Learning To Listen, Listening To Learn

This post will be a reflection on an experience I had in the classroom this week with my year 7 French group. In it I will attempt to ‘think aloud’ what happened and what I could learn from it in future teaching of listening. It is a mixed ability group of 30 students who began French in September - about six months ago. They have five lessons a fortnight. The back story We have just begun a run of lessons on comparatives: in practical terms, this means using the phrases ‘plus xxx que’ (more [adj] than), ‘moins xxx que’ and ‘aussi xxx que’. I had introduced the ideas and we had worked quite a lot on the vocabulary in the previous lesson, and all of them had completed a vocabulary-learning homework including these key words within the structure (eg plus grand que / moins intéressant que / aussi beau que).  I wanted to move on to doing a series of listening exercises so that the class could have a lot more comprehensible input before they began to output their own sentences comparing...

  This post is inspired by a brief exchange I had on BlueSky with Carmen. The exchange looked like this: I was a fairly late arrival into languages teaching, and have been teaching ‘only’ 14 years, having spent the first 18 or so of my career doing all sorts of things to stoically ignore my calling to the classroom. (But that’s a story for another day.) The point of even telling you this is to remark on the fact that in my own secondary education, topics were simply not a thing until A level; and even then I only remember doing ‘topics’ in French, where I did a non-literature course. My German A level based on literature was still not structured through topics.  Yet something changed between when I stepped out of the classroom in 1989 and when I stepped back in in 2011, and that thing was the dominance of topics-based pedagogy. And it now seems so utterly entrenched that even with the new GCSE and some discussion against moving away from the ‘silos’ that a topic-based approach...