Introduction

In the last ten days, I have delivered a few workshops in a number of secondary schools around England, which focused on Listening, Grammar, Spontaneous speaking and Vocabulary instruction.

As usual, in order to gauge the 220 participants’ expectations and find out about their professional context and previous professional development experiences, I sent them an online survey which 210 of them completed.

In this post, I will share the most interesting data I obtained from the survey, as I believe the common trends I have identified in the delegates’ responses may help colleagues who run CPD (continuous professional development) in the MFL field select and/or conduct courses more effectively.

The participants

The sample included 210 secondary and primary MFL teachers from the private (55 %) and public sector (45 %) whose average teaching experience was 12 years.

The questions

The survey included two sets of questions. The first set elicited biographic data, the second included the following (mostly open-ended) questions:

1. Why are you attending this workshop?
2. What are the areas of your MFL teaching expertise that you are less confident in?
3. How much has previous CPD (continuous professional development) from external providers enhanced your practice?
4. What disappointed you the most about the CPD events you attended in the past?
5. What did you enjoy the most about CPD events you attended in the past?
6. Which of the following areas interests you the most: Vocabulary instruction, Listening instruction, Grammar instruction, Spontaneous speaking instruction?
7. Which of the four language skills do you feel you neglect in your typical lesson?

The responses

Question 1 – why are you attending the workshop?

This question elicited the widest range of responses although two common trends were particularly obvious. Whilst 38 % of the teachers decided to attend my workshops because they had either read ‘The Language Teacher Toolkit’ and/or my blog, another 42 % stated that their main rationale was to obtain new ideas, 20% of them adding that they wanted ‘research-based’ ideas. 12% of the sample kind of echoed the same aspirations by stating they were seeking to ‘revitilise’ their teaching and to be inspired.

This is interesting in the light of two sets of answers I obtained to question 5 (What disappointed you the most about the CPD events you attended in the past?); one set referring to the sense that previous CPD events had proposed nothing new, the other conveying frustration at lack of inspiration due in some cases to a narrow focus on assessment.

Question 2 – What are the areas of your MFL expertise that you are less confident in?

This is the question with the least degree of variance, 80 % of the respondents stating that Listening was the area of their teaching expertise they felt less confident in. It should be noted that 40 % of the same respondents who flagged Listening as their weakest area included ‘speaking’ or ‘spontaneous speaking’ in their answer. What is particularly interesting about this finding is that Listening was also the skill that the vast majority of the respondents felt they neglected the most in their teaching.

Question 3 – How much has previous CPD  (continuous professional development) from external providers enhanced your practice?

This question required the respondents to choose a number from 1 to 5, one being ‘very little’ and 5 ‘massively’. The mean score was 3, which, although indicates an overall positive trend, still points to 40% dissatisfaction with CPD. This, in light of the high cost of many CPD events for schools (cover + course fees) is a cause for concern.

Question 4 – What disappointed you the most about CPD events you attended in the past?

Evidently, this was the question that I was most interested in, in the run-up to my own workshops and is a question that I recommend all CPD providers ask delegates prior to their events. The answers I obtained were extremely useful. Three main trends could be identified.

Firstly, 71 % of the respondents pointed to the lack of practical ideas that could be applied to their teaching context (20 % of them stating that the CPD was too theoretical).

Secondly, 18 % said that there was lots of ‘waffle’ or ‘talking’ but not much valuable content.

Thirdly, 9 % described CPD as ‘boring’, ‘uninspiring’, ‘lacking engagement’ or ‘lacking pace’.

Question 5 – What did you enjoy the most about past CPD events?

71 % answered that they liked new practical usable ideas whilst most of the remainder (22 %) stated that they enjoyed practice-sharing and networking  with colleagues from other schools.

Question 6 – Which of the following areas interest you the most: Vocabulary instruction, Listening instruction, Grammar instruction, Spontaneous speaking instruction?

41 % of the respondents selected Spontaneous Speaking as their main interest, 39 % Listening, 14 % Grammar and 6 % Vocabulary. This is very interesting as CPD in the area of spontaneous speaking is the one which, based on feedback received by my readers and on my own experience, is also the least frequent and effective.

Question 7 – Which of the four skills do you neglect the most?

Speaking and Listening came top of the list, chosen by 41 and 39% of the respondents, whilst 10 % said they did not neglect any of them and 6 and 4 % respectively neglected reading and writing. In other words, they reported avoiding teaching the very skills they felt less confident teaching and, arguably, the most important in real-life communication!

Concluding remarks

This sample is not necessarily representative of the whole MFL teachers’ population in England. However, if it indeed were, there are important lessons to be learnt from the data my survey gathered.

1.More emphasis on Listening and Speaking

The most important lesson in my opinion pertains to the two areas MFL teachers feel least confident teaching and appear to neglect the most in their daily practice: Listening and Speaking, especially ‘Spontaneous speaking’. Hence, more CPD in these two areas is needed, especially considering the emphasis the new GCSE specification places on oral spontaneity. Based on the questions and reactions I got during my workshops, when tackling the issue of speaking spontaneity and listening, many teachers do not seem to have a methodological framework on how to approach these two major areas of MFL teaching and learning – especially Listening.

Moreover, Heads of departments and course administrators may have to emphasize the collective focus of their teams on these two areas. This can be done by devoting department meetings to reading research (e.g. specialist blogs), practice-sharing and reflection on how to best teach these skills. In my school, these three professional development strategies have yielded significant positive results.

2. More practical teaching strategies informed by research

Another important set of data relates to what the teachers do not enjoy about CPD. I queried those data when I actually met the teachers in person to find out more about the dislike of theory that they voiced in the survey. What many of them said was that they did not mind references to theory and research as far as by the end of the workshops(s) they had something new and practical they could implement in their lessons the next day. They reported that this happened rarely and that often, whilst the theories or approaches presented may have differed from what they had heard in the past, the tasks or resources the CPD providers presented were nothing new.

Many of the participants complained about the fact that often CPD providers’ suggestions are based more on their own hunches, personal experiences and fads than on current research. It was apparent during my workshops that there is a growing demand amongst classroom practitioners these days for research-based teaching and learning strategies.

3. The need for inspiration and innovation

What was evident from the survey data and my conversations with many of the teachers at my workshops was a frustration with CPD providers that kept recycling and/or repackaging the old. They wanted to be ‘inspired’ and to get new ideas to inject in their teaching but they said that they had not really got much of that recently.

The need for ‘Inspiration’ was a common thread in most of my respondents’ comments and in my conversations with the delegates at my workshops. Our profession is more than ever in need of inspiration and this is unlikely to come from ‘consultants’ who are not currently teaching, as they lack credibility – how can they fully empathise with the challenges that the ordinary classroom practitioner faces in the classroom? This is a point that many teachers raised in my workshops.

4. Collaborative learning a must

It is apparent that many MFL teachers want to know what works well in other schools, especially in the areas they are less confident in. What was most apparent was that many teachers were very worried about the new GCSE specification and wanted to know what their colleagues from other schools were doing. However, many of them complained that that did not happen in many CPD events. For reasons of coverage, I too did little of that in my own workshops this time around. CPD providers and course administrators may have to be mindful of that and create opportunities for attendees of different institutions to share practice, especially in the areas that seem to concern them the most.

5. More neuroscience

Something that emerged from my conversations with several teachers in my workshops was their fascination with how we acquire and process languages. Many delegates came to me at the end of my workshops to comment on how useful and eye-opening it was to understand the challenges that language learning poses to our students from a cognitive perspective. CPD providers should ground their practical suggestions as much as possible in neuroscience so as to (1) provide a stronger rationale for their approaches and techniques and (2) help develop creators of knowledge rather than passive consumers of it.