This post is about one of my big preoccupations - How do we help the pupils express themselves confidently with the structures we teach them?
Structures are the key to any form of independence in language learning. Our pupils are aware of this, however vaguely, and unsurprisingly, they want to understand what they're saying. We are never to convince them that they are making progress as language learners unless they have that fundamental confidence to use the structures themselves.
Emma (@bains_1) demonstrated how her pupils use their exercise books as reference resources. They have key tables demonstrating verb and tense formation and connectives stuck into their books. How do they find them? They are colour-coded and have tabs sticking out of their books for easy reference. These tables are taken from the school dictionaries, and so they are getting used to using the tables they are able to refer to in Controlled Assessments. I loved this idea because it promotes the structures as well as showing the pupils what they can do for themselves. They also had gold stickers for pieces of work which were good enough to be used in the future. Getting pupils to see their exercise books as a resource can be an uphill struggle, so these ideas were very welcome.
Emma also showed us a score sheet she uses with pupils to promote punctuation and other linguistic structures - the more complicated the structure, the more points it scores. I teach in a boys' school, and truly, points mean prizes. I'm thinking of combining this with ideas from James Padvis to really get them thinking.
James (@jjpadvis) showed several of his cunning ideas for getting pupils to extend their sentences beyond "J'aime le foot parce que c'est super". He had a connectives pyramid, with the most basic "1point" connectives (and, but) at the top, and going down to level 7 for much more advanced connectives. The pupils were encouraged to use this to help them improve their written work. I think this is a very powerful way of showing pupils that they can extend their sentences and thoughts beyond the basics. I have a colleague who liked that idea so much, she is planning a connectives Eiffel Tower!
I have a different variation in my classroom, linked to the word-order rules in German. "Green" connectives are the connectives where the word-order doesn't change, "yellow/amber" are the connectives which mean that the verb comes next, and the "red/pink" ones are the connectives which send the verb to the end of the sentence. These have been really effective since I re-vamped my classroom in the summer holidays - the colour-coding helps them remember the grammar rules, but also means that pupils are more prepared to look at the wall and use a bigger variety in their work.
One more display to help support pupils, this time in using the target language. I feel slightly deflated when a pupil gives an answer in the target language, but precedes it with "Well, I think it might be.." Having a traffic-light coded set of phrases on the wall so that they can express their level of confidence in the TL makes a lot of sense. Pupils clearly feel the need to show their level of doubt, or to put a disclaimer on their answer. Why not give them these prompts and keep the exchanges in the TL?
Amanda (I'm sorry, that's all I have in my notes) had a great guessing game for us. Us MFL teachers love a guessing game - all that reinforcement of key structures! All that learning by having (whisper it) fun! She showed us a grid with 3 columns filled with variations. You take one element from each column to make a sentence. The pupils then guess which sentence you are thinking of by saying something from each column. You then say oui/non to each element, and see how many goes it takes them to get it right. I played this with my Y10s this week, when we did the great Time-Manner-Place word order rule in German, and it worked a treat. The pupils were then able to do it in pairwork, and scored how themselves on how many guesses they needed to get the right answer. The pupils with the lowest score won!
Finding the right words, however is a challenge, especially when the dictionaries don't keep up with the weird and wonderful technological world we live in. Need a word which is too hip for the dictionary? @dominic_mcg has the answer! Look up the page in Wikipedia, switch languages, and (hopefully) voila! It's slightly less fiddly than using amazon.fr/de to give you the words for the latest essential, although in trying it out, found that there is no entry in German wikipedia for "skinny jeans". Make of that what you will. Sick of franglais? Then turn to the Institut français webpage "Dire..Ne Pas Dire" for the approved version of anglicised words. If only Germany had something similar.. ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment