german sentence builders conti

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. Reading and writing exist in space, which means that you can go back to the text at will. Using sentence builders means that there is lots of scaffolding for weaker learners, but you can also stretch the more able learners. Our number one priority was to address students’ engagement and to stabilize numbers into sustainability. Is it too crowded? The students will benefit from it in the end and this is what matters the most. 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 you use the sentence builder to model the content, you will of course use your voice to emphasize the very same items and others. Two brilliant posts, as inspirational as and fascinating and the previous ones by Julia, Chloe and Heather. I make sure I use all three media when possible. Bouncing ideas off my colleagues (e.g. Dual coding, whereby images and words are used in combination, helps massively in bringing about stronger retention. They were too crowded, contained no English translation (taboo for many authors) or other means to establish meaning. The Sentence builders, if designed and used effectively, make this all-important chunking process much easier, whilst the LAM activities we propose, not only make the explicit teaching of phonics nearly redundant, but make language learning much more fun and durable. Finally, I am the proud father of Catrina Jade Conti. 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. We needed it to serve our purpose, not the other way around. An OFSTED inspector has recently said to me that SBs make language learning too easy. For instance, in the sentence builder above, I could have chosen to have ‘que’ in a column of its own. Is this the clearest font? (7) opportunities for seed-planting of upcoming material – by the same token, just as you can recycle old material, you could put in the sentence builder chunks and grammar that you will expand on in a lesson or unit that you are planning to teach in the not too far future. We have not used a textbook at KS3 for years, as we found the content dry and the activities not relevant and not adapted to our students. What follows is an account of the steps I have taken to redesign the KS3 French Curriculum at the school where I work. I have always been fortunate to have worked and work with teachers who are forward thinkers and open-minded and who have embraced the “contification” of the lessons. 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. This is where the post-its came in handy. However, dealing with absolute beginners, I am simply putting it together with ‘se llama’ in the chunk because I want to use ‘que se llama’ as a whole unanalysed building block. The turning point for me was when this particular class asked “Can we do this one again tomorrow?”, “What do you have in store for us today?”, “What new activity have you found that we are going to try out?” – they were fully on board, so it was time to move forward and share the approach with my other groups and the department. I do not know if my students will ever need their acquired French in a real-life context. Although quite divergent in many ways, they converge on the same core principles which I swear by and constitute the pillars of EPI. All of these things have led to a purposeful classroom dynamic, following a bespoke Scheme of Work, and referring to agreed department principles. 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? (4) cognitive load and ease of visual access – (Is it easy on the eye? 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. Change ). Is it too crowded? 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. 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. 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). Language Gym reinforces our scaffolding our activities at any stage of the learning sequence. 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. (3) input enhancement techniques (Have I made what I want the students to notice more distinctive?). $9.06 #43. 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. My previous jobs include: Head of Italian, Head of French and MFL subject leader at various secondary schools in England (at primary and secondary level). Have you made progress?”. They require thorough planning, the creation of resources and time to reflect on your progress. Most sentence builders I see do not contain the L1 translation or images which  make the learners’ access to the meaning of the SB content possible. As a side note, it was also important for us to have common communicative functions across our 3 languages: French, Chinese and Japanese. The Verb Trainer will provide you with valuable practice in the conjugation of French, Spanish, Italian and German verbs. 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, My favourite read-aloud tasks and how I use them. What are students going to want / need to do? 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). 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. Establishing and embedding a key number of universals within the KS3 SOW enables recycling and interleaving e.g. In certain cases, with very basic sentence builders introducing places, colours, animals, food, etc. 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. Every single student found the translation useful, especially ‘dodgy translation’ (word-for-word L1 translation, even when grammatically wrong in the L1 – see below). Check out her Sentence Builders blog in particular. This fits in with the maxim that there should be 95% comprehensible input allowing pupils to thoroughly process the language being taught. I also purchased the Language Gym books in French & Spanish. We adopted the communicative approach combined with task-based learning assessment in order to contextualise their learning. 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…. But Listening exists in time, aural input lingering in sensory memory for barely two seconds; hence, when you use sentence builders to present language through listening you must be aware of anything that may add an extra cognitive challenge. Statements like “it’s too hard” and “I will never speak the language fluently” are all too common. That’s how we acquire language – any language. 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. 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. verificare - translate into English with the Italian-English Dictionary - Cambridge Dictionary Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. 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. I should add that this year, remote learning has pushed us further in every aspect of teaching, but particularly with technology. We had reached a stage where students were reflecting actively on their own thinking, processing and learning. There may be enough new stuff in that topic for everyone to feel as though they are getting something out of it. When one lets go of the need to be perfect, magic happens. 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. Modern vehicles offer a new experience of mobility. (10) visuals that may support the learning of the target vocabulary (e.g. 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”. 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. After yet another “Mosaic Reading Translation”, he called out “Miss, French is not that hard after all”. I decided to start from the bottom and work our way up, one year group at a time. How you combine or isolate items in each column can help facilitate learning by drawing attention to them or to the fact that they are usually used in combination with specific items. 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. I mixed the new activities with the ones that the students were used to, to introduce them gradually. 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 sentence builders I see do not contain the L1 translation or images which  make the learners’ access to the meaning of the SB content possible. I have a strong grounding in Latin and ancient Greek, two 'dead' languages that have helped me a great deal in life! 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. 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. What more could we ask for? 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. 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. 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’. In order to access our locker room materials, please login with your credentials. If we can continue to harness students’ enthusiasm, interest and motivation that can only be a good thing. By learning them as a chunk they are learning them as an item; so there will be more chances that ‘je suis allemand’ will be learnt as ‘jesuizalman’ rather than ‘je’ / ‘sui’ / ‘alman’. The very next day I asked my students, both in my more able and less able groups, through an anonymous questionnaire, if they preferred my SBs with or without the translation. 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! Many of which I share in my workshops around the world, have shared in my second book and will soon share on this blog. 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. Do I have a set of flashcards or other visual aids to support the teaching of the SB’s content?) I started my journey by delivering a first unit according to The MARS EARS cycle, which I would like to outline here. I have an in-depth knowledge of teaching and learning across the curriculum including the latest approach of teaching more from context with parallel texts and sentence builders (Gianfranco Conti style). This particular, “What have you particularly enjoyed? A Tale of Cokefee, Sleepless Nights and Lexicogrammar. This painstaking process often carried out through less-than-engaging techniques has failed students and teachers alike for many decades. I researched Language Acquisition, Essay Writing, Error Correction, Learning Strategies and Learner Training impact on L2-writing proficiency under the supervision of Professor Macaro, Head of the Oxford University Department of Education and Editor of the prestigious ' International Journal of Applied Linguistics' both on my Ph.D and on a large-scale research project in Oxford comprehensive schools (documented in Macaro, 2001's book). 5. 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 Finally, we were seeing all students consistently engaged and excited, because they were feeling successful with their own learning. Sentence building - An extensive collection of teaching resources for KS4 German language topics and skills including grammar, speaking and translation. I have devised sentence builders, although I have tended to opt for relatively short phrases, mainly to facilitate mini-whiteboard work. 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. I researched Language Acquisition, Essay Writing, Error Correction, Learning Strategies and Learner Training impact on L2-writing proficiency under the supervision of Professor Macaro, Head of the Oxford University Department of Education and Editor of the prestigious ' International Journal of Applied Linguistics' both on my Ph.D and on a large-scale research project in Oxford comprehensive schools (documented in Macaro, 2001's book). 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. (5) phonological and orthographic similarity of the lexical items (are there items in here that could cause cross-association because they sound or look too similar?) 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. The sentence builders made by some prominent authors on TES and elsewhere fell short in this regard. Using a variety of activities which follow the MARS/EARS structure (e.g. Lots of resources (including lots of freebies!) Traditionally, this has been done by teaching words and then the glue (i.e. The Švejk reconstruction, finished in 2011, gave the building visage, coziness, but especially comfort and good gastronomy. Following this, we move on to the STRUCTURED PRODUCTION – we continue to recycle chunks but this time we are gradually moving away from the Sentence Builders to get them ready for being more spontaneous. Proudly, I presented a sentence builder to each of my classes. 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. 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. Of course not. 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. Right, where are those post-its? you will be able to add in images instead of the L1 translation. And because they rely mainly on the aural medium (in synergy with visual coding) to introduce the new constructions and vocabulary, sentence builders and L.A.M. ( Log Out /  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. The sentence builders made by some prominent authors on TES and elsewhere fell short in this regard. 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. They were too crowded, contained no English translation (taboo for many authors) or other means to establish meaning. We kept on using multiple teaching tools, but the pedagogy underpinning them became clearer. 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. 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. This was our starting point. 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. As a consequence, engagement in the class will be mixed. 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. I give ‘Dojo’ points in younger years for a certain number of quickest and most correct WB ‘hands up’ for example. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. 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. 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. 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. (10) visuals that may support the learning of the target vocabulary (e.g. They mark it themselves and we look for perfection in terms of spelling and accents etc. I didn’t use these techniques with any other classes, despite the fact that they were showing results with these lower ability classes. Heather Morgan (former Head of Languages at The Chantry School, Worcestershire). 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.

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