French is not that hard after all- by Sonja Fedrizzi

When your S2 (year 8) students keep asking you to play yet another round of “Mind Reader”, “Trap Door” or “Sentence Stealer”, you know as a Modern Languages teacher, you are onto something. In my case, it has been the gradual introduction of Gianfranco Conti’s pedagogical framework called “MARS EARS”. The reason I say gradual is because sustainable changes to one’s teaching methods such as Conti’s do not happen overnight. They require thorough planning, the creation of resources and time to reflect on your progress. Luckily, I could rely on the generosity of other language teachers, who shared their knowledge and resources through social media to get me off to a good start.

We’ve all faced this problem, no matter which set (ability level) you teach, there will always be students in whom it seems particularly difficult to ignite the “language spark”. Statements like “it’s too hard” and “I will never speak the language fluently” are all too common. As a consequence, engagement in the class will be mixed. The stop-start nature of school, and frequent absences due to the Covid-19 pandemic only made this worse throughout 2020. These difficulties prompted me to go “full Conti” for the first time this year for some of my classes, starting with a lower-set S2 French class. I’ve long been using specific Conti activities, and they have been received well by all levels of students. This year, however, I experienced the full range of benefits of Conti’s method in particular for ‘levelling up’ lower ability students. I started my journey by delivering a first unit according to The MARS EARS cycle, which I would like to outline here.

MODELLING: With all of the Covid-19 restrictions in place, modelling sounds through sentence builders and tasks like “Faulty Echo” and the “Mind Reading” activity presented me with the first hurdle. Wearing a mask when modelling new chunks of language is almost impossible, which is why a solution had to be found quickly. I opted for video recordings of myself that I would then show in class to my students. My class took well to that and showed great readiness to copy new sounds. As neither choral speaking nor singing was an option due to Covid-19 guidelines, my students recorded themselves at home either on their phones or using the in-built recording function in Microsoft’s ClassNotebook. I subsequently gave them feedback through voice-recordings, using the app https://vocaroo.com/, modelling the sounds correctly that they mispronounced. It took a while to overcome the digital hurdles, but it was worth it.

AWARENESS RAISING: Moving into the stage of awareness raising felt natural and was, quite frankly, a lot of fun. Making sounds in a foreign language can be daunting and uncomfortable for many learners. Losing face in front of peers can become a huge obstacle when trying out new sounds. I therefore included activities where students could record themselves at home speaking in funny voices, for example in the voice of a robot or a mouse. In hindsight, I believe that the stage of awareness raising helped me bond the most with my students. They shared their thoughts on different varieties of English, taught me a number of local expressions I hadn’t come across before and readily engaged in phonics activities. We had lots of chats and the fact that they could share their expertise with me seemed to really empower them. 

RECEPTIVE PROCESSING: During this phase, also called the LAM/RAM phase, I included a set of Conti classics in almost every lesson: “Listening slalom”, “Sentence Stealers” and “Spot the differences”. I made sure not to overload my students with unknown sounds and was consciously sticking to the recommendation of having 98% comprehensible input. Reading texts and looking for mistakes in their L1 did at times prove more difficult, which was certainly due to low literacy skills in their L1. However, being able to spot mistakes in English and getting praised for their achievements gave many of my students a huge boost in their self-esteem, which in turn, made them keener to have a go the next time.

STRUCTURED PRODUCTION: The “pushed-output” phase was perhaps the trickiest to get right, but it ended up having a huge payoff. I was somewhat doubtful of making my students produce the target language, even if heavily structured. Would they cope, would they disengage? They didn’t. Thanks to popular games such as “Trapdoor”, “Speaking Ladders” and “Sentence Chaos” students were able to gradually be weaned off their sentence builders and started saying chunks of French. By that point, I realised that their self-efficacy had increased, and they were thus more willing to give it a go.

EXPANSION:  This phase had another few surprises in store for me. A grammar lesson with students with below average literacy skills in their L1 seemed risky business as I knew I would not be able to hold their attention for long. Eventually, I decided to let them discover the rules of the “l’article partitif” by exposing them to a number of different shopping scenes yet always including the same structures. When a few students started drawing their own conclusions, asking me “So Miss, so does that mean that when the food item is feminine you have to say, ‘de la’?”, I knew that my deductive approach had worked.

AUTONOMY, ROUTINISATION AND SPONTANEITY: These stages,which include a variety of un-scaffolded speaking activities, such as “Speed-Dating”, “Pyramid Translation” and the “Market Place” (which we played on https://whiteboard.fi/ ), followed. There came a point where my students started experimenting with chunks of the language. Not all of them at first but once the more reluctant learners saw how rewarding it was to “show off” their knowledge of French in a quickfire translation (on the app https://spiral.ac/ ) more and more of them engaged. My highlight was definitely a comment by a dyslexic student. After yet another “Mosaic Reading Translation”, he called out “Miss, French is not that hard after all”.

Ultimately, all my students passed their oral assessment. Two of them asked to redo their speaking assessment as they felt they could do better, which they eventually did. For me, this was a huge breakthrough as their self-efficacy and self-esteem had clearly improved. I do not know if my students will ever need their acquired French in a real-life context. What I do know though is that the implementation of MARS EARS with the focus on LAM (and RAM) through lexicogrammar, gave them the confidence to try something that they had written off as being too difficult.

I am convinced that through the continuous recycling of sentence builders, my lower-set French class built up the confidence to engage in activities as they did not feel overwhelmed by endless lists of vocabulary and tasks, they were not yet ready for. Most importantly though, I know that the Conti-method combined with my own ideas of delivering them using a range of modern digital tools has given my students a sense of achievement and the motivation to apply themselves to task that had seemed “too hard”.

Sonja has been an MFL teacher for thirteen years, teaching all levels of French, Spanish, German and EAL in Austria, Australia and now Edinburgh, Scotland. Responding to the pandemic’s challenges, Sonja has enthusiastically researched, applied, and shared, a range of digital-age teaching resources that align with the Conti method. 

Introduction

Melbourne-based French-Australian Chloe Brian, Head of Languages at the prestigious Methodist Ladies College (Melbourne) writes about how she overhauled her curriculum design based on the MARS’EARS pedagogical framework. This is a sequel to a blog post she published on The Language Gym last May.

The Conti effect on curriculum design

Following on from my previous article for the Language Gym on our department’s “journey into Contification” (22/05/2020), I was delighted to be asked to write the sequel account of our step by step approach and adoption of his work into our curriculum design. With this new post, I aim to go through our process, and share our findings at every stage. I hope that by providing you with those specifics details, you will find some inspiration to infuse your own teaching with MARS’ EARS; from experience, and as I have mentioned before, I can assure you this has been nothing short of a revolution.

Right after we began our work with Dr Conti back in 2018, we decided to examine our existing schemes of work in detail, our textbooks, and our sequences for learning, starting with Year 7. Having engineered a dual language carousel system for Year 7, and consequently, a reduction of time allocation per language, we saw the perfect opportunity to put our syllabus under the microscope and carefully examine our pedagogy. One key element that had resonated with us during our first workshop with Gianfranco was the prevalent lack of recycling opportunities for students. This had been highlighted to us all during a department meeting where we had gone through the exercise of writing on sugar paper our Schemes of Work for every year level from Year 7 onwards for every language: seeing before our eyes the amount of content and grammar we were asking our students to cover each year was not only enlightening, but confronting too. It became apparent that we rarely revisited any item of language, did not do enough consolidation from one unit to the next, and bombarded our students with long lists of vocabulary, mostly in discrete item formats, with no chunking or communicative purpose other than their connection to the topic taught.

This was our starting point. In our language teams, we decided to start with the communicative functions we wanted our Year 7 students to develop a mastery of, bearing in mind the ones which would form a strong foundation for Year 8 communicative functions’ development. As a side note, it was also important for us to have common communicative functions across our 3 languages: French, Chinese and Japanese. Those universals, as Gianfranco calls them, underpin everything our students do in class now. As a result of this sharper focus, we managed to weave in recycling opportunities in every lesson, and throughout entire units of work, giving students the chance to become highly proficient in those functions over time. This was our new mantra: less is more.

Going back to design, the second phase was the creation of Knowledge Organisers, or Sentence Builders, which supported the development of those communicative functions. We put them together for each unit, and they served as the framework for the only language to be practised in class, through a careful and highly curated sequence of tasks which follow the MARS’ EARS sequence. In our beginner classes for Year 7, we spend more time on those early stages in order to develop transferring skills across contexts and enable students to commit their language to long-term memory. The LAM phase is crucial in building students’ confidence, and very soon, we started to see the effect of our new teaching routines through student participation and engagement. With that momentum in place, students (even the most hesitant ones) could then tackle the thorough processing and structured production without any apprehension. This is where we started to see very early on the transformative impact of this way of teaching a second language. Among staff and student favourites are, in no particular order: chorus repetition, finish my sentence, read my mind, dictation and delayed dictation on mini whiteboards, one pen one die, narrow reading, narrow listening, sentence stealers, oral ping-pong, no snakes no ladders, and of course, sentence chaos. The fascinating thing is that as students became familiar with those tasks and thoroughly enjoyed the dynamic nature of class, they started mentioning how this was supporting their language acquisition. We had reached a stage where students were reflecting actively on their own thinking, processing and learning. We share our learning intentions and success criteria at the start of every class, and through their participation in those tasks, they started to connect the dots and comment on how they were developing as second language speakers. Finally, we were seeing all students consistently engaged and excited, because they were feeling successful with their own learning.

The next phase of our curriculum design was rethinking our use of technology so that it would support our pedagogy and significantly enhance learning. We needed it to serve our purpose, not the other way around. We selected a range of tools specifically aligned with each point in our teaching, in direct correlation with the various phases of MARS’ EARS. Incidentally, we also wanted to get better at collecting formative assessment data and ensure we could do that in an easy and manageable manner. The following are some of the tools we find most useful: Education Perfect, Immerse Me, Flipgrid, Kahoot, Quizlet, Anki, and Language Gym. Each of these serves a specific purpose and is aligned with what we teach, when we teach it. For instance, we tend to use Kahoot and Quizlet after the thorough processing phase in order to check for understanding, we also use Flipgrid in the structured production phase and check for spoken precision and sentence structure. Language Gym reinforces our scaffolding our activities at any stage of the learning sequence. As a side note, I do not, by any means, want to imply that these tools are the ones you should necessarily use with your students. This is very much about individual schools, teachers, and contexts, or in other words, what works for you and your students. By using each one with a highly specific purpose in mind, we reinforce each segment of our units of work, and we consolidate the whole process. I should add that this year, remote learning has pushed us further in every aspect of teaching, but particularly with technology. Those extreme circumstances demanded that, like we did with our curriculum, we considered using technology with a heightened sense of purpose, almost with a laser cut approach. There was no more room for the non-essential. If it did not directly contribute to high impact learning and student progress, we did away with it. This reinforced that some of the changes we had made were the right decision, and it clarified the absolute necessity for technology to be an instrument of highly successful learning at all times. Again, and more than ever, less is actually far more. 

Finally, the last phase in the sequence takes place when we reach autonomy and expansion, after most of our time has been spent on building up the previous phases. This last section becomes more integral and prominent as students progress in their learning, and already within the course of Year 7, we can see a progressive shift in the time spent on the early stages of MARS’ EARS, when we can progress faster through to routinization. The scaffolding eases off, and the training wheels come off faster too. This is not only the case because they become more proficient, but also because they trust the process and their ability to learn, and therefore, they take on more risks without fear of failing. They become more creative, and love discovering that about themselves.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, I cannot recommend taking on this journey highly enough, and here are some of the considerations that we are keeping in mind at this time: we have seen a tremendous change in our students’ engagement and participation rates in class. We are regularly receiving very positive feedback from students and parents about what is happening in our classes, which is wonderfully affirming. We will keep a close eye on our Middle School and Senior School language numbers, which will be a strong indicator of how students have connected to their language learning journey. Our staff have worked incredibly hard in order to break free from the mould and carve a new path to learning a language. Our purpose was to empower our students and to give justice to their potential as future language speakers, which required a huge change embraced by all parties. I am incredibly lucky to be surrounded by such passionate and committed teachers, who have poured every effort into this curriculum overhaul, and I thank them all so much for the amazing work they have undertaken. This is teamwork at its best, and whilst there is no perfect way, this sure does feel like we have contributed to something much bigger than us in this journey of exploration and discovery. When one lets go of the need to be perfect, magic happens.

Another instalment, in our series of posts in which language educators from around the globe share their experiences with aspects of my language teaching approach. This time around I thought of sharing two posts rather than one, because the teachers who authored them, Vicki and Mike, showcase two very different pproaches to incorporating EPI or elements of it in their teaching practice, both very interesting in their own right. Although quite divergent in many ways, they converge on the same core principles which I swear by and constitute the pillars of EPI. Two brilliant posts, as inspirational as and fascinating and the previous ones by Julia, Chloe and Heather. Enjoy.

Post 1: Vicki Brownlee (Head of Languages @ Howden School, East Riding, England)

When I discovered your work I had been using what I described as ‘chunking’ along with LAM (only I didn’t give it a name) for just short of 10 years but I had only used it with one type of pupil – the lowest ability – the pupils, who in year 9 (age 13-14) needed a focus to keep them on track as they would be dropping languages at the end of the year. So they were doing OCR ASSET languages but then we moved on to AQA FCSE! I wrote an article on it for an SEN magazine at the time as ASSET we’re shocked at the number of entries from SEN pupils that we were sending them.

I didn’t use these techniques with any other classes, despite the fact that they were showing results with these lower ability classes. Why? Honestly, I have no idea! I felt the need to teach ‘conventionally’, I thought it was limiting them or I just hadn’t transferred my ideas to other groups? But honestly who knows!

The by-product was that I was starting to see these upils SEN pupils in my GCSE classes and they were ending their GCSE courses with their highest grades in French. I was really lucky that I had some amazing TA’s through this time that ploughed on with the techniques that they had seen me use in KS3 as these pupils moved into mixed ability classes at GCSE – thanks to Karen, Lisa and Jack!

Alongside this I was studying for my masters in psychology and beginning to look more at a psychological level as to how the brain worked and learned, but when I first encountered your LAM and chunking work, it was like someone was affirming what I had been ‘trialling’ with these children (one class in each year group in KS3). So I immediately pushed on and began rolling it out to all classes. It took time for the pupils to buy in and in the last 18 months the department has now ‘bought in’.

We still have textbooks, but in KS3 they are used to guide topics and for a bit of assessment not as a day-to-day resource. I won’t be replacing or renewing them as the bits we don’t like we just don’t use, whether that is units or whole chapters.

In the last two years we have also reduced the curriculum content massively and planned using interleaving, recycling etc so that the whole approach is more joined up. I am still refining some areas and finding what works well with different ability groups and still feel speaking could improve further, however I am very happy with the reading and writing side of it all.

In starting a lesson we always begin with a recap of key structures at 3 levels – red (the easiest), then amber and green. We use a couple of key structures or sentence starters for red; amber looks at recent work and green slightly trickier and from further back. They do this, as they do most of their tasks, on a mini whiteboard, making this all a win in terms of marking!

During the modelling phase we make use of sentence builders with translation activities with the teacher reading sentences in the L2 and the pupils translating into L1 and moving on using this like a dictation. This is the perfect way to highlight elements of grammar that you want pupils to notice.  In the next phase, pupils love the mind reader game, which we play in both the spoken and written form – we play as a whole class and in small groups!  The games are so useful as pupils are hearing and seeing the target language so much. Delayed Dictation has proved exceptionally useful at highlighting and teaching a technique, which is invaluable when listening to longer texts.  Delayed translation is a further and equally useful version, which again practises an essential skill needed in listening.

The Sentence Stealer Game is extremely popular.  Pupils still love games such as 3:1 for whole class translation into L1. I am gradually building a bank of narrow reading activities that I personally find more time consuming to make, but a focused and excellent resource.

As we begin to move into the structured production phase, we begin to remove some of the sentence builder support and again use activities such as delayed dictation and translation.  We also use a range of activities such as one pen, one dice (L1 to L2) and translation based tasks.  Tangled translations are fabulous and can focus on specific structures with careful planning. Pupils can choose to translate into or from the target language to produce their response and the more able will do both! Pyramid Translations take a bit more organising and setting up to ensure that the ‘jobs’ are correctly allocated but the outcome is highly engaged pupils producing some fabulous L2 work.

We also do a weekly low stakes test of core structures that we have identified for each year group. The set of phrases starts at 20 for year 7 going up to 80 for year 11. They mark it themselves and we look for perfection in terms of spelling and accents etc. The aim each week is to equal or preferably improve on a previous score. The whole process takes an absolute maximum of 10 minutes but this has been invaluable and was implemented long before the Contifying of lessons and followed my reading about the usefulness of low stakes testing!

At the end of the lesson I make use of exit tickets (written or verbally) and recap 5 slips – where pupils note five things from that lesson, five from the previous lesson and five from earlier in the topic or a previous topic. This is helping them to see the links in their learning and how they are building a level of complexity in what they are able to do. Pupils love the game ‘boxes’ and we often play for 5 minutes at the end of a lesson, using it as an opportunity to revise receptive and productive chunks rather than just vocabulary.

With a series of templates these activities are very quick to produce with the chosen vocabulary. I use the same resources and activities in sequences of lessons expecting the level of independence to increase or just by adding an extra column to the sentence builder to add a layer of additional complexity or additional pronouns etc. Having everything the same means I rarely have to ‘waste’ time explaining how to do a specific task and we can just do the task. Pupils are writing more accurately and are gradually gaining more independence and autonomy. They are feeling as if they are understanding more too (comprehensible input) and this, along with other measures, I feel is instrumental in our increased uptake for GCSE and the steadily improving outcomes!  It is harder to implement in KS4 with the sheer volume of vocabulary to be covered but we will plough on and keep doing our best to Contify as much as possible.

I am loving teaching again and reading and educational research to justify what I am doing – thank you! My only issue is mini whiteboard pens – I can’t keep up with the quantity we use and the pupils are practising so much!

Vicki has been teaching for just over twenty years and has worked as a GCSE moderator and examiner too. She has always had a keen interest in SEN teaching and recently undertook an online part-time Masters Degree in Psychology with University of Derby. Vicki is currently a Head of Department in a small rural 11-16 school in northern England, where there is currently a huge growth in languages. The school currently teaches Spanish and French (despite her degree being in German) and they have just started the process to introduce Chinese with the help of the Confucius Institute. Vicki has found learning Chinese alongside the pupils to be an enlightening experience and has been introducing Conti methods and activities to the teachers from the Confucius Institute!

Post 2: Mike Elliott (Head of Languages @ Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England)

KS3 French Curriculum Redesign: A Case Study

At the end of each unit in my Year 7 French class, I ask students to complete a Google Form, offering them the chance to comment on their perceived progress, to identify their personal targets, and to see whether they have met the learning objectives for the topic. This particular link contains responses to the question “What have you particularly enjoyed? Have you made progress?”. A useful starting point, perhaps, in determining whether the KS3 Curriculum that I started to redesign is heading in the right direction.

Some of the comments are very flattering (!), but the ones that I really like are these:

“In French, this term I have enjoyed the active games where we get out of our chairs. I have also enjoyed the activities on the board. Overall French has been great and my favourite lesson this term.”

“I have enjoyed playing the interactive games such as ‘voleurs’, where you steal other people’s cards by guessing the phrase they’ve picked.”

“I have enjoyed that we do lots of talking and not just taking down notes.”

“I have enjoyed everything we have covered and I feel as if I have improved massively in pronunciation of French words I am or am not familiar with.”

“I liked learning about the town in French over again and learning about sports.”

Now, it could be that I have a very able cohort (I have), but I have been pleased that the things that we set out to do have largely been achieved. There is reference above to: more speaking; games where students get out of their seats and interact with others; clear improvement in pronunciation; learning a new topic whilst recycling elements from the previous topic. All of these things have led to a purposeful classroom dynamic, following a bespoke Scheme of Work, and referring to agreed department principles. I don’t think it is finished, but I do think we have made a promising start, and, personally, I am excited and motivated to keep revising and developing. What follows is an account of the steps I have taken to redesign the KS3 French Curriculum at the school where I work. It is not intended to be a “this is how you do it” piece, but rather “this is how I did it” and let’s start the discussion… !

Planning

Redesigning the KS3 curriculum was an obvious thing to do given the changes to the GCSE and A-level specification. On the one hand it could be argued that this was obvious anyway, given the increased importance of students being able to express their ideas spontaneously and freely, and no longer having the luxury of controlled assessment tasks, where students could focus on just a small topic area which could be revised, rehearsed – perhaps copied from an older sibling – and then reproduced in test conditions, earning up to 15% of the final GCSE grade. On the other hand, why not objectively reflect on the status quo, and consider making improvements.

It was clear to me as well that there were a number of inspirational teachers around the country who were coming up with new ideas, and new approaches, in order to improve students’ best chance of success, particularly for Speaking and Writing. I attended the Inside Government Conference for Modern Foreign Languages conference in October 2018 and was impressed by Ian Bauckham, who shared some of the key findings from the Modern Foreign Languages Pedagogy Review, which I subsequently downloaded and read closely. I was already aware of Gianfranco‘s work, and had already read a number of other articles on the Language Gym looking at various strategies, including implicit vs explicit routines, the importance of comprehensible input, the importance of self-efficacy (one of many words / concepts that I needed to look up!), and all these things were pointing me to the same conclusion: that less is more and, in a lot of cases, textbooks are not the only answer. Some colleagues and I were concerned when looking at the GCSE Textbook – particularly for the Higher Tier – where there were double pages that were almost entirely inaccessible. I accept there is a strong argument to review the current mundane GCSE topics to improve motivation, but I think a bigger factor for motivation is the reward associated with being able to access and understand material. So, if it comes down to a choice between mastering concepts and ensuring that all the mundane topics are covered, it seems clear to me that mastery should be prioritised, even if this means you don’t cover everything. 

Anyway, I became increasingly convinced that going more slowly and focusing on developing confidence, enjoyment and self-efficacy was going to lead to greater motivation, greater enthusiasm and, perhaps, greater uptake throughout the Key Stages. There were also other things that I picked up from various Language Shows over the years: Rachel Hawkes commented in one of her sessions that, despite the fact that she has written or contributed to a number of textbooks, the perfect textbook doesn’t exist in languages, because every chapter would repeat the previous chapter as well as adding new content from the current chapter, so an ideal textbook in languages would be almost exponential in terms of chapter length. In another session, some were talking about making KS3 “grammar and structure heavy”, but light relatively in terms of vocabulary, because once the structures were well understood, it makes it far easier to manipulate those structures in KS4 just by switching the key vocabulary. I was increasingly interested by the idea of knowledge organisers too, which seemed to be paying dividends at the Michaela School and elsewhere, as well as increased focus perhaps on the importance of phonics, and the introduction of good pronunciation earlier on. I was also interested by an AQA GCSE Feedback comment, where they had expressed surprise that so much ‘KS3 vocabulary’ had been misunderstood in one set of exams. This goes to show the importance of recycling and of revisiting vocabulary throughout. 

Starting to build

In the gained time after the exam classes left last year I started seriously thinking about how to restructure the KS3 curriculum. I was already very convinced by a lot of what I had read on the Language Gym blog in particular, and I put some of these ideas to the Head of German and the Head of Spanish. We took a whole day off timetable, to agree our key principles, ready for an official launch to the rest of the department, making sure that we were all singing from the same hymn sheet, and that we were all equally invested in making this a success. The key principles that we agreed were as follows:

1. Focus on mastery not content: one unit every half term doesn’t make sense for any number of reasons, so why put yourself under unnecessary pressure to cover lots of content quickly and superficially?
2. High(er) levels of comprehensible input: making students feel more connected, more involved, more engaged and give them a greater sense of reward in what they’re doing.
3. Lots of recycling of grammar and vocabulary: think very carefully about opportunities to revisit key vocabulary, and to recycle what has been learnt in different contexts.
4. Communicative functions (cf. Conti): an eminently sensible starting point. What are students going to want / need to do? These become the learning objectives for a unit of work too.
5. Schemes of Work to contain key vocab & structures, assessments driven by key vocab & structures (“fair” assessments)

In addition to this was an acceptance that Listening and Speaking is probably neglected at times, so we agreed to put more focus on these skills. This resonated with me as my eldest son was 2 at the time, and it was fascinating to watch his speech develop, solely based on what he heard, and this hammered home the point that we are hardwired to learn languages through listening, so why not make this a bigger part of the classroom experience. “Sentence stealers”, “Quiz-Quiz-Trade”, “Mind Reader”, e.g. have been great, and have helped to maintain that sense of progression, enjoyment, and enthusiasm throughout the year.

We also agreed to make key structures and key vocabulary very clear and very explicit in the Schemes of Work, and to ensure that assessments were fair, and encourage and reward ‘thorough processing’, demonstrating real understanding of a text (as opposed to demonstrating good multiple-choice guesswork, or an ability to deal with the demoralising puzzles, riddles and red herrings typically found in Listening or Reading questions).

Practical steps

So, practically, what did I do? I looked at a number of different Year 7 French SoWs, some taken from exam websites, some from other schools, which I then compared with what we normally do. I decided early on that this curriculum redesign would need to be done over a few years at least, so I wanted to have a rolling plan. I decided that four topics felt like a more reasonable number to complete in one year, and I decided not to start with the classic “My name is… / I am 11 years old /  I live in …” topic, based on our school context. When students from a nearby independent primary school arrive in Year 7 having completed Tricolore 2, and they are in the same class as students who have never learnt French, it is easy for both ends of the ability spectrum to be put off, either because it seems like easy, tedious revision or because you feel that everyone in the class is better than you. It creates an unwelcome dynamic.

So I thought perhaps something like “Town” might be a leveller. There may be enough new stuff in that topic for everyone to feel as though they are getting something out of it. Then, I thought we could move on to Sport, and then Talking about Oneself and then Family. I was building up to a point whereby in the third unit, in addition to the classic, hello, my name is, etc, they were able to talk about hobbies too, why they do them, which ones they do when it’s hot, what there is in their town to enable them to do their hobby, etc. and therefore drawing in things that had been previously learnt. For instance, take the sentence “In my town there is an ice rink”. We have a preposition, a possessive adjective, the phrase “there is” which will be used in probably every topic (weather, in my family, …). I was also thinking about introducing the ‘oi’ sound in French (patinoire). All of these things will be revisited frequently, and intentionally. For a hastily-prepared Christmas lesson, it was relatively simple also to go from “the station is next to the church” to “the Christmas tree is next to the television”, and from “in my town there is an ice rink” to “in my stocking there is a present”. 

Getting a little ahead of myself here. Before thinking about key structures and vocabulary, I first thought of the communicative functions (taken from Gianfranco’s magic twelve). Once I had decided on the main Units, I picked the relevant macro functions for Year 7, and then started thinking about the micro-functions. This is where the post-its came in handy. Once I had macro and micro functions in place, I started to think about the key vocab and structures, etc. I have devised sentence builders, although I have tended to opt for relatively short phrases, mainly to facilitate mini-whiteboard work. I may consider extending these in the future. You can see some of the work in progress below:

Once I had shuffled around the Post-Its, I started to create a document like this, which – once formatted – I am happy to share. It breaks Units down into the following: macro communicative function; micro communicative function; key vocabulary and structures. From then, each Unit is broken down into suggested lessons.

I have not had any real need to use a textbook this year, other than judiciously-chosen pages which match the topic well (and then, only for cover work or listening homework). When required, I have created most of the Listening tracks myself, recorded on a small voice recorder with USB, and then embedded into Google Slides), although there is a lot of listening happening through the various sentence builder / whiteboard activities. I have created two booklets to cover the first two units (the next two are on my to-do list) and I have included a number of activities, some of which can be completed in class, some as homework/cover, and some that include thorough-processing tasks, modelled on some of Gianfranco’s ideas. Example booklet below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1he28jcnztokxj3gJ32h-Biz1ikzR8A2g/view?usp=sharing 

What next?

Repeat for Year 8. I need to take on board the successes of this year, and at the same time implement feedback from colleagues and students. I remain utterly convinced that these changes have been massively beneficial, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my lessons with Year 7 this year. Sure, it’s been a lot of work, but most Year 7 resources are ready to go now, bar the odd tweak here and there. If we can continue to harness students’ enthusiasm, interest and motivation that can only be a good thing. I am aware of recent posts questioning the benefits of comprehensible input over engaging culturally-rich texts and, as with most things, a hybrid approach, blending a number of these key ideas is probably best. I am sure, however, that the short term pain will be worth it when enjoying the long term gain. Right, where are those post-its?

Mike Elliott is the Team Leader for Languages, and Subject Leader for French, at Dr Challoner’s Grammar School.

This is the third post in our series of articles written by experienced language educators who have decided to adopt my approach or aspects of it. This post is by Heather Morgan, a very experienced teacher, with many years as Head of Languages in the bag, many of which in a great Worcester school, The Chantry School, in which the MFL team have wholeheartedly embraced E.P.I.

“Contification in practice” by Heather Morgan 

I have been teaching languages for 15 years in a small rural comprehensive in Worcestershire. I have worked with some fantastic colleagues there, both in the MFL department and the wider school community.

About two to three years ago I started following posts about MFL teaching on Facebook, started reading blogs and I also purchased the book

“The Language Teacher Toolkit” by Steve Smith and Gianfranco Conti

I was absolutely fascinated by the research which Gianfranco had done regarding the acquisition of language. Lots of things which I had noticed in my own language learning and also in my experience of teaching languages, suddenly made sense!

As a Head of Department for many years, it had always dismayed me that when I came to analyse the GCSE results, Listening was the skill where pupils seemed to fare the worse (especially in French).

So with this is mind I decided to see if we could incorporate some of Gianfranco’s ideas into our teaching in KS3 in the hope that it will bolster the confidence and therefore the results of our KS4 pupils (and also into KS5, although we do not have a Sixth Form at our school).

Around this time, we had just employed a new colleague – a compatriot of Gianfranco (Italian native speaker – Ambrogio De Santis) and he also was keen to embrace the ideas of Gianfranco; so, we set about “Contify-ing” some of our work. As with all things in teaching, we could not do everything at once so we each focused on a particular group – for me this was Year 8 French.

At this time, we were also very fortunate to be given one hour per fortnight’s timetable dedicated to our own CPD. This meant that I could read around the research (but to be honest I am still getting my head around some of the specialised vocabulary) and also spend some of my time on specific Conti planning. I also invested some of our CPD budget making sure that each of the MFL teachers had the opportunity of attending a CPD session with Gianfranco.

So, these are some of the things we have learnt, and are learning, along the way:

• Establishing and embedding a key number of universals within the KS3 SOW enables recycling and interleaving e.g.

UNIVERSAL 1

·         j’ai / je n’ai pas de/ il y a / il n’y a pas de

This universal is at the very start of Year 7 (with school bag items, family members, pets etc.) but it is recycled many times through Year 8 and Year 9 as well.

• Using sentence builders at the start of each block of work introduces patterns (or reinforces patterns) and enables progress.
• Using sentence builders means that there is lots of scaffolding for weaker learners, but you can also stretch the more able learners.
• Using a variety of activities which follow the MARS/EARS structure (e.g. sentence stealers / mind readers / delayed dictation / faulty echo / oral ping-pong/ shading in narrow reading / narrow translation) motivates the pupils.

Initially it seems like it is a lot of work to prepare a series of lessons based on Gianfranco’s principles – certainly the first time that both Ambrogio and I prepared one, it took hours. However, once you have the formats for the sentence builders and activities, it takes very little time. Also, we have found that the same 9-12 sentences are used in lots of the activities (e.g. Strip Bingo / Blind OXO). This fits in with the maxim that there should be 95% comprehensible input allowing pupils to thoroughly process the language being taught.

When we had a PGCE student with us last term, she had to produce a resource for one of her assignments.  We advised her to produce a MARS/EARS PowerPoint with at least 2 activities for each stage. This means that she has a blueprint which she can use for any block of work. When I caught up with her again at a Gianfranco Conti CPD session organised at our school, she told me that she had scored very highly in this assignment!

The pupil voice which we have conducted over the last 18 months is very encouraging: pupils find the sentence builders useful and really enjoy a lot of the activities which take them on their journey. Several pupils said that the constant modelling of the language made it stick in their heads and some of them said they could “see” the sentence builders in their head. This means that they feel more confident and willing to have a go at speaking!

The progress which we have made since our initial foray into the world of Conti teaching, is that we think much more carefully about the sequence of the learning and activities. If I’m honest, at the start it was just a series of activities merged together! Now we are much more aware of where each activity fits in the MARS/EARS sequence.

This year we have tried to make our summative assessments be more spontaneous rather than the rote learning of long passages which a lot of our pupils used to rely on. This has certainly worked for our higher ability pupils and by paring it right down for our weaker pupils, they have also been able to achieve a level of spontaneity.

We have tried to take on board the “less is more” mantra but we also acknowledge that there is somewhat of a dichotomy with this and the very content heavy status of the current GCSE. Our aim is to improve fluency and spontaneity in our three year Key Stage 3 and then consolidate in Key Stage 4.

The fluency and spontaneity of some of our pupils in Year 8 and 9 is very encouraging and it is such a shame that this could now be hindered by the lockdown caused by the Corona virus. However, in our on-line lessons we are trying to take on board some of Gianfranco’s ideas of using reading as modelling to try to offset this.

Heather Morgan (former Head of Languages at The Chantry School, Worcestershire).  Having loved learning languages in my small secondary school in Wales, I was determined to further my studies in languages at University. I chose a course which allowed me to study three languages simultaneously and gained a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages from Leicester University in 1986.

Over the years, I have used my knowledge of languages whilst working for an international warehousing and distribution company, for the management services section of local government, and for the sales and administration department for an international china and porcelain company. I retrained as a MFL teacher 15 years ago and I am able to teach French, German and Italian. I have recently decided to work part-time to help my husband with his business. We have also brought up three children – all now flown the nest!

As language teachers, we are all too familiar with the seemingly Sisyphean task we have chosen as a career: to instil a love for the language we teach in our students whilst developing their linguistic competence towards autonomy, to facilitate their understanding of why they are learning a language and what opportunities lie ahead if they seize that challenge, and finally, to provide them with enough success in their learning to balance out the frustration from what can feel like a never ending process of failed attempts, which is the only way to proficiency. It is a highly complex environment to navigate, for both teachers and learners, even more so when situated in highly Anglo-centric backgrounds, and when faced with divergent research findings on various Second Language acquisition methodologies on what proves to be most effective in the classroom.

Traditionally, we have been guilty of considering innate talent, or aptitude, to be the main factor in successful L2 acquisition. This misconception would allow us to predict students’ success, or failure, accordingly. This meant that our methods in class were mostly tailored to suit a finite number of students, who demonstrated these “aptitude” attributes (such as the ability to infer meaning, grammatical flair, a sensitive ear to phonemes, memory capacity, etc.) along with the motivation and determination to succeed. The way I trained as a French and Spanish teacher back in Swansea, Wales, back in the early 2000s, with the exclusive use of Target Language in the classroom and the clear veto of any use of English, most certainly confirmed that predicate. The cognitive factors at hand here were not addressed systematically in our methods; upon reflexion, I can clearly see that my training was designed to cater to a small portion of students who would be able to, not only process highly dense input through their overly able decoding and sound discriminating faculties, but also to synthesize complex grammatical concepts through abstract meaning and apply their newly acquired knowledge into their production of language. This was of course doomed to fail, and I very soon observed that such an approach lost me most of my students, who were discouraged, feeling highly anxious, and at times, completely overwhelmed with what I asked of them, especially when comparing themselves to the 2 or 3 students in the class who could keep up.

I believe this approach is what has built our reputation over the years as an impossible subject to learn, because in truth, it really was. How many times have we heard parents at teacher interviews confess they were “no good at languages” when they were at school, and that they wished they had continued with it rather than give up? To this day, children are still largely experiencing that feeling of hopelessness and that it is just “too hard”. And I agree. What we have been doing as language teachers is teach ourselves, or the impossible minority of students who possess the motivation and those abilities, and who will learn the language no matter what is thrown at them in class. I was one of those students at school. No matter what the method was, who the teacher was, I was passionate about language and I was determined to learn, so I experienced success regardless. Unfortunately, this left the vast majority of our students on the side of the road.

Another crucial element that contributed to this phenomenon throughout the last decades is the multiplicity of methodologies developed over the years, through developing academic research on second language and its acquisition. A constant evolution from the direct method, the audiolingual method, the communicative approach, the Task-Based Learning, the Content and Language Integrated Learning, a focus on interaction and transaction, an explicit teaching of grammar, a target language only approach: the abundance of suggestions was both extremely stimulating and confusing. There is often a feeling that we must reinvent the wheel with every new method that comes out, which led many practitioners to feel like they had no clear guidance on, or understanding of, how to best teach their students.

More and more, language teachers started to incorporate multiple approaches into their classrooms, based on what they observed to be effective. We started to use English purposefully to reinforce understanding of concepts and instructions with students, scaffolding into different layers what we exposed them to, in order to cater to every range of ability. We adopted the communicative approach combined with task-based learning assessment in order to contextualise their learning. We were striving to find the right balance between communication and explicit grammar teaching to facilitate analysis of language. A lot of thinking about learning and curriculum design was taking place, but there was no consistent approach across the board.

At my current school, back in 2016, we found ourselves at a crossroads. Multiple languages were on offer since Year 7, but we struggled with low numbers and retention in middle and senior school for some of them, and with many disengaged students throughout the years, despite highly experienced and passionate teachers. Our number one priority was to address students’ engagement and to stabilize numbers into sustainability. To that end, we introduced a carousel of languages in Year 7, where students study 2 languages throughout the year before selecting one to pursue in Year 8 (this would allow them to experience them first-hand, and not just randomly select a language without really knowing). We also introduced a national qualification in Year 9 and 10, the Certificate II VET in Applied Language, which focuses on both social and workplace competencies (for clarification, VET in Australia stands for Vocational Educational Training, which provides nationally accredited qualifications designed in partnership with industries and the government in an effort to train people with workplace skills and technical knowledge to help them advance their career).  These measures meant less time to teach in Year 7, as we were now delivering 2 languages, and a high volume of prescriptive assessment tasks in Year 9 and 10. The challenge was enormous, but we had restored a sense of purpose to what we were doing, and soon, all teachers found themselves scrutinizing their curriculum and experimenting with a range of tools and methods, as we were committed to empowering all students to become the best language learners they could be. This is when Dr Conti came in.

Back in 2017, Dr Conti came to deliver his first workshop, and within the space of 3 hours, managed to open our eyes to his world of comprehensible input, working memory and thorough processing. In that time, he validated what we intuitively knew already: our syllabi were too full, and they were not effective. We did not leave room for recycling and we were throwing vocab list upon vocab list at our students, hoping that some would “stick”. The discussions that ensued from this moment not only radically changed our approaches, but they also made us better practitioners, in that we started to critically observe each element of our curriculum in order to decide whether it was truly necessary to build students’ competencies. We kept on using multiple teaching tools, but the pedagogy underpinning them became clearer. In brief, we started making room and we started embedding systematic recycling, knowledge organisers, extensive processing of language in all 4 skills, and communicative functions of language. It was a revolution.

But revolutions do take time, and a lot of arduous and consistent work across teams, in order to reach their objective. With a renewed sense of purpose underpinning our programs (with the carousel in Year 7 and the VET Certificate II in Year 9 and 10), change was possible. By the time Dr Conti came back to our school for his second workshop the following year, we were all eager to ask more specific questions about his MARS’EARS sequence, the transition from oral to written fluency, and how to best maximise class time for successful learning. We had started to see the shift in students’ engagement and participation in classes, at every step of the range of abilities. They were active, focused and very enthusiastic about the skills they were developing. The anxiety levels had dropped significantly as we recycled language thoroughly, as modelling through listening became our focus when introducing new content, and as thorough processing finally allowed students to internalise what we covered in class. Our students’ survey results were unanimous: they felt positive about learning a language, empowered to do so, and their self-esteem was soaring as a result. What more could we ask for?

Upon looking back at these past few years, I am in awe of my amazing colleagues for undertaking such a challenge and for seizing every opportunity to make their student’s experience better. This has been quite the journey, from overhauling our methodologies across all languages to training for VET delivery, and I could not have worked with more committed and passionate practitioners. I am also deeply grateful for Dr Conti’s support and influence in guiding our practice. His wealth of experience and practical approaches enabled us to trial and experiment his method very quickly, but more importantly, he facilitated this drastic change to our teaching through saying out loud what everybody thought quietly: less is more, and with the right approach, far more effective. In future, we will continue to use an evidence-based evaluation of our programs, to develop teachers’ skills through training, and to collect feedback from all our stakeholders, but so far, results are staggering.

If we are to truly impact our students’ lives through our teaching, we must empower them all to believe in their own potential, and we must enable them to experience systematic success in our lessons. Only then will they open up to the possibility of making a second language part of who they are as they continue to grow as young adults. After all, Sisyphus did prove to the Gods that by embracing life’s challenges as our own, we give them their true value and significance.

Chloe Briand is the Head of Languages at Methodist Ladies’ College, Melbourne, Australia, where she leads a team of 20 staff across 4 languages (French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese). With over 17 years of teaching practice across 4 countries and her experience of a wide range of school environments, academic excellence and innovation drive her curriculum design, along with pioneering approaches to teaching languages, through authentic contexts and experiential learning.

If you want to find out a bit more about how to use sentence builders and Listening As Modelling (aka LAM) do get hold of my book, “Breaking the sound barrier: teaching learners how to listen”, co-authored with Steve Smith.

In this very witty and informative blog post, Dylan talks about our forthcoming Spanish workbook, the first in a series of books for independent and classroom learning, based on our EPI principles. The booklet is currently being translated into French, German and Italian.

https://mrvinalesmfl.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/from-building-sentences-to-sentence-building-my-journey-to-mars/?fbclid=IwAR0FVgA9xn_ZMKM29-38ZJeBft-FUN-q6Im1B6RHjZbJQkTJPG46_z9FJss

This is the first in a series of posts written by language educators from around the world who have been experimenting with my approach. In this post a passionate language educator, Julia Hegarthy, head of languages in an independent school in New South Wales, relates how she went about applying EPI to her context. Here is her bio:

I work in an independent school in Sydney. We are a small Language Faculty running French in Yr 7, Chinese in Yr 8 and small elective classes in both Languages in 9 and 10. We have not yet had a Continuers class through to HSC level but we have been running the French Beginner HSC courses since 2015 and our numbers in this course are growing stronger every year.

In Australia there is no adequate textbook for the fast-paced and demanding 2-year HSC Beginners course, and so, after seeing Gianfranco Conti in action at a Language convention in Sydney in 2017, I decided to implement aspects of Extensive Processing Instruction. It made sense to me that to get students to hold a 5-minute conversation about their personal world in the space of not even two full years of instruction, the teacher ought to model structures related to their personal world intensively until their brain can automatically retrieve these structures….

The importance of rote learning had always been clear to me, however, I had been lacking the pedagogical tools (or creativity!) to make this appealing to the students. Seeing how the 300 strong conference room was responding to stating their Emotional Temperature in Malaysian through False Echo and “Mini translations” immediately struck me as an ingenious way to drill without causing my students ‘death by Powerpoint or worksheet coma’. I remembered I had a stack of Mini Whiteboards and WB markers in a dusty corner of our store cupboard somewhere and they haven’t left my teacher bag since. Another staple is a box of dice, so we can play any sort of ‘no snake no ladder’ translation game at our leisure.

Today, I still consider myself at the beginning of our journey to ‘contify’ our programs (I tend to agree with Gianfranco it is a LONG process.  It’s also worth mentioning that because we are still bound by the parameters of the current HSC format, I haven’t been able to throw out teaching the old way of responding to comprehension questions altogether – yet!). However, I am making a conscious attempt to use the MARS/EARS sequence with all my classes for all units and this year, I have thrown out textbooks for French altogether.

Actually, I should say I am using the MARS sequence with all classes, and EARS is mostly ‘extension’ material. I find this method is brilliant for differentiation; because it allows lesser able/confident students to operate with their scaffold for longer, whilst eager learners ‘wean’ themselves off much quicker, therefore cycling through the sequence at a faster speed, thriving on activities such as Fast and Furious and Pyramid Translations  that would be way beyond some of my students’ level of competence. The fascinating thing is to see them actually DO the activities and ENJOY doing them.

Independent pair or group work is no longer a pain and (for the most part) I truly don’t have to worry about groups being off task and can use my teaching time cruising around from group to group, giving feedback in real time. I think a lot of this is also due to the fact that the games and activities very much appeal to students’ competitive nature. I give ‘Dojo’ points in younger years for a certain number of quickest and most correct WB ‘hands up’ for example.

I have been buying and downloading lots of Gianfranco’s resources on TES and am adapting his worksheets and Sentence Builders to suit the exact need of my unit and class. This IS more time consuming initially, but once they are created and filed in an orderly and logical fashion, it is easy enough to pull together any lesson on any topic within a very short time frame. The other big bonus was (still is of course) that most of the structures from the worksheet and Sentence Builders also feature across the Language Gym’s activities, meaning that students have another option to ‘make them stick’ via this online modus.

I also explicitly tell my students about the approach – we look at the curve of forgetting together and on my online lesson plans I include a mention of which ‘stage’ we are at in a given lesson, which I find helps them to understand the relevance of what I am doing.

Here is an example of what I did before Coronavirus sent me into self-isolation with my Yr 12 class on Relationships

Modelling/Awareness Raising:

Hand out Sentence Builder with structures

Mini WB activities – Choral repetitions, Faulty Error, Spot the error, delayed repetition, delayed copying

Education Perfect list with the exact sentences from the SB as follow up in Reading / Listening mode (no translating into French at this stage)

Receptive Processing

Mini WB activities (lots of French – English translations)

RAM/LAM worksheets

Lots of reading out aloud – (they love reading aloud in class ‘until they make a mistake’ in which case another student interrupts, corrects and has earned the right to read on)

1 Pen 1 Dice

Find your match

Sentence Stealer

Quelquechose Game (you may know it as ALGO game)

Language Gym Workout (Vocab Section)

Textivate activities

Education Perfect list with the exact sentences from the SB as follow up in Reading / Listening mode (no translating into French at this stage)

Structured Production

Mini WB activities (now include translations into French)

Dictations (running, delayed, mad)

Education Perfect list with the exact sentences from the SB across all modes incl translation into French

ImmerseMe activities

No snakes no ladders translation game

Find someone who

Oral Ping Pong

Expansion

Education Perfect lists (my students also create and maintain their own individual lists which they are allowed to use at this stage)

Education Perfect Grammar units on the grammar point in question (in this case direct and indirect object pronouns)

ImmerseMe activities

Piranha Grammar

Role plays

4,3,2 Technique

Pyramid Translations

Highly scaffolded writing tasks

This was about 6 one hour lessons and at the end I made them hand in a free writing: You want to nominate your best friend for participation in the TV show “Le meilleur ami du monde”. Write the letter to the production company in which you describe your friend and why they should win the title. (150 words – use all structures and features covered to date)

As I said, I am still in a ‘hybrid’ stage, where I do sometimes revert to using texts/audio from a textbook instead of just my own creations; however, overall, I find that implementing the Conti method into my teaching has increased student motivation and my own zest for stepping into the classroom.

 

A bit about Julia

Julia Hegarty, Head of Department for Languages at Oxford Falls Grammar School is living proof that commanding another language is a concrete and demonstrable life skill that can take you places around the world. Born in Germany, Julia moved to the UK for her  university studies and graduated with a First Class BA Hons degree in French, Italian and Business Studies, having spent one year of the degree studying and doing work placements in France. Julia went on to work in a London based financial communications agency, travelling around the world in the course of equity capital offerings for German and French clients before meeting her husband and deciding to re-train as a teacher after settling in Australia 10 years ago. Julia a dynamic, creative and engaging language teacher, with a passion for foreign languages.

The curve of skill-acquisition

You may have heard the expression ‘it’s been a learning curve’. Well, Cognitive psychologists working in the Skill Theory paradigm- which I am currently reading and writing about for my forthcoming book – have observed, for skills as different as making cigars out of tobacco leaves or writing computer programs, that learning follows a curve representing a power function that looks like the curve in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: the curve representing the power law of learning

The same is true of language learning. After intensive training (massed practice), L2 learners first experience a drastic improvement in task performance in terms of decreasing reaction time and error-making (represented by the steep decline); this decline indicates that the learners, after performing a task a few times have routinised it (what we call ‘proceduralization’).

For instance, a student may have learned to use the perfect tense of French regular verbs in the context of a structured communicative drill. Whilst at the beginning s/he was performing the task slowly, having to retrieve and apply the relevant grammar rule consciously (declarative knowledge),  after several repetitions of the task s/he has now mastered the task.

When mastery has occurred and your students have routinized the task-at-hand (i.e. can perform it fairly effortlessly and speedily) and errors have decreased drastically, the curve starts to flatten (around point 20 on the curve) . This is where the typical grammar test, for instance, indicates the student has ‘got’ it and can apply the grammar rule fairly accurately and with some ease in the task they have been practising (although not necessarily in other tasks).

Automatization is a long process

At this point, if practice is continued, research shows that the curve flattens. This flattening of the curve shows that the process of automatization is very slow; the gains in speed and accuracy are steady but minimal. Why? The brain goes slowly when it comes to automatizing things, because anything we automatize – including mistakes – cannot be subsequently unlearnt (a phenomenon known as ‘fossilization’ in language learning).

The problem in much language learning in English schools at Key Stage 3 (beginner to intermediate stage) is that once the students evidence ‘mastery’, teachers  often move to the next topic/grammar structure instead of  providing automatization practice – what cognitive psychologists often refer to as ‘overlearning’.

Automatization as fluency

In language learning, automatization practice equals work on fluency, getting the students to use the target vocab and/or structures under communicative pressure and time constraints, what Johnson (1996) calls R.O.C.S (aka Real Operating Conditions). ROCs are ‘desirable difficulties’ (Bjork and Linn 2006) which pose variable demands on learners’ processing ability when performing the targeted behaviour or task, in resemblance with real-life conditions. Pedagogically speaking, the application of ROCs in LT results in task grading: manipulating different factors to vary the complexity of the tasks. Among them, Johnson (1996) highlights degree of form focus, time constraints, affective factors, cognitive and processing complexities.

Paul Nation calls this all-important dimension of language learning the ‘fluency strand’.

Figure 2: the fluency strand

Most teachers, partly because they feel under pressure to ‘cover the syllabus’ and partly because they are reassured by progress tests that their students ‘know’ the target L2 items neglect this area of L2 proficiency. Yet, automatization practice is key, because (1) it is essential for spontaneity; (2) what is automatized is never forgotten and (3) if fluency training aims – as it should – at automaticity across a range of linguistic contexts and tasks, it enables students to use what they have learnt more flexibly in real-life interactions.

Basically, tragically, practice with the target items ends exactly when it is needed the most ! And, more importantly, that practice is needed over a long period of time ( through distributed practice).

Automatization is more than speed of retrieval

This kind of training gets eventually the students not merely to fast retrieval which requires little or no conscious awareness (what psychologists call ‘ballistic processing’) but, more interestingly, produces qualitative changes in the way we retrieve and apply the vocab/structures we need to successfully execute the target task. In other words, automaticity means that the brain finds a more efficient way to produce that vocabulary and those structures in the context of a given task. We know this because MRIs show that when L2 learners have become fluent in the execution of a task, the brain areas activated during the execution of that task shrink, a sign that the brain makes less effort and needs to recruit fewer neural circuits. This qualitative change is called by researchers restructuring.

Main implications for language pedagogy

The main implications for language learning are obvious: we need to spend more time on automaticity (aka fluency) training. This means:

(1) cutting down the curriculum to allow for lots of recycling, task repetition and fluency practice once the students show they master the content of a unit of work. Textbooks go  way too fast !

(2) lots of recycling and task repetition at regular intervals. These will be very close in time to each other at the beginning of the curve and gradually more distant as the curve flattens;

(3) deliberate work on fluency/automaticity, by increasing the communicative pressure and time constraints in the execution of tasks (e.g. the 4,3,2 technique, Messengers, Market place, Speed dating, my mixed-skill ‘Spot the difference’, etc.)

(4) ensuring that the same set of vocabulary and grammar structures are practised across different contexts, as learning is context and skill dependent (e.g. what is learnt in reading and listening is not transferred automatically to writing and speaking; what is learnt practising a task won’t be transferred to another, even though the two tasks are very similar).

(5) teaching chunks (e.g. sentence frames and heads), as it reduces cognitive load thereby speeding up processing and fluency. Teaching multi-word chunks means that there are fewer grammar rules (if any) to apply and automatize, as opposed to teaching single words that the learners must learn to bind together grammatically in real time.

The curriculum-design matrix in figure 3 below (aka the “Conti matrix”), makes provision for all of the above. As explained in previous posts, in my approach automatization occurs in the context of tasks designed to elicit language processing and production under what Keith Johnson calls R.O.C. (real operating conditions), i.e. in communicative drills and tasks I will discuss in greater detail in my next post.

Figure 3- The Conti Matrix

Practice with the language they KNOW

Of course, before venturing into this type of training, it is crucial that the students have mastered the target items, i.e. they can recall them with some ease and without the help of reference materials.

This is unfortunately one of the most common problems in much of the communicative language learning I have observed in 25+ years of teaching; the students are interacting orally, yes, but having way too often to resort to the help of word/phrase lists. When you stage fluency-development activities, the students shouldn’t need to do this. They should have had already plenty of retrieval practice which has weaned them off such lists first. That’s why, in my Recycling Matrix, the students get to the automatization phase at the very end of a macro-unit (i.e. unit 5).

Make time for fluency training

Some may object that there is not enough time for this type of training. My response is that it is all down to effective curriculum design and smart use of lesson time. But it is also dependant on your mission as a language teacher: are you imparting abstract knowledge of grammar structures or are you forging confident and effective L2 speakers ? Are you preparing students for exams or for real-life use? Are you teaching to cover the syllabus or for durable learning and spontaneity?

In the early years of language instruction, when exams are not and should not be a concern, you can and must make time for fluency practice.  Focus on the target items and tasks you students truly must learn to perform confidently, spontaneously and as accurately as possible and cut down the superfluous.

Less is more.