At KS4, we have the book recommended by the exam board but we use it more for reference and again we prepare our own tasks. 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). The importance of rote learning had always been clear to me, however, I had been lacking the pedagogical tools (or creativity!) They were too crowded, contained no English translation (taboo for many authors) or other means to establish meaning. Introduction: no, I have not invented sentence builders. The games are so useful as pupils are hearing and seeing the target language so much. So, first off, you need to decide what you are going to use the SB for: for Listening As Modelling (aka LAM), i.e. Check out her Sentence Builders blog in particular. A very useful technique in that it primes the students for future learning thereby facilitating the acquisition of the to-be-taught items. 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. For instance, in the sentence builder above, I could have chosen to have ‘que’ in a column of its own. By that point, I realised that their self-efficacy had increased, and they were thus more willing to give it a go. (6) opportunities for recycling and interleaving old/new items (have I seized any opportunity to recyle and interleave core items?). Paperback. A language teacher for around 30 years, I am the founder of the language learning website www.language-gym.com as well as the winner of the 2015 TES (Times Educational Supplement) best-resource-contributor award. I have extensive experience of teaching GCSE and A-Level German (and KS3 French). Dual coding, whereby images and words are used in combination, helps massively in bringing about stronger retention. Finally, by launching our new section 'The Locker room' we have basically added around 600 new resources to the Language Gym :) See you on www.language-gym.com With free PDFs. 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! I started my journey by delivering a first unit according to The MARS EARS cycle, which I would like to outline here. At this stage, I was not aware of the MARS EARS sequence. Delayed Dictation has proved exceptionally useful at highlighting and teaching a technique, which is invaluable when listening to longer texts. German Sentence Builders - A Lexicogrammar approach: Beginner to Pre-intermediate (The Language Gym - Sentence Builder Books) by Dr Gianfranco Conti , Mr Dylan Viñales , et al. Watch this space. We had lots of chats and the fact that they could share their expertise with me seemed to really empower them. Planning the grammar lesson - heading for M.A.R.S. Get your team on board as soon as possible, share the work, share the resources. All of these things have led to a purposeful classroom dynamic, following a bespoke Scheme of Work, and referring to agreed department principles. Right, where are those post-its? It is also great when you have trainee teachers, as you can get them on board straight away. 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! So, do avoid embedding entire unfamiliar verb conjugations in your sentence builders. 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. 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. The sentence builders made by some prominent authors on TES and elsewhere fell short in this regard. 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. The Workouts have been designed to gradually expand your command of a wide range of vocabulary through techniques rooted in memory research. Two of them asked to redo their speaking assessment as they felt they could do better, which they eventually did. Is it too crowded? I have also enjoyed the activities on the board. The website has been recently redesigned and re-launched in a much more user-friendly and stylish form and now offers four languages. German Sentence Builders - A Lexicogrammar approach: Beginner to Pre-intermediate (The Language Gym - Sentence Builder Books) by Dr Gianfranco Conti , Mr Dylan Viñales , et al. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Reading and writing exist in space, which means that you can go back to the text at will. A Tale of Cokefee, Sleepless Nights and Lexicogrammar. Whenever I come across an idea, I like to try it first before I suggest it to the department. (6) opportunities for recycling and interleaving old/new items (have I seized any opportunity to recyle and interleave core items?). We know this helps L2 acquisition. STRUCTURED PRODUCTION: The “pushed-output” phase was perhaps the trickiest to get right, but it ended up having a huge payoff. My language learning website: The Language Gym, Implementing MARS EARS in lessons and across the department – by Aurélie Lethuilier, Scottish educator Sonja Fedrizzi on her implementation of MARS EARS in her classes, Chloe Briand on her journey to ‘contification’ (Part 2), Three degrees of ‘Contification’ – two guest posts by Vicki Brownlee and Mike Elliott, “Contification in practice” – Guest post by Heather Morgan, Translation tasks and techniques that have significantly enhanced my teaching, Eight motivational theories and their implications for the classroom, PATTERNS FIRST - HOW I TEACH LEXICOGRAMMAR (PART 1), The art and science of creating sentence builders - key factors to consider in creating your sentence builders. This painstaking process often carried out through less-than-engaging techniques has failed students and teachers alike for many decades. German Sentence Builders - A Lexicogrammar approach: Beginner to Pre-intermediate (The Language Gym - Sentence Builder Books) by Dr Gianfranco Conti, Mr Dylan Viñales, et al.| 15 Sep 2020 4.7 out of 5 stars65 “Sentence stealers”, “Quiz-Quiz-Trade”, “Mind Reader”, e.g. That decision is crucial: as it affects massively how you are going to design the sentence builder. With that momentum in place, students (even the most hesitant ones) could then tackle the thorough processing and structured production without any apprehension. Planning the grammar lesson - heading for M.A.R.S. I have not invented sentence builders. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. 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. 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. That’s how we acquire language – any language. They were too crowded, contained no English translation (taboo for many authors) or other means to establish meaning. In order to access our locker room materials, please login with your credentials. AWARENESS RAISING: Moving into the stage of awareness raising felt natural and was, quite frankly, a lot of fun. you will be able to add in images instead of the L1 translation. 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. Then, four years ago, I came across the picture of an activity on Facebook that I had never seen before – this picture was of “Sentence Stealer”. Therefore, I started off by sharing a lot of my MARS EARS resources with my department and now the sharing is across the department, not just from me. By the way, I shouldn't need to justify the usefulness of reading aloud, but just in case, we are talking here about matching sounds to spellings, practising listening, pronunciation and intonation and … This particular, “What have you particularly enjoyed? Hence the importance of a clear SB design with spaces in between words, alphabetical order, etc; of input enhancement techniques; of highly patterned comprehensible input; of ‘dodgy translation’ (i.e. Do I have a set of flashcards or other visual aids to support the teaching of the SB’s content?) 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. Proudly, I presented a sentence builder to each of my classes. 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. The rationale and logic behind it made complete sense. ), 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. The columns in an SB can be used to recycle and interleave previously learnt items, so why not exploit this great advantage they give you over many other vocabulary-teaching tools? Present continuous tense expresses the ongoing action or task of the present. Adding in phonics, high-frequency word lists and banning ludic activities, as some prominents UK MFL ‘gurus’ propose, won’t make this approach any more palatable or easier for youngsters. 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. 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”. In this post, the first in a series of posts on how to create and use sentence builders, I will deal – very concisely – with some key issues to consider when designing a sentence builder (henceforth SB). Hence, you will avoid, especially with beginners or weaker students, items or chunks that are too similar along those dimensions. 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. What I usually do, is slot in those columns my set of universals or desirables. 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. For instance, take the sentence “In my town there is an ice rink”. Four years ago I co-founded www.language-gym.com, a language learning website packed with interactive self-marking activities and games and a verb conjugation trainer. EXPANSION: This phase had another few surprises in store for me. I opted for video recordings of myself that I would then show in class to my students. He had never used an SB before as a means to present vocabulary orally because, for donkey years, SBs have been used as writing frames or grammar-teaching tools. Paperback. 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. translating ‘J’ai dix ans’ ‘I have ten years’ as opposed to ‘I am ten years old’). The answer to this person, who boasted that having taught for 15 years he was an expert, is that, according to research, the main reason for which students drop modern languages in Year 9 in the UK is that they find languages difficult and too much work. When we start a new topic, I like to spend a whole lesson on MODELLING / AWARENESS RAISING and I use activities such as Ghost Repetition and Faulty Echo to get the students to identify and become familiar with the different 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. The columns in an SB can be used to recycle and interleave previously learnt items, so why not exploit this great advantage they give you over many other vocabulary-teaching tools? 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). If the sentence builder above featured the indefinite article ‘un‘ in isolation in ‘Tengo un pajaro’ , the chances of them learning it as ‘tengo’ ‘un‘ ‘pajaro’ would be higher than them learning it correctly as ‘tengo umpajaro’ which is the correct pronunciation (the ‘n’ being pronounced as ‘m’ in connected speech due to the assimilation phenomenon). Then, I thought we could move on to Sport, and then Talking about Oneself and then Family. 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. $9.06 #43. “Stickability” from recycling was happening! 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? | Sep 15, 2020 4.7 out of 5 stars 52 ), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E. Is this the clearest font? 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. We have a preposition, a possessive adjective, the phrase “there is” which will be used in probably every topic (weather, in my family, …). but it is recycled many times through Year 8 and Year 9 as well. 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. 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). This is where the post-its came in handy. ( Log Out / It was soon becoming clear that less was more: the students could remember chunks, they were confident in speaking and writing the language and they were gradually moving away from their Sentence Builders. 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. 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. I may consider extending these in the future. Yikes! 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. My only issue is mini whiteboard pens – I can’t keep up with the quantity we use and the pupils are practising so much!
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