Learning To Listen, Listening To Learn

I wrote the week before last about my experiences with gap-fill dictation in class , and where I felt it took my pedagogy. That also inspired me to look really hard at the new ‘section B’ of the new GCSE exam. Here I’m going to look at the two specimen papers for AQA French, German and Spanish and see whether we can infer from them exactly what the exam board really is trying to assess here. I’m not going to go into debates about how dictation in French is by definition harder than it might be in German or Spanish, but try and dig into what’s properly going on here. (A tangent. I think the exam boards do a lot of great things and it’s a bit of a thankless task, but I would LOVE it if the commentary provided a justification as to how they created the questions in the paper and what research or evidence this was based on. It seemss a pity that we have to second-guess like this, and the commentary that they do offer is piecemeal and cursory.) Anyway, here goes.  Exam structure Within ...

It’s half term, and that’s a time when a lot of us might relax a bit, and with that comes a wonderful opportunity to think more widely and loosely about pedagogy, as we enjoy a week’s pottering, spending time with family, having lie-ins, or whatever else we are doing. For me it’s definitely a time when I have the headspace to mull over what’s happening in my teaching and my students’ learning. I’ve written before about how difficult it is, once you understand a language, to remember what it was like when you only had partial understanding of that language. I would say it’s even harder than, say, remembering what it was like when you couldn’t walk, or talk - I suppose because we all have experiences in our adult life of moments when those become impossible. A challenge! So we play a passage to our students and we make perfect sense of it. But our students’ perception is something very different, and my work is constantly trying to get under the skin of that student perception. So over h...

  Dictation is an old thing come back around in the curricular pendulum swing, and as we all know in the UK languages-teaching world, all students from year 10 and below will have a dictation test as part of their listening exam. There are some teachers who are quite against it, but I’m not one of them. I tend to see exams in terms of washback and feel it can only be good that there is more emphasis on forming the sound-spelling links and attention on the tiny processes of listening. The foundation paper awards 8 marks out of 40 (ie 20%) to these five dictated sentences, and 10 marks out of 50 at higher (hence also 20%).  So today I want to talk about the exercises one might do building up to dictation, and whether these are the best way to go about it.  On Friday I was doing a listening gap-fill with my year 10s. It had come out of the Active Hub book and I had looked at it and quite liked it. I had a few interesting pedagogical moments, though, which are worth sharing. ...

  What are the new GCSE listening papers like? Notes from an intermediate listener French is my first foreign language and some time ago I went through the French Higher listening paper noting the nature of the questions, the traps, and trying to second-guess the reasoning behind the question-setting. Today I have done the same with the Spanish paper. I took my Spanish GCSE in 2012 the summer before I began my teacher training, as I thought it would make me more employable. Since then I’ve occasionally had to teach Spanish as far as year 9, and I have done my best to chat in Spanish with Spanish colleagues. I dropped three marks on this paper. That means my experience isn’t quite that of a year 11 taking the paper, but I certainly didn’t make perfect sense of it.  (An aside. I have been in touch with AQA to ask if I can get involved in some way with the listening papers but have drawn a complete blank. My back-and-forth correspondence with them was almost kafkaesque, which is ...