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ISMLA NEWSLETTER Independent Schools’ Modern Languages Association Spring 2014 www.ismla.co.uk
ISMLA N E W S L E T T E R Independent Schools’ Modern Languages Association
Spring 2014
www.ismla.co.uk
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Chairman Nick Mair Dulwich College [email protected]
Vice Chairman and Membership Secretary Geoffrey Plow
University College School [email protected]
Treasurer
Peter Ansell Stonyhurst College [email protected]
Secretary
Jenny Davey Glenalmond College
[email protected] Newsletter Editor
Peter Langdale North London Collegiate School
[email protected] Reviews Editor
Melvyn Bardou Mill Hill School [email protected]
Website Editor
Thomas Underwood University College School [email protected] Awarding Bodies Liaison Officer Alex Frazer Mill Hill School
Liaison with Prep Schools Anne-Marie Williams Bilton Grange Preparatory School, Rug-by [email protected] Exhibitions Organiser
David Cragg-James [email protected]
Other Committee Members
Jane Byrne, King’s School, Chester
Duncan Byrne, Cheltenham College
Kevin Dunne, formerly Ampleforth Col-
lege (Liaison with ALL, ISMLA repre-sentative on Executive Council )
Jim Houghton, Highgate School
Astrid McAuliffe, Alleyn’s School
Richard Oates, Sherborne School
Daniella Mardell, St Paul’s Girls’ School
Helena Matthews, Godolphin & Latymer
Duncan Peel, Hampton School
Ben Pollard, Eltham College
David Sheppard, Tanglin Trust School,
Singapore
Julia Whyte, formerly St Francis’ Colle-
ge
John Wilson, Cheadle Hulme School
Contact the Committee
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Contents
Page
From the Chairman 4
From the Editor 6
ISMLA Conference 2014 7
Teachers, Research and Evidence 17
Parlez-vous Zulu? 20
Northern Schools' MFL Debating Competition 24
ISMLA German Day 25
Six School Lower 6th French Conference 28
Reviews 30
The front cover image is a detail from Primavera (Spring) by Sandro Botti-celli (1445-1510) which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Other details can be found throughout this Newsletter!
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I hope you will agree that the speakers and venue at the ISMLA annual con-ference on 1st February were of the highest order. The variety of sessions allowed a happy balance of the academic, the practical and the informative – with much to help pupils but also something for our own interest and devel-opment. Our thanks go to the speakers and to Robin Edmundson and the City of London School. Next year’s conference will take place on Saturday 31st January with the venue to be confirmed in the next newsletter.
We are especially grateful to those of you who filled in a feedback form at the end of the conference. It was a bumper crop – easily the biggest haul of feedback we have had in the last ten years. All your responses will help im-prove the conference next year. Venez nombreux.
Meeting with Ofqual
ISMLA welcomed the opportunity to meet again with leading representatives from Ofqual – Amanda Spielman (Chair) and Cath Jadhav (Head of Stand-ards) – as a result of the ‘What the **** do my pupils need to do to get an A*?’ conference which had been held at Dulwich College in Autumn 2013. At the meeting, we reiterated our concerns about the severity and unpredictabil-ity of modern language examination marking and Ofqual have undertaken to investigate these concerns further. You will remember that the Ofqual corpo-rate plan published in August has already promised to address the A* issue in modern languages.
Ofqual report: Review of Quality of Marking in Exams
I draw your attention to the Ofqual report encouragingly headlined ‘Ofqual report calls for better examinations marking system’ published during the Spring half term. We applaud their research. You will find pages 33-41 of particular interest. We again highlight the difference in grading (which we think is more severe than in other subjects) and assessment (the way in which marks are awarded – we think that the oral and topic essay do not produce a rank order we understand). The report can be found at http://
ofqual.gov.uk/documents/quality-of-marking-final-report. It is worth pointing out that Ofqual concedes that as an organisation it has no ability to under-take analysis of the comparability of grades between boards and between subjects within boards.
The New Modern Language Examinations
Departments will want to know that the date for first teaching of both the new GCSE and A level exams is 2016. This is a concern given that the first
From the Chairman
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examining will then be in the academic year 2018 (results in August 2019) and for most schools the ‘message’ about the new exam and its effect on results will take some time to trickle through to SMT (often not linguists), heads of 6th forms, pupils and parents.
The Next steps
Our understanding is that the new modern languages GCSE consultation pro-cess will be around April. Given the tight deadline, the window for contribu-tions will be tight. Please continue to pass on information about issues that concern you. It is only through your contributions that Geoffrey Plow and I can be aware of emerging trends and build a body of evidence.
Chairmanship
Geoffrey Plow (Vice-Chair) and I (Chair) will be stepping aside at the next conference. The committee is eager to hear from full-time teachers who are keen to fill these two roles and thereby contribute their energy, interest and input to the development of the important work of ISMLA. Geoffrey and I will give every assistance to those who follow in the two posts. Peter Langdale (Newsletter editor) is also relinquishing his role and the committee thanks him for all he has done to produce such consistently high quality publications. He too has undertaken to mentor the new editor.
With all good wishes for the coming exam season
Nick Mair
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It was with some dismay that when I went back through my files the other day I noticed that this edition will mark 5 years of my editorship of this Newsletter. Time has passed so quickly.
I first became involved with ISMLA through the then Chairman, Richard Hoare, with whom I had taught at Dulwich College in the 1990s offering to host the 2005 National Conference at Merchant Taylors School, Northwood where I had recently been appointed Head of Modern Languages. I joined the committee shortly thereafter and in Summer 2009 I edited my first Newslet-ter. It was something of a coincidence that I began my tenure at the same time as Nick Mair took over as Chairman with Geoff Plow as Vice-Chairman, but so it was and it has been a pleasure to work with them.
Editing the Newsletter has been a really interesting opportunity, having stepped aside from Head of Department duties, to keep abreast of what is going on in and to encounter people from many different corners of the lan-guages world from publishers to advertisers, from exam boards to teachers and heads of department in a wide variety of schools. It has been rewarding and great fun.
However, I have decided that it is time I passed on the baton to someone younger, with new ideas (and maybe even technical skills!). So, the next edition in Summer 2014 will be my last.
I am therefore making an appeal to find a successor.
Are you interested, or do you know of someone else who might be interested in taking over? Anyone even potentially interested should get in touch with me ([email protected]) and I will be only too happy to outline what editorship entails. I will equally be on hand to help a new editor as he or she takes over the reins. And I promise to contribute some articles too!
I look forward to lots of expressions of interest in my inbox!
Peter Langdale
From the Editor
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The annual conference was held this year on Saturday 1st February , hosted
by City of London Boys’ School. There follow brief accounts of the main
events.
Bilingualism Matters - Professor Antonella Sorace
Antonella Sorace gave the opening talk and was as inspiring and thought-provoking as ever. Antonella is Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and also the founder and director of the Europe-wide information service Bilingualism Matters. Antonella started her talk by outlin-ing the common misconceptions that people have about the consequences of learning more than one language. These, combined with a lack of infor-mation and the low priority given to language learning in the UK had led to many opportunities being missed.
Antonella went on to show that learning more than one language had proven cognitive benefits for the brain, in addition to practical and cultural ad-vantages. She showed how bilingual learners found it easier to learn a third or fourth language, had a better understanding of the first language, were more precocious readers, had greater awareness of other points of view, greater efficiency in adapting to new tasks, were better at carrying out tasks requiring selective attention and benefited from better negotiating abilities, understanding of priorities and even better leadership skills. This is all in addition to improved mathematical reasoning and problem-solving abilities.
Antonella made it clear at the start that the term bilingual was used here to refer to anyone with a knowledge and regular use of more than one lan-guage, thus the benefits were accessible to those studying a language at school, as well as later. As many of us expected, it is easier if you start young and it was fascinating to hear how babies could distinguish between two languages just by watching the facial movements and expressions of the speaker!
The talk led to a number of questions and a lively debate on how to use this information to promote the language learning cause. Mention was made of the Financial Times article which put the case for languages for business and also the recent report by the CfBt into the negative impact of monolingualism on British companies (1)
ISMLA National Conference 2014
(1) "The economic case for language learning and the role of employer engagement" by James
Stokes at POPmedia Ltd. www.popmedia.co.uk (document put together in collaboration with Education and Employers Taskforce, Business for New Europe, Association of School and College Leaders, and CfBT Education Trust).
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It was a wonderful way to start off the conference – it seemed puzzling in-deed that the clear case for language learning was not more widely promoted by government and business, given the potential benefits.
Jenny Davey
MFL & Dyslexia - Alison Clark
Professor Sorace’s excellent talk was followed by an equally informative and valuable talk by Alison Clark from Godolphin & Latymer School where she works as a French teacher and Individual Learning Co-ordinator. Alison set out to contrast cognitive attributes and learning styles of strong linguists with those of dyslexic pupils, highlighting specific areas of difficulty for dyslexic learners.
In her introduction, Alison distinguished between two particular (out of many) types of dyslexia, the phonological and the visual. She went on to explain how learners who fall into the first category are likely to find listening tasks difficult due to the difficulty they will have in hearing the sounds in words, distinguishing letters and letter sequences when listening, grasping letter and sound correspondence as well as their relatively poor phonological memory. On the other hand, learners with visual dyslexia may well be com-paratively good at listening and oral but will find grammar rules and spelling difficult due to their difficulties with sequencing. While most would find a full paradigm of the verb helpful when teaching and learning a language, this sequential presentation would not help a dyslexic learner. This is only one of the difficulties dyslexic learners will encounter in the MFL classroom; dyslexic learners are likely to find learning vocabulary that is grouped thematically more difficult than when words are grouped into word families or around their similar spelling/phonological patterns.
Alison highlighted many useful strategies In order to help learners to make progress. One of the key starting points is to be aware of the specific difficul-ties an individual will face. In practical terms, the teacher can help the pupil prioritise the most important items of vocabulary by marking those in a vo-cabulary list and help them make other connections between words. For ex-ample, to help support the learner’s relatively weak working memory, they can use gesture, colours, pictures to help bring the vocabulary to life and learners should also be encouraged to use strategies such as colour-coding of nouns of different genders or making mini-flashcards. It also helps to make links to previously learnt vocabulary and highlight similarities in pronuncia-tion/spelling. When teaching grammar, rules and discussions of patterns and probabilities will be a useful shortcut for many, while some learners will be best served by learning the most important forms as vocabulary.
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Alison also gave useful tips for each of the skill areas – in general, many of these skills and strategies are applicable for any learner, dyslexic or not and should have their place in every classroom. However, for dyslexic learners these skills and strategies may be taught (even) more explicitly. Other ex-amples included scaffolding, short-term targets, tasks which are broken down into smaller steps, work with a supportive partner, listening with transcripts etc.
Given the number of questions and requests for copies of the PowerPoint – and one colleague’s immediate request for a talk in his school, I think it is safe to say that a) colleagues are keen to know how to help their dyslexic pupils and to make their learning experience a worthwhile one and b) Alison’s talk was right on the mark.
Astrid McAuliffe
Running and Judging a Modern Language Debating Competition.
(Joutes Oratoires) - Duncan Byrne and John Wilson
Probably the most difficult skill for our pupils to master is speaking. It re-quires a sense of self-belief and a willingness not to worry if utterances are not perfect. Finding situations where language is used for authentic purposes is something most teachers find problematic because we want to create real scenarios: arguments, opinions, persuading and convincing others of one’s point of view. Cue, debating!
One of the sessions in this year’s ISMLA conference took as its theme the running and organising of a MFL Debating Competition. Presented by Duncan Byrne (Deputy Head of Cheltenham College) and John Wilson (HOD of Span-ish Cheadle Hulme School), delegates were first treated to a real-time debate in which four volunteers from City of London School Sixth Form proved just how successful a format such a debate can be.
The subject for debate was ‘Aller en vacances à l’étranger est plus intéres-
sant que de rester dans son propre pays’. Each side put forward its view-point, two minutes allotted per speaker. This was followed by four minutes of ‘lutte acharnée’ or free debate, ending with one minute each in conclusion for each side. Points were awarded at the end by Duncan Byrne and a winning side was declared (and for the record, I agreed with his judgement!) The participants were articulate, passionate and, although the language was not perfect, views were put forward, arguments proposed and countered in a credible and enjoyable fashion.
Duncan and John have had much experience in organising such debates and their enthusiasm was clear. The principles for running them are based on the
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debating rules of the English Speaking Union but with some modifications. For example, timings are much shorter to replicate the experience of oral exams. There are no interruptions to the individual speeches (no ‘points of order’!) and no audience participation.
It is an accessible activity for all, not just the best linguists and can have great benefits not only for those participating but the school, audiences and ultimately the reputation of languages as serious subjects for A level study.
For further information and ideas on running such a competition, readers might wish to consult the ISMLA website where there are useful materials available on the subject of running a debating competition.
Julia Whyte
Language as head-ache: the Linguistics Olympiad grows. - Dick Hud-
son
ISMLA delegates were fortunate to hear Professor Dick Hudson (retired Pro-fessor of Linguistics at University College, London) share his enthusiasm and knowledge of linguistics and this talk served to highlight the tremendous growth in numbers taking the UK Linguistics Olympiad and to entice mem-bers into promoting the various stages of the competition in schools. Indeed, Professor Hudson is passionate about building bridges between academe and secondary schools and it is interesting to note that Olympiad is actually based on a subject that is not officially taught on any exam syllabus in sec-ondary schools. Since Professor Hudson's last address at an ISMLA confer-ence three years ago at Magdalen College School, Oxford, the Linguistics Olympiad has seen the number of participants increase to just less than 3000. Independent schools still make up the largest percentage of pupils taking part, despite the secondary sector having more schools registered.
As ever, the competition contains problems involving language data and the challenge for the pupils is to work out the underlying system. There are three levels of difficulty and this lends itself very well to allowing all pupils a chance to participate. Indeed, last year there were 48 entries from Year 5 and Year 6 pupils. The Foundation and Intermediate levels can be set up according to a school’s needs and pupils can even work in pairs. The Advanced level needs to be run along the same lines as a public exam. Professor Hudson under-lined the importance of taking part in the competitions in the lower years so pupils can naturally build up to the Advanced level tests; these are certainly some of the trickiest brain teasers that one could imagine. Pupils tackle the questions with relish however and are often quicker to spot patterns than adults. The UKLO website has also expanded over the course of the past year and contains lots of information and reference material (including past papers
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and guidance on marking) for teachers.
Professor Hudson thanked ISMLA for its generous financial support and is looking forward to reporting again in a few years’ time on the progress of the competition and on the possibility of a linguistics A level. Delegates continued to be interested and ask questions well into the lunch period. The sign of a captivating subject!
Thomas Underwood
Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes
and the Banality of Evil - Dr Damian Cattani
Those attending the French session on the afternoon of the conference en-joyed a thought-provoking introduction to a controversial modern historical novel considered in terms of the essential banality of evil. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century specialist Dr Damian Catani of Birkbeck, University of Lon-don, delivered a fascinating paper deriving from his most recent book, Evil: A
History in Modern French Literature and Thought, in which he explores the presence of evil in canonical literature such as the work of Baudelaire, Zola and Gide
Les Bienveillantes was published in 2006 by Jonathan Littell, a French-educated American former humanitarian worker, in his adoptive language. Well received by French critics, it won the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française and sold 700,000 copies in the first year. However, as Dr Catani observed, the novel’s 983 pages suggest that true readership was not of the same order as sales. The novel is a fictional autobi-ography recounting the life of a Franco-German SS Officer, Maximilien Aue, whose omnipresence at many key events of the Second World War allows the reader to reflect on the causes and consequences of evil in human behaviour.
Dr Catani invited his audience to consider the novel in the light of Hannah Arendt’s notion that the most appalling evil can be committed by ordinary people in banal settings, the root cause being far less pre-meditated and far more trivial than we usually imagine. This means evil can return very easily, leading Arendt along with other philosophers mentioned by Dr Catani, princi-pally Alain Badiou and Susan Neiman, to call for ethical vigilance rather than waiting apathetically to become passive victims of evil. Although his narrator-protagonist is an extreme and in many respects grotesque character, Littell uses Aue’s involvement in events and encounters with other Nazis to draw the reader’s attention to the flowering of evil from often workmanlike and functional impulses.
One such encounter is with Adolf Eichmann, who sees organising the
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transport of countless Jews east to the death camps as a logistical task to be perfected and his reward the approval of his superiors; with no moral reflec-tion on the results of his work, he would have acted no differently had he been transporting horses. Littell looks to Greek conceptions of morality, where the act and the effect are to be judged, rather than the intentions be-hind them. Evil is something than anyone can generate; it is not the preserve of ideologue or the loose cannon on the margins of society. We want to cate-gorise Eichmann as a genocidal maniac but Littell ensures that we cannot: he is a mediocre man with foibles and motivations similar to our own; we, there-fore, are ensnared as the dangerous ones who could express and pursue evil if the circumstances called for it. Littell rejects the division between victim-hood and perpetration; he proposes, like Badiou, that only pro-active moral watchfulness of our own potential actions can guard against outbreaks of evil, when the disparity between innocuous cause and critical effect is so ca-lamitous.
Alex Frazer
The medieval German 'Chronicle of the Emperors': A major new edi-
torial project in the UK - Dr Mark Chinca and Professor Chris Young
It was a real insight to learn from Dr Mark Chinca and Professor Chris Young from Cambridge University of the project upon which they had recently em-barked – backed by the award of a £950,000 AHRC grant – to create a truly innovative, authoritative edition of a German medieval work whose signifi-cance was undoubted but whose origins and germination still remain a matter of conjecture.
The Kaiserchronik is the first verse chronicle in any European language; it expounds upon the relationship between Church and nation and upon ethnici-ty (among other things) and is a truly broad-canvas piece of work. It offers a unique focus on the Roman Empire which it describes and comments on, and deploys a combination of contemporary historiography, oral history and leg-end in a unique way. The existence and influence of the Kaiserchronik were recognised over the centuries across large swathes of Germany. It was re-worked a number of times to adapt to changing linguistic conventions and to meet the need for prose versions.
However for all that, as Mark Chinca and Chris Young pointed out, our grasp of the work is surprisingly uncertain. This has partly to do with the fact that generations of historians who have discussed the Kaiserchronik have had no philological training. Therefore, Chinca and Young’s work sees the Kai-
serchronik as a crossover text that links literary and historical studies in a particularly interesting way. They intend, over the next few years, to produce
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a digitised critical and historical edition of the Kaiserchronik and are working with scholars in Germany and the United States to that end.
It was intriguing to discover how many unresolved issues remain about the work: who wrote it? where was it written? what were the literary and social networks that knew about it? The Cambridge academics’ talk introduced us to these broad questions but also demonstrated some of the practical work that had had to be done on the manuscript texts. There was much puzzling over the way words had been transcribed and it was interesting to encounter situ-ations where it had become quite obvious that the original scribe had simply made a mistake and written a word that did not exist then and has never done since.
This was a particularly attractive form of literary and linguistic sleuthing, and the proposal was made that the work being done could be introduced, in the form of hands-on workshops, to sixth-formers in schools. The twenty-five or so delegates who attended this talk looked forward to hearing from Mark Chinca and Chris Young to that end. The snapshot introduction to Middle High German that could be afforded by their suggested workshops promised fasci-nating knowledge that could illuminate the German language for our sixth-form students – for example, into the way words were formed and have sub-sequently changed their meanings over the course of centuries.
Professor Chris Young is contactable at [email protected]; I do hope that the Kaiserchronik project results in stimulating enrichment activities in ISMLA schools and elsewhere.
Geoffrey Plow
Out of the Wings - Professor Catherine Boyle
I had begun by asking Professor Boyle of King’s College, London to give us a brief overview of recent cultural and literary developments in Latin-America but gave her free rein to change the title to suit what she would like to talk about. In the event, what she did was challenge our (my) quest for the novel and the curious by suggesting that classical works of Spanish theatre (and the issues presented therein) transcend the epoch in which they were writ-ten. She did so primarily by referring to a project in which she has played a major part: Out of the Wings. This is a website designed to make Hispanic theatre accessible to schools and other interested parties who may not have the time or the inclination to research fully the periods/themes involved. A number of those present commented that they have already found this a useful resource to enliven (the dreaded) topic teaching with extracts from relevant theatre. I highly recommend a visit to www.outofthewings.org.
Jim Houghton
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The Fantastic in Italian Literature - Matthew Reza
As one of the afternoon sessions we were treated to an overview from Mat-thew Reza from Pembroke College, Oxford of a century-and-a-half of fantas-tic literature in Italy from 1870 to 1960.
Tracing the history of the fantastic in Italian literature from Ugo Tarchetti and the Scapigliati through key figures such as Mario Papini. Massimo Bontempelli and Curzo Malaparte, he argued that the fantastic was ephemeral and occa-sional and not a systematic endeavour for Italian writers until the late fascist period with the emergence of Dino Buzzati (Il deserto dei Tartari) and Tom-maso Landolfi. He examined the relationship of the fantastic to futurism and surrealism and how Fascism viewed the fantastic as a distraction from the here and now, an implied criticism of the regime. He went on to stress the importance of the publication of Gianfranco Contini’s Italia magica, an anthol-ogy that engaged with the fantastic in Italian literature for the first time. Then of course came the internationally recognised Italo Calvino who pub-lished in 1960 his trilogy Our Ancestors which unapologetically dealt with the extraordinary, fantastic and improbable. Yet significantly, he was writing at a time, the post-war years, when the portrayal of the real in literature and film was dominant. Matthew’s talk was based on a recently completed DPhil thesis which, judging by the breadth and scope of this talk, deserves a wider audi-ence.
Peter Langdale
‘You can talk’ - Stephen Fawkes
In the final plenary session of the conference, the audience was treated to a masterful session from Steven Fawkes on how to get our students to talk in class – in the target language, of course!
In the first instance, Steven was keen to make a distinction between ‘talking’ and ‘speaking’. The former is what we all want our students to do – respond, as spontaneously as possible, to a wide range of stimuli, whether they be written, spoken or non-verbal. The latter, ‘speaking’, is inexorably tied up with what students have to do in oral examinations. In 2011, OFSTED put it this way: in speaking “too many of the students … were … ‘rote learning’ … and (relied) on written work. Although they generally gained good results, this did not necessarily equate to competence in a language .. “. It was in this context that Steven presented us with lots of ideas on how to get our students to talk.
Anyone familiar with Steven’s presenting style would have known that the
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audience did not have the time or the opportunity to switch off. We learned numbers in Russian in one activity, but with a twist – each number came with a particular gesture. Lots of thinking was needed, leading to considerable amusement! This was followed by an exercise in reading the football results in Russian, all with the correct intonation. And to complement such a wide range of fantastic ideas – as one delegate put it, ‘ideas I can put into practice on Monday morning’ – Steven served up some of his memorable linguistic differences. Here are three of my favourites: from the Philippines ‘the guide
knows England like the hand of his back’; from somewhere in Africa ‘to call
room service, please open the door and call room service’; and from Spain ‘No in the room’! Now there’s something to talk about!
Kevin Dunne
Contributions to the Newsletter
We value all articles, letters or reflections in any form which contribute to enriching the debate about modern language teaching in our schools. Contact the editor, Peter Langdale ([email protected]).
The Reviews Editor, Melvyn Bardou, would be happy to hear from anyone wishing to review books, websites and other teaching materials. Contact him at [email protected] if you would like to help in this way.
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Help needed! What are your perceptions of research? Have you ever
used it? Would you like to?
A group of researchers and teachers at the University of York are trying to find out about language teachers' views about research and evidence, and about any engagement they have with research.
Please spare 15 minutes to complete the survey by visiting the ISMLA web-site (www.ismla.co.uk) where you will find a link on the home page or visit www.iris-database.org and click on the link on the right: "Survey (UK)".
We are interested in knowing about the kinds of research activities that teachers engage in - such as reading about research online, in newsletters or in journals, hearing about it at workshops or conferences, or doing it your-self. We'd also like to know what kind of evidence teachers consider to be important, for example, what tells teachers that something done in the class-room was effective? What kinds of problems do you think research might address? What informs the way we assess learning?
We also want to know what helps teachers to engage with research, and what hinders their involvement, so that we can improve how and what re-search is done, and how it is communicated.
In recent years, national and international research has produced a huge range of fascinating findings, telling us about: how progression in oral pro-duction unfolds over the first few years of learning; the kind of grammar and vocabulary that can be expected after a few hundred hours of exposure and at the end of a university course; how teachers can effectively teach gram-mar using Processing Instruction and certain types of error correction; how teachers and trainees perceive and teach inter-cultural understanding; what drives motivation to continue studying a language; what determines poor motivation; about the early stages of foreign language literacy and sound-spelling mappings; how the language used changes with the type of task being undertaken; how different tests elicit different kinds of language knowledge; what happens to language when learners go to a country where the language is spoken compared to instruction in their home country; what is the effectiveness of certain types of computer assisted language learning packages; how sleep affects the learning new vocabulary; how learning is different at age 7 compared to age 11; the role working memory seems to play in processing language; the effect of bilingualism on memory and lan-guage awareness; what do adolescents really think about foreign language
Teachers, Research and Evidence
A York University Survey to Complete
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classes; how we can train learners to pay attention to bits of the language they seem to ignore...
A considerable amount of public money is spent on this research, but we don't know how much of it reaches those who might actually use it. To what extent are teachers and/or teacher educators in a position to consume, dis-seminate, and use it?
Please circulate the survey link as widely as possible! The more responses we have, the more will can say about how engagement could be improved between research and teachers.
The survey is part of a project funded by the British Association of Applied Linguistics, in collaboration with the Association for Language Learning. The first phase of the project was a teacher-researcher workshop on 14th Febru-ary (in the Department of Education at York) at which delegates planned and designed small projects to carry out in their schools. 30 teachers, teacher educators and advisors attended along with 10 researchers from the Univer-sities of York, Reading, and Southampton. The teachers and researchers worked together in thematic strands: motivation and identity, literacy, gram-mar & vocabulary, primary-secondary transition, ICT. Delegates heard about relevant research, formulated research questions, designed studies, and started to create materials for collecting data. Topics ranged from evaluat-ing an element of practice (such as when is the best time to introduce the written word? how can I teach written grammar to EAL students? what effect does teaching phonics have on spelling?) or gain a better understanding of learners' or teachers' opinions (What is the impact of different interventions on secondary teachers’ perceptions of prior MFL learning? How do attitudes to language learning develop across transition from primary to secondary school?). Participants will produce short reports on their projects over the next year - watch this space!
Dr Emma Marsden, Centre for Language Learning Research, Department of
Education, University of York
For more information, please contact [email protected]
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HISPANIC THEATRE FESTIVAL 2014
The great success of the First Hispanic Theatre Festival has shown that this festival must be an essential annual event in every school’s calendar. For this reason, the Spanish Department of North London Collegiate School (NLCS) would like to invite you to take part again in the Hispanic Theatre Festival 2014.
The Hispanic Theatre Festival 2014 will take place on Thursday 9th October 2014 at the Performing Arts Centre of NLCS at 5.30pm for a 6pm start. The participant schools will be sending their best Year Eleven and Sixth Form stu-dents of Spanish to perform an extract of a play in Spanish (3 to 10 minutes), written by a Hispanic playwright or possibly by the students them-selves.
If you would like to enter your students into a competition that will challenge their linguistic, dramatic and creative talents, please send an email to Xiomara Yerbury ([email protected]) to register your school.
Best Play 2013: Pic-nic, performed by Eton College
(For a brief account of the 2013 festival, see page 26 of the Autumn 2013
edition of this Newsletter).
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This was the title of a talk by Baroness Jean Coussins at the Festival of Ideas held at Cambridge University on 2 November 2013. A former MML graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and indisputably passionate about the val-ue of languages, Baroness Coussins is now a life peer. Currently Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Modern Languages Group and Vice-President of the Chartered Insititute of Linguists, she is well placed to understand the parlous situation in which the UK now finds itself in terms of language skills. She is determined to “ bang the drum” for languages , spearheading a National Lan-guages Recovery Programme, from Primary through to post-graduate re-search, employment and training and to challenge our “cultural and economic monolingual cul-de-sac”. As an aside, she once acted as an interpreter for the widow of President Allende during the Chile Solidarity Campaign in 70s.
The facts speak for themselves.
• 70% of businesses surveyed are not happy with the language skills of potential employees and have to recruit from abroad (only 1 in 10 Britons speak another language).
• 96% of exporters have no language skills for the sectors they serve. The UK has the largest language deficit in the fastest growing markets; busi-nesses with language skills and cultural knowledge could boost their sales by up to 45%.
• 75% of the planet speaks no English. The global explosion in online sales means that if required to order in English, orders are not placed, thus leading to loss of trade.
• A third of businesses in Europe, when questioned, rated languages skills as very important, whereas in the UK only 5% shared the same view.
• It is estimated that the UK is missing out on £21 billion pounds per an-num due to the very low numbers of nationals with knowledge of lan-guages and cultural skills, a significant barrier to growth.
• Numbers of GCSE and A level entries have been in free fall across lan-guages as a result of the decision to make a language GCSE optional and the severe grading issues at both levels. In an OECD survey, our second-ary school pupils spend less time on languages than any other country and were joint bottom alongside Ireland and Estonia. (How many Heads of Department reading this have battled with SLT about time allocation for the teaching of a MFL?)
• Decline is almost exclusively in state sector. Take up at age 14 is 41% in
Parlez-vous Zulu?
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state, 81% in independent, 91% in selective schools. University depart-ments by default are becoming more elitist.
• The withdrawal of OCR Asset languages means loss of opportunity to “professionalise” the mother tongue skills of many young people (Yoruba, Hindi, etc).
Languages will be statutory at KS2 from September but which ones? Where are all teachers going to come from? No systematic recording of progress and attainment means that transition to secondary school is often not well man-aged and many start again from scratch leading to boredom. Many primaries run language awareness programs to encourage interest in general, but is this rigorous enough? (Of note was the announcement that there was an agreement amongst all schools in Hackney Borough that Spanish will be the language taught at KS2 so secondary schools can continue to offer French from scratch, but plan for Spanish to be picked up at the right level).
There has been a drop of 40% since 1998 of specialist language courses at university (tempered with the increase in university language centres where students take languages alongside other courses, and combined honours in a subject plus a language). Three times more French, German and Spanish students take up an Erasmus place than do their UK counterparts. The high cost of HE is possibly deterring students to add to their loans by spending a year abroad; those who do are often considered to be head and shoulders above their peers.
So is it all doom and gloom? There are green shoots of hope we were as-sured!
There are currently several campaigns to increase the profile of language learning in the UK: the Guardian and British Academy have joined forces, there is Speak to the Future, Born Global and the recently launched 1000 word challenge. British Academy research due out this year points to the importance of languages for diplomacy, national security, defence and tack-ling organised crime. Specialist linguists are increasingly needed for public sector interpreting (in law courts, police stations, hospitals) in situations where people's human rights are at stake. Linguists are needed to develop teaching materials (textbooks and online), for subtitling, dubbing, and the translating of websites to support the growth in online shopping. It is esti-mated that the languages industry will be worth 16.5 billion euros by 2015. French and German remain at the top of the wish list for employers, followed by Spanish for Latin America’s emerging economies, Mandarin, Russian and Arabic. Next come Farsi, Hindi, Turkish and Portuguese. Crucially, it is not fluency that is sought, but conversational ability in order to develop relation-ships and create a good impression. Often the tiebreaker at the end of an interview is: how many languages can you work in?
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In a recent and very welcome decision to re-open the Foreign Office language centre, William Hague talked of the need to harness “soft power”, the ability to engage with other cultures outside the EU; working in languages is a fun-damental skill of our diplomats. Three quarters of Foreign Office language training is in Arabic (the fastest growing language on social media platforms due in no small part to the Arab Spring), Russian, French, German, Spanish and Mandarin. We must also not forget that issues such as climate change and the threat of terrorism remind us that research and cooperation have to be international and cross-cultural.
But how do we now move forward? The question and answer session that followed provided some interesting suggestions and questions.
• Languages should be restored as compulsory at KS4, but not necessarily as a GCSE; a language NVQ could be best for some.
• Should languages be planned for like maths, with clear progression and expectations throughout school?
• All universities should require a language for matriculation, like Imperial and UCL (where if applicants do not have a language, they must commit to taking one in 1st year).
• Just like STEM subjects, languages have been identified as SIVS (strategically important and vulnerable subjects) and are being boosted by initiatives such as Routes into Languages.
• Should languages be assessed like music, with progression through grad-ed exams? (Some of us with very long memories will remember Graded tests and the Languages ladder!)
On the back of the Severe Grading issue and Ofqual’s promise to do some-thing about this, Baroness Coussins is campaigning for an equitable marking system for 2014 exams.
So, all in all, a very worthwhile talk to attend if only because it certainly ap-pears that the good work of many (including ISMLA) seems to be at last bearing fruit at the highest level. But why was Zulu included in the title? This is a reference to an (unidentified and obviously enlightened) head of an independent school who introduced a dynamic new programme prior to GCSE choices, where pupils did one term each of Dutch, Vietnamese and Zulu (the languages chosen by continent and for being unusual). Pupils have been so fascinated by dipping into these cultures, they have been more inclined to take up a language at GCSE.
Julia Whyte and Helena Matthews
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Northern Schools' MFL Debating Competition
Cheadle Hulme School, 14th November, 2013
It was the seventh year for our Northern School´s Debating Competition at Cheadle Hulme School and it was certainly bigger than ever.
We look to make improvements each year, learning from the valuable feed-back from our visiting schools. Last year the big development was for there to be an unseen title for the finals. This year three main changes were made: we switched the competition from a Saturday morning to a Thursday even-ing, we clamped down on competitors reading from scripted notes and we received sponsorship from three organisations, including generous support from ISMLA.
Sanako kindly agreed to sponsor the newly purchased winners' trophies. The University of Manchester brought academic representatives for French, Ger-man and Spanish and were able to share information with the students about languages at university level. The academics also provided fantastic impartial adjudicators for several of the debates.
Nine schools attended for the German competition, fourteen for Spanish and sixteen for French. Once more, the standard of debating grew with the four debating titles, released previously, being 1. "Prisons are a waste of time and money", 2. "We don´t need paper anymore", 3. "Environmental protests make sense" and 4. "Dogs are better than cats". The unseen topic for the final was "We should go on holiday in our own country." Three different schools went away with the trophies for the three respective languages. QEGS, Blackburn won the Spanish competition; Altrincham Boys' Grammar School the French and Stockport Grammar School the German. The hosts are desperate to get one of the trophies back next year.
The greatest satisfaction is seeing the development in confidence of the young men and women during the course of the competition. They tend to arrive like a "a bag of nerves" but they soon start surprising themselves and often their teachers through the language they are able to produce.
Given the size of this competition now, the organisation is a large undertak-ing and there are so many hidden benefits to be exploited.
If any schools are interested in taking part next year, they can contact me for further information. Despite the name of the competition, we are very happy to welcome schools from below the Watford Gap too!
John Wilson
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We were delighted to be able to come once again to Goethe-Institut London to hold the second ISMLA German Day on 16th November. 2013. Thanks are due to Karl Pfeiffer and all the staff there.
Our aim was to provide a conference which would entertain both the day-to-day needs of classroom teachers of German and the future aspirations of their pupils. Thanks to the contributions of the speakers on the day, we felt that this was achieved with élan (perhaps Begeisterung might be a better word under the circumstances).
Karl Pfeiffer mapped out what the Goethe-Institut had to offer digitally to teachers. It was remarkable for some of us who thought we knew about these things to discover the extent of the user-friendly rich-es now available – for example on the http://
aufdeutsch.co.uk site, with its video accounts of young people’s lives and the rolling German tran-scripts viewers can access as they watch. This has potential for remarkably versatile use in teaching and learning.
Sabine Uibel, also from Goethe-Institut London, showed us clips from three recent German films – Almanya, Der ganz große Traum and Barbara – and indicated how these might be used in class.
Owen Evans then offered an overarching and coherent account of the way German film has, since the Second World War, treated the country’s own past. He dealt in particular with German film-makers’ handling since 2000 of the question of history. He explored different ways in which the Third Reich and the GDR have been portrayed by German cinema in this period. The ac-count Owen proposed was informed both by his knowledge of German culture (he was originally a lecturer in German at Bangor and then at Swansea) and his specialisation in film (Owen is currently Professor of Film in the Media Department at Edge Hill University). This allowed us to capture an overview of a topic which teachers are accustomed to seeing only piecemeal.
In the afternoon, Áine McMurtry from the German Department at King’s Col-lege London outlined to us how undergraduates studying German were faring in their pursuit of work after their degree. A hopeful picture emerged, in-formed and sharpened by Baroness Coussins’ statement in the House of Lords in 2012 that ‘over 70% of UK employers say that they are not happy with the language skills of UK graduates and are being forced increasingly to recruit from overseas to meet their needs’.
The ISMLA German Day
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Alex Pickering, who works closely with the Goethe-Institut London, was able to contribute data and well-informed inspiration calculated to enable us to influence school management teams as to the importance of German. He was especially enthusiastic about the creation of regional German teacher forums and clusters so as to take this one step further. It is in keeping with Áine McMurtry’s talk that he should have championed this. King’s College London German Department has recently launched a focus group for German teach-ers from a range of schools in and around London so as to further the discus-sion of a number of issues facing the teaching of German at school and uni-versity (contact Sarah Bowden at King’s for details: sa-
Finally, Thomas Reimann’s talk Quo vadis Deutschland? Relevantes und In-
teressantes aus Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur im Deutschland des Jahres
2013 explained it all in the title. He talked to us about new German words, the voting patterns of the German nation, an analysis of the German mood ('zwischen German Angst und German Selbstbewusstsein', as Thomas put it), the question of the Mindestlohn and much, much more. It was hugely illumi-nating and entertaining, and it included Thomas‘ recommendation of www.tivi.de/fernsehen/logo/start/ as the essential place to go for German video clips to use in class.
60-odd delegates attended this event and we like to feel that they went away stimulated and informed (that’s what they said, anyway). We look forward to repeating the exercise before too long.
Geoffrey Plow & Astrid McAuliffe
From the Oxford German Project
Germanists among you may already have signed up to our initiative “Joining up German Teaching in the UK”. If not, we hope you’ll want to do so, go to : www.ogn.ox.ac.uk/german-survey or just send your contact details to this address: [email protected]. We hope you agree that it’ is valuable to strengthen the exchange of ideas and information across the tertiary, secondary and primary sectors at this important time for modern languages. Please also pass this message on to German teachers in your school or elsewhere.
The deadline for this year's Oxford German Olympiad is approaching fast (17 March 2014). Pease encourage your pupils to participate. You can find more details at www.ogn.ox.ac.uk/oxford-german-olympiad-2014
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GCSE FRENCH/SPANISH/ GERMAN CONFERENCE ON IMPROVING
EXAM RESULTS. IN-SCHOOL.
A former Chief Examiner and Head of Languages with 28 years' teaching
experience will come to your school and deliver a session or sessions to your
students: sessions specifically tailored to your needs.
Speaking and Writing
• Students are shown a video clip (subtitled in TL and English) of a student performing at grade D in speaking.
• Then they will be given 10 rules to take the performance up to grade C followed by a subtitled video of these rules being implemented.
• This process is followed moving through the grades from D to A*
• The same process for Writing
Listening and Reading
Hands-on listening and reading tasks with advice on how to improve.
Language-orientated sketches (optional) in conjunction with one of the UK's leading professional comedy groups who perform entertaining and en-gaging sketches. Short plays in the TL. Short subtitled films. Video montage. A talent competition. Songs and music.
Contact
Terry Murray
www.terrymurray.co.uk
01299 871600
∗ You choose which skills to focus on.
∗ Flexibility around content and duration (one hour per language to a full day per language).
∗ Neighbouring schools can be invited at no extra charge.
∗ Student participation and interactive activities throughout.
∗ Cost: from £500.
"I had my Yr 11s today and they were raving about the session with you. We should definitely do this again with Yr11s next year!”
"Ante todo quisiera darte las gracias por el curso al que asistí ayer. Fue excelente, fenomal, fantástico, extraor-dinario, maravilloso, soberbio, increíble y rocambolesco"
"My students are more likely to take advice from outsiders!"
"Having your support was invalua-ble to achieve such good results. We got 77% when the school was happy for us to achieve 38%. Can’t thank you enough.”
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Six School Lower 6th French Conference
EDINBURGH
Friday 8th November 2013
Sixty three Lower Sixth boys and girls studying French at Fettes College, Glenalmond College, Loretto School, Merchiston Castle School, Stewart’s Melville College and Strathallan School gathered at Merchiston Castle School for their annual conference. The day was divided into a series of five workshops or activities followed but a talk.
The first activity was an icebreaker which went down a storm: Speed Da-ting. The students then went from one workshop to the next which were all based on pair work: picture game, film workshop, running dictation and word game. The workshops were 30 minutes long, and there was a bit of a buzz in each of them. Some members of staff actually joined in at times in order to have first-hand experience of the day. Break and lunch were noisy affairs and gave all the participants the opportunity to revert to English and socialise.
The last part of the conference was a talk given by a speaker from GCHQ. Working alongside MI5 and MI6, and given what goes on in the world in terms of terrorism and general international criminality, GCHQ has an acute need of good linguists. The students got an overview of what it might be like working for GCHQ in Cheltenham.
The conference came to a close shortly after 2pm. The participants had interacted with complete strangers in a foreign language throughout the morning, and had found themselves considering working for an intelligence agency using foreign languages… not a bad way to spend a few hours for linguists!
Hélène Gray, Merchiston Castle School
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Edexcel Spanish for A-Level. Mike Thacker and Monica Morcillo. (Hodder Education)
This is largely an up-dated, online version of the very popular and challeng-ing Ponte al Día textbook for the previous specification. In fact, many of the resources , especially the listening files, have considerable overlap so if you do still have a copy of the old Ponte to hand, hang on to it!
The structure of the book is confusing when compared to the examination specification as it separates themes into AS and A2 incorrectly as the themes remain the same across both levels. This can be off-putting to teachers and could, were someone unable to look at the spec., potentially lead to half the course not being taught at AS Level. It would benefit from being re-structured so that the AS and A2 courses are discreet, and then having the relevant activities tailored to each course.
In terms of content, the Edexcel book contains a wide variety of exercises with lexis that will both support weaker students whilst containing sufficient extension activities to challenge the brighter linguists. There is a slight over-reliance on reading activities and it would be valuable for students following the course through this book to be exposed to more material on translation and grammar. Overall, I have still found that using it necessitates the pro-duction of extra resources on the part of the teacher as it does not always provide sufficient revision resources of GCSE vocabulary prior to launching into a more complicated text. Similarly, creating more online resources that are not simply reading and listening exercises would be a way in which the publishers could develop this resource and make it more relevant at A2 (as there is no listening component).
Daniella Mardell
Reviews
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Cambridge IGCSE and International Certificate Spanish For-
eign Language. Jacqueline López-Cascante and Judith O’Hare.
(Hodder Education)
Keen as I am not to have my teaching dictated by a course book, I was very excited to discover that a book had been published to accompany the CIE IGCSE Course for Spanish. However, at first glance this book looked very familiar. I kept saying “I’ve seen that before somewhere.” I reached for my Mola and my suspicions were confirmed. It is pretty much exactly the same book. The only difference being a more streamlined front cover, a useful list of examination topic areas on the inside cover, information about the four components of the CIE Examination in its new format for 2015 onwards, and a useful “Exam Corner” feature at the end of each of the five “Módulos” which, pleasingly, gives example questions in the new format and some con-sidered tips on successful exam technique.
At first I felt a little aggrieved at the similarity with Mola but soon this turned to reassurance that I had chosen well with Mola two years earlier when I was entering my students for CIE IGCSE for the first time. So, I think that Hodder deserves credit for acknowledging that Mola was not broken and channelling its proven success. As far as course books go, this is very good and it will make sense for us to switch from Mola next year, as it has all the benefits of Mola plus the added exam-specific information.
We will look to use this as a supplementary resource for our IGCSE students but it could also be used for beginners if the beginners were high-achieving linguists on a fast-track course.
John Wilson
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Zoom español, Isabel Alonso de Sudea, María Isabel Isern Vivancos
and Abigail Hardwick. (OUP)
The books are clearly laid-out and have a good spread of different activities with instructions in the target language. Zoom 2 acts are revision and exten-sion of the majority of topics covered in Zoom 1 and prepares students for GCSE themes. However, it would benefit the learner to have the instructions in the accompanying workbooks written in Spanish rather than in English, as is currently the case. My particular gripe is with the Zoom 2 textbook as learners definitely should be able to read instructions in Spanish at this stage.
Within the texts, the use of bold text to emphasise structures is useful, but it can lead students to the answers a little too easily when they are asked to pluck translations/equivalent phrases from the text. Native-speaker videos are a commendable idea and provide learners with a more stimulating expe-rience than they acquire from audio alone. Grammar teaching, however, re-mains a problem as concepts are introduced almost as an ‘aside’, in the form of a rule in a little green box. Insufficient time and space are given over the practice of forming such constructions which are, after all, the building blocks of language learning.
The workbooks: Although I like the fact that they contain listening exercis-es, I frequently use a workbook as a resource from which to set homework and this can prove difficult when students are unable to access aural re-sources (for whatever reason). The layout is well thought-through as it uses a relatively large font and does not try to daunt the learner by filling each page with too many cramped activities. That said, it would benefit from con-taining some more differentiated activities in order to support weaker learn-ers and/or challenge the more able.
Daniella Mardell
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Zoom Deutsch Corinna Schicker,Marcus Waltl and Chalin Malz. (OUP)
We are extremely happy with Zoom Deutsch as a KS3 text book .
The language is authentic and challenging and allows pupils to develop their own idiosyncratic vocabulary rather than everyone learning the same words. In particular, the Oxbox videos provide excellent exposure to natural German spoken by young Germans in real-life settings.
The motivation that bright pupils derive from being able to follow these con-versations is tremendous.
The grammar is dealt with thoroughly, in particular by the Sprachlabor sec-tion at the back of each chapter. The accusative and dative cases are met early on, so pupils become accustomed straightaway to the concept of case in the German language, so it is not saved up as a nasty surprise for later. The book is thoughtfully and attractively laid out and there is good extension for more able pupils in the form of the Extra Star/Plus sections at the end of each chapter, as well as the reading revision exercises at the end of the book.
I like the idea of devoting each double page to two rather than four skills. I would say that the book is conservative in terms of the amount of vocabulary covered on each topic e.g. furniture, food – we find that this needs supple-menting. We wuld also welcome some form of modern versions of flashcards to present new vocabulary. The idea of a grammar book (rather than just a “workbook”) is also appealing.
Duncan Peel
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¡Viva! Libro 1. Anneli McLachlan (Pearson Education)
Given that there are so many new beginner’s Spanish course books available for Year 7/8 pupils, including Pearson’s own ¡Mira! which is relatively recent, it is surprising to find yet another course book for KS3. Pearson have pub-lished ¡Viva! on the back of the success of the equivalent French course Stu-
dio. Book 1 one is the first of a series of three books aimed at Years 7, 8 and 9, (books 2 and 3 have yet to be released) and is accompanied by the usual workbook and interactive package.
If you are familiar with ¡Listos! or ¡Mira!, ¡Viva! does offer something differ-ent. There are five units instead of 6, which makes it easier to complete the book in a year (you won’t have to rush that final unit 6!) and the introductory unit 1 already gets the pupils to talk about personality, family and pets as well as the standard greetings. What I also like about this book is that at the end of each chapter there is an original extension/project idea which offers some cultural input linked with the topic, such as endangered animals, edu-cation in Central America, Hispanic art and festivals.
¡Viva 1! would be an ideal beginner’s course book in a 13+ school such as ours, where pupils start Spanish in Year 9, but it would also be ideal for teachers whose Year 7 or 8 pupils make quick progress and need an extra challenge.
Melvyn Bardou
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