Facing the currently unknown

More than words- languages in the world of work

I was recently invited to present at an event in Plymouth at Devonport High School for Girls. For once this wasn't me talking about pedagogy or methodology but about the actual end point that languages can take you to in the real world- how do languages contribute to getting a job? What can you really do with them?

I've told so many of the students that I've taught that languages are useful. That they help you get a job. But do they? When I'd agreed to do the presentation it suddenly struck me that I needed some actual information, not just me waffling. So I tweeted and I used Facebook and wondered what would turn up...

The Prezi below was what I used on the day before we launched into an exciting day of "language journalism". The year 8s I was presenting to were working in groups to translate Target Language articles in a variety of languages and collate them into a newspaper, using their own devices and a Language Lab. The groups then also had to prepare a "live" news report, including a foreign language interview from the scene. Alas, as so often happens, technology scuppered some of our plans (the USB ports on the computer we were using decided to malfunction), the students created some great pieces- and did some great ad-libbing as well!

My main focus was that languages are a vital transferrable skill in a world where few people stay in the same career throughout their working lives. What do you have to offer to a potential employer? Which could a business do more rapidly, train you to speak a language or to operate in their business environment? A real no brainer there. But what surprised me from the responses I received to my social media messages was how varied the careers are of my friends, in many cases people I've studied with at school or university. Many of them would not consider themselves fluent, yet have got ahead in their chosen fields as a result of being able to offer language skills.  A powerful motivator, as clearly demonstrated by the impressive statements in the evaluation document below. Journalists, lawyers, accountants, marketing agents, engineers, Human Resources, translators and diplomats. People whose job titles I don't understand but whose jobs look amazing (and terrifying in equal measures!). Generally people who have used their languages- and not just to be a language teacher!

Download Students comments on evaluations 

 

Shelterbox for year 8

What do you really need to live contentedly?

What would you do after a disaster? How would you cope and how would you feel?

To be honest those were my basic premises for putting together a unit about the Chilean earthquake of 2010- a disaster that struck a beautiful part of the country that I'd visited only a few months before. I'd put together a unit on Haiti a few years ago for French so wanted to see if I could do something similar in Spanish and really challenge my year 8s to think about how fortunate they really are, even just to have a solid roof over their heads, decent food and, although they often don't accept the point, a good education provision. 

Again I wanted to focus on discussion and debate in this unit as well as creativity and empathy- hence why the unit was building up to a reading image task to be shared on Voicethread - a site which I often feel is very underrated simply because it doesn't offer all the whizzbangs but which is great for sharing discussions and encouraging peer assessment.  

So here it is. Nothing special but hopefully a tad thought-provoking...

Download 2- Shelterbox

Year 7- getting them to WANT to tell you something

The year 7s all studied French throughout the year. However, they were then split into 2 sides of the year. Each side study Spanish for a term and a half and German for the other half of the year. At the end of the year they choose which language they would like to continue with alongside studying French. Although it seems that each language, allowing for year by year variations, seems to have been equally as popular in terms of uptake, the more concerning element for me was that there was a huge division in terms of uptake for KS4, with French being more popular by a ratio of at least 4 to 1. So how could that gap be shrunk- this was obviously not just an issue of students having had an extra term and a bit of French, or even many having had the joys of primary French before they came up to secondary school. The French Schemes of Work made students feel more confident and more able.

Things I felt were important:

1. giving the year 7s material that they wanted to talk about- the differences between their lives now and their lives at primary school. They were told that at the end of the unit they would have to make an HONEST presentation to explain their new lives to the year 6s at their old school. So what would they want to be able to say to tell year 6s about their new lives?
2. give them the tools to communicate in a way that they felt comfortable with

            -    phonics from the outset, making the most of Rachel Hawkes' superb materials and using her amazing Spanglovision idea. If you've never tried it, please, please do. It's amazing what the classes achieved after only a few lessons and with minimal teacher support. The sense of achievement they felt was immense. Especially as we shared the recordings on the VLE and allowed the school to vote for the "best" video (dance routines were obviously crucial). A small trophy also helped show SLT what we were up to as well as providing a tangible something for classes.

            -    learning from Greg Horton and building in a variant of Group Talk- giving them the tools to communicate semi-naturally from the outset.

            -    basic tenses from the start- using a blend of simple but multi-purpose imperfects alongside key present tense verbs.

            -    working at sentence level not word level. When I started out teaching I was working at the "here are 9 nouns" level, yet my students couldn't actually DO anything.

            -    encouraging everyone involved to be very upbeat and positive. The unit contains lots of games and mini-whiteboard activities to create a buzz of enjoyment and competition- as well as allowing for AfL wherever possible.

 

So there are lots of big creases to work out in this unit. When I was first settling in there was of course a need for more control in my lessons than there was by the end of my time there. As such, if I had been teaching the unit again in September I would have built in far more open-ended, group based speaking tasks such as "Just a Minute". But hey, I hope there are still a few bits here that people might find useful. There are rough slides which need tidying up and plenty of bits which need developing but hey ho- all feedback more than welcome! I feel very nervous uploading these materials, but I'd be a hypocrite to use other people's ideas and then not share my own for other people to use and improve.

Download Year 7

Exeter European Day of Languages project- some review thoughts

Right, from my point of view the project went really well yesterday. But at the same time I feel that there was a LOT that could be improved, especially if other people wanted to adapt the idea. It was the first time that the lovely folks at ISCA had run a project using their ipads and I think we all learnt a lot from it.

The language angle

• Given that we had a range of schools coming in who we'd never worked with before we didn't insist on TL throughout the ads or presentations. Next time I think we really should.
• Grammar: for me one of the main impediments to students giving things a try yesterday was limited grammar skills / confidence. However, could we have had either a link or QR code to a source of grammar explanations? If you want to be able to give instructions, go here, if you want to describe what you did, click here... For me this would also enable learners to realise the importance of grammar in a non-classroom, real setting.
• Kelda and I decided that we didn't want to provide a template for the presentations for fear of encouraging a kind of identikit presentation, wanting instead to encourage each group to go it alone. However, this left some of the teams feeling a bit lost. Was that good (encouraging independence) or did they feel mildly demoralised / nervous about using language?

The technical angle

• we provided a lot of the links in the form of QR codes. However, I think it would be important to place more emphasis on also fully displaying key addresses such as that of the blog www.exeteredl.posterous.com . Many of the groups used the blog repeatedly but by not having to type the address in they went away asking what it was- and thus couldn't see it straight away at home or begin to share the buzz.
• some of the filming / recording was not of the highest quality. It might be worth having a 5 minute technical brief on issues like not filming in front of windows / bright sunshine or how best to capture audio, especially for interviews. Also, some of the teams turned their audio up to full which lead to poor quality playback. Hopefully we've now sorted that out for the blog.
• the room that we showed the videos in had poor lighting- either on or off. This meant that we couldn't film the presentations, a HUGE shame, as all that was visible to the camera was a bright white screen behind the teams.
• The completion process. We didn't explain well enough to groups how to finish off their projects / how to export them. This caused 2 significant issues. The first was that we had a big faff when teams came up to present. The second was that when we came to upload the final ads and in some cases presentation materials to the blog we had to go through and export each ipad's materials and then sync it to one iTunes account and THEN upload. There must be a better way.
• When the teams were coming up to present they had to plug their team's ipad in, set themselves up and then go. This was stilted rather than smooth and led to the process not only being slower but some audience members getting... distracted after a long day. One idea was that when teams had finished their work they upload them to a wiki from which they could then present. It would be interesting to know if that idea was actually possible.
• The ipads themselves were great, but it's not always possible to accomplish what you can on a laptop. For example with Posterous, well, the app isn't great (and is designed for iphones). And when using posterous on ipads the website in safari is... limited. In hindsight I should have tried e-mailing the videos but that wouldn't work with garageband projects.

So in short there was a LOT to smile about- but still lots of work to do to create a really effective, transferrable model. All ideas welcome!

 

Exeter European Day of Languages project

Since July I have been working hard on a project with Kelda Richards from ISCA College for the European Day of Languages. Every year when I was at Edgehill I used to help organise an... extravaganza, with all classes in KS 2, 3 and 4 spending the first few weeks of term writing and rehearsing their own sketch to perform in the school's theatre in front of parents and whichever staff I could persuade to attend. It was exhausting, highly stressful and I was never sure actually how much benefit came from it. A lot of the kids grumbled and I found that with my exam groups I really resented the time lost. Also, how much did it really boost the profile of languages and show how worthwhile they are? In effect, was it a real or an artificial outcome?

Yesterday at the University of Exeter 7 schools from around Exeter and Plymouth brought teams of 6 with them (5 schools brought 2 teams each), each containing 2x year 8, 2x year 9 and 2x year 10 pupils. Their brief was provided by Bertie Cozic, a recently retired French footballer who played for Exeter City and who now owns and manages Gourmandine creperie in the heart of Exeter. Here was our real purpose. The teams were challenged with creating an advert, predominantly in French, for Gourmandine. They also had to make a presentation, again predominantly in French, of up to 5 minutes, explaining their choices and campaign. Bertie eloquently explained that nowadays one language is not enough- and in fact can be incredibly limiting. His main message- go on, take a risk. Learn a language and see where you end up- you'll be surprised what doors open for you.

And so the teams had 150 minutes to get creative. Each team had an ipad loaded with iMovie, Garageband and Pages and could choose how they wanted to present their materials. Armed with a poster packed with QR codes, including to Gourmandine's website, to the project blog ready loaded with example viral videos, an iMovie guide and later with a basic set of ideas for a presentation, the teams found a quiet space in the language department's rooms and set to work. Or, in many cases, set to a mild state of panic. Here they were confronted by using language for a real purpose, eek. Yes their teachers were there but they were (fairly) strictly hands off. The ideas and the language were student driven- and some of them were amazing.

The first hour was mostly spent faffing. Very little concrete progress was made. Groups of (mainly) boys huddled around their ipads and achieved very little. And then all of a sudden things kicked off. Logos were drawn, filming began in earnest and interviews were taking place in every quiet corner of the building and beyond. Bertie was a busy boy, much in demand! It really was a delight to behold- these were groups of students, of hugely varying abilities, genuinely engaged in a language creation task. I admit it, at times I really was proud of what was going on.

At 1pm teams were invited back into the main lecture theatre to "present". Given that this was the first time any of us involved had put on an event like this using ipads this section of the day was not as slick as I'd have liked it to have been, but I'll come on to that probably in a separate post. That said, it still worked, and worked really well- with HUGE thanks on that front to the skill and knowledge of Kelda and her techies Dan and George, again from ISCA. They were superb, cheers guys. We really wanted to focus on the fact that these teams, just like in business, had a deadline to meet and if they weren't ready there was nothing anyone else could do- they'd just have to go for it. And, on the whole, they really, really did. Even down to the fact that they were in charge of their own lunch times- and most of them worked straight through, munching on a sandwich whilst rehearsing for a language performance- in my experience a real rarity.

So having watched the presentations and ads, a choice had to be made. And for me undoubtedly the right decision was made to announce Devonport High School for girls as the winners on the day (please please watch their video, it is superb). Their video really was a shining example of creativity- it was so different, so visually attractive and so watchable, really well done, girls. 

But the day winner was only a small part of the "event". The real goal was to send the buzz around languages back to the schools and really build something special. And so the real winner will be the team whose ad receives most views / listens / hits by next Wednesday at 5pm, thus going through the actual European Day of Languages on Monday that we couldn't do physically due to the start of Fresher's week. So the teams are trying to find every way possible to drive traffic to their materials, thus publicising languages across the school, with the teachers not having to do anything at all. And with 1 video already haven broken through the 1000 views barrier in under 20 hours and a number of other videos close on their heels it really seems like they're hard at work, whilst the comments section on the blog has been exploding ever since! What a day.

But in many ways more importantly, what a day that could easily be adapted, replicated and improved upon anywhere across the country.