or my love of dressing up, but I love the resources available from Pedagogs! And so do pupils.

So I was really pleased to receive an email today offering 15% off during February!

Stickers are available in Spanish, French, Mandarin (tradtional and simplified) and German, and feature little cartoon people dressed as cowboys, firemen – well, see for yourself below!

And I’ve just noticed that the design of their charity tote bag has changed – I’ve got a blue one but the new one is pink with a mermaid… I feel the need to shop!!

Many of you will know of Joe Dale and follow his marvellous blog, Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom. Joe is an SSAT Lead Practitioner and as part of his role, he delivers an SSAT seminar each year. This year he ran a day in Colchester on Blogging and Podcasting, and I am really pleased that he is going to repeat that day in the Midlands soon – on Thursday 29th January at Shirelands CLC to be precise.

As Joe says –

If you are interested in finding out more about the potential of blogging and podcasting to enhance language learning and offer personalised distance learning opportunities to your students, why not click here and download the flyer to apply to attend the course? It only costs £69 which includes lunch.

I can thoroughly recommend Joe’s seminars as they are always very instructive and full of ideas for enhancing language learning – and the ideas are all easily transferrable to other areas of the curriculum so it would be easy to share the outcomes with your whole school and for everyone to benefit.

If you need further persuasion, check out some of the comments from his session in Colchester– (bottom of post!)

Following on from El pequeño petirrojo, here’s another idea for Christmas that is adaptable to a variety of age groups.

Courtesy of HGfL (Hertfordshire Grid for Learning) comes ideas for using Raymond Briggs’ Snowman in French, Spanish and German.

You can download a set of flashcards in the form of a Powerpoint, and also the script of the story in the above languages. Here are instructions for how it’s suggested you might use the resources:

The basic idea is to show the DVD, which (apart from the introduction) has no words, accompanied by a reading of the script. Some confidence and competence in the chosen language is required as the text, although in the present tense, presents some challenges as you need to understand when to pause to allow the film to tell the story. Some ideas:

1. Introduce key words with the flashcards.
2. Play flashcard games.
3. Develop actions for each flashcard. Children repeat the actions whenever they hear the words in the story.
4. Distribute flashcards. Children wave flashcards when they hear the appropriate words in the story.
5. For older children you may want to introduce the written word and distribute word cards which the children show as they hear in the story.
6. When the children have watched the film and listened to the script in the appropriate language several times, they could act out the story as it is being read (first of all with the film and then without the film).
7. Older children could be given a simplified text, cut up which they then need to put in order. A similar activity could also be carried out using the smartboard or something similar.

I think this is a marvellous idea! Not only do you get to watch a classic, it also serves as a teaching resource.

And in case you haven’t got the DVD, here it is from Youtube – in three parts!

And here’s just the song – Walking in the Air – which I have just discovered was not originally sung by Aled Jones.

Just read an interesting article in The Telegraph Education section with the above title. It reports on a group in the Harrogate area called French for Fidgets (a great name for the group!) that teaches French to toddlers through song and games. Taking kids as young as 18 months, their philosophy is –

“… to make it fun. When devising these classes, I asked myself what children this age enjoy doing and the answer was singing, eating and rolling around the floor. So that’s what we do. It just happens we speak French while we’re doing it.”

I’ve taught Kindergarten at a previous school and also had pupils as young as 18 months, so I can completely agree with and endorse the benefits of catching them early. In fact there were children with emergent speech who had as many words in Spanish as in English – and all that from 20 minutes first thing on a Monday! The analogy ‘little sponges’ is a very apt one.

And research backs this up – Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith of the Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development in London is quoted in the article saying –

“Right from birth, the brain has the capacity to learn three or four different languages and in many countries that’s what happens,” she says. “In fact, the majority of children in the world are bilingual, either because their country has a number of borders or because their parents speak different languages.

“The typical pattern is for a child to learn one language from their father, one from their mother and another at school or in the street. As for brain capacity, I know children with Down’s syndrome who have three languages simultaneously. The truth is that languages shouldn’t be introduced at primary school, but at nursery school.”

And she concludes with a radical idea-

“Teach a language at nursery school and you won’t need to teach it at secondary,” she maintains. “By that time, the children will already be able to speak it.”