“I don’t
know, I can’t remember.”
“Ok, that’s
fine. No problem. How do you say ''I don’t know, I can’t remember.” in Target
Language?”
“I don’t
know that, either.”
In 2012 Dr Florentina Taylor and Dr Emma Marsden of the
University of York undertook a study on students’ perception of MFL lessons and
GCSE uptake and carried out a research report called,‘Influencing the perceived relevance of Modern Foreign Languages in
Year 9: An experimental intervention 9’. In the summary conclusions of
their study they stated that,
‘…Uptake appeared to depend mainly on
pupils' perceptions of their usual MFL lessons at school.’1 (Marsden
and Taylor, 2012)
In the Team MFL/MFLtwitterati, ALL-conquering and
ALL-supporting environment we are in it is wonderfully reassuring to note the
number of amazing initiatives to promote languages across the entire country. The
numbers of events and staggering support is phenomenal; from Routes into
Languages 2 to the World Languages project there are enough positives to shake
a baguette at.
I’m not dismissing all of the wonderful ways that promote
languages in schools as a way to motivate students to opt. After all, a
research report, entitled, Languages at
key stage 4 2009: evaluation of the impact of the languages review
recommendations: findings from the 2009 survey, also found the
following,
‘…factors thought to support uptake
were extra-curricular activities (such as theatre visits, exchanges and trips),
the availability of ICT resources, and promotional activities at KS3 (such as
assemblies, language days and outside speakers).’2 (Filmer-Sankey and
Marshall, 2010:19)
However, this piece focuses on certain aspects of what happens in the classroom to motivate students. I’m not going to claim that we should all wear a Barcelona kit while we’re teaching and pretend to be Lionel Messi in the classroom to get students into languages though. (See the article on the ‘Lionel Messi effect’ in The Telegraph3 in 2014).
Before getting to what happens in the classroom let’s look
at the current curriculum ahead of the 2016 changes as a demotivating factor for students learning languages. Taking the
2012 Language Trends’ survey as a starting point,
‘By far and away the strongest message
emerging was the dislike of existing ‘controlled assessments’ for GCSE speaking
and writing (68 respondents from the state sector and 15 from independent
schools – the largest number of comments from this sector). Respondents
believed they were time-consuming for teachers, demotivating for learners and
not a genuine test of linguistic competence:’4 (Board OBE and
Kinsley, 2013:60)
Findings from the following report; Language Trends 2013/14 The state of language learning in primary and
secondary schools in England also painted a worrying picture for motivating
students to continue learning a language under the current system as one
respondent in the survey put it,
‘As the demands for memory skill in
GCSE is so high, the least able have simply given up.’5 (Board OBE
and Tinsley, 2014)
Here we go again. The demands for memory skill. It must be
some form of irony that the complaints about the current system are forcing
their way into our own long-term memories. Agood job Controlled Assessment is going then, isn’t it?
Well, yes it is…but it doesn’t mean an end to teaching as
a means of ‘motivating for memory’.
In Visible Learning
and the Science of How We Learn Hattie refers to Willingham by discussing
that a reason why students don’t like school is because school makes students
think and that our minds are not geared towards thinking. Hattie refers to
thinking needing a lot of effort and goes on to say that this is related to how
much we can recall from our long-term memories.6 (Hattie, 2014:5-6)
If ‘We are motivated by knowledge gaps, but put off by
knowledge chasms’ (idem) as stated by Hattie then, put simply, why some
students don’t like languages can be related to students’ suffering from a lack
of enough language in their long-term memories and subsequent cognitive
overload that their self-efficacy is undermined.
With all this in mind and my obsession with all things Doug
Lemov and practice-related I’ve put down a few potentially self-efficacy
diminishing and consequently demotivating scenarios in the MFL classroom and
potential strategies to ensure that students are being motivated by knowledge
gaps and not demotivated by knowledge chasms. These will be in the next post!
Notes
1 Taylor, F., & Marsden, E. (2012).
Influencing the perceived relevance of Modern Foreign Languages in Year 9:
An experimental intervention (Research report). York: Centre for Language
Learning Research, University of York.
4 http://www.ucml.ac.uk/sites/default/files/lang%20trends%202012.pdf
(accessed 9 July).
6 Hattie, J. and Yates, C.R.G., Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, Routledge, 2014,
pp.5-6.
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