#ililc

Steak et le chaton minuscule, Edmotho and Vader's March. These are the only things I have taken away from the Links into Languages ICT conference this weekend. Not really, I have met some amazing people and I have learned a lot and I mean a lot. 

Firstly I have learned that although Darth Govius and his Sith Lords are trying to turn education to the dark side, there are many, many rebels who are fighting the good fight and it is great to see a convergence of ideas and beliefs. I would like to summarise a couple of points for Mr Gibb and Mr Gove

1. Children require more than knowledge, they require transferable skills

2. Children are not memory machines, they are people who need an emotional and intellectual buy in to education in general and language learning specifically - terrible topics and contextless grammar is not a good diet

3. Excessive pedagogical dogma supported by old books out of a skip is shit - we need a blended pedagogy which is distinctive to learners on different parts of their language learning journey

4. TeAchnology is the future like it or not

5. Passionate teachers are worth their weight in bankers' bonuses -please treat them as professionals and with respect

6. In the words of Michael Jackson; "the children are the future"  so stop messing with their lives and leave it to professional educationalists, just because you went to school does not make you an expert in education.

I have learned many other things which I need to digest and I will blog about in the future but for now I just want to send a huge linguists love-in shout out to (in no particular order) @bellaale @reesiepie, @blagona @lwelsh @lisibo @wendadeniji @mariefrance @icpjones @suzibewell @joedale @zenahilton @amandasalt @froggyval and my dad and my bro @bootleian and @chrisfullerisms (and so many others!) Keep on rocking in the free world kids!

You can watch my presentation on Languages:Reboot here if you are interested!

 

 

Comments

[Alex Bellars]

big shout out to you too, mate...great weekend, and an honour to share it with so many inspirational people!

[Steve Smith]

Hello Chris

I watched quite a bit of your presentation up to about the 1 hour mark. Thanks for posting it and sharing. A few points occurred to me:

1. I thought your argument about the exam boards dictating our content in lessons was a bit outdated now, since we can choose what we wish to do for CAs. No need to talk about household chores for CAs, though they might turn up on listening and reading papers.

In terms of what content might interest 16 year olds, this is tricky, because different kids are interested in different things. This has always been a problem for course book writers. I do believe that we suffer too much from the backwash effect of GCSE and teach to the test too much. Hard not too, with targets to meet etc.

2. On the perfect tense preceding the imperfect in a SoW, this is not because the NC levels dictate it. It was ever so, because the perfect is much more productive and useful than the imperfect. True, it is harder, but ease of learning need not always dictate the sequence.

3. You were quite critical, I think, of teacher-led styles. But don't we need to provide lots of "comprehensible input" to allow some element of natural acquisition to occur. Now, maybe this works less well with pupils of lower aptitude, but if language teaching becomes too much based on the social and analytical, then you remove an important element of language learning.

I'm afraid I didn't get beyond the 1 hour mark, so I hope I am not off the mark with these comments.

Cheers

Steve

[Chris Harte]

Hi Steve, thanks, as ever, for your insightful comments, although we do not always agree, it is always thought provoking to receive your critique!
Just to answer your points...
1. The exam boards absolutely dictate content and as you say yourself any of the topic vocabulary could come up and I would argue that the topic areas are not intellectually stimulating enough for young people and it defies understanding why they are so removed from the target language speaking country. Disasterously, in my opinion, there is no particular demand even at AS level now to learn about the clture of the language.
But just to be absolutely clear, my point, although absolutely critical of the exam bards choice of content which I believe is more outdated than my critique of it, my main argument against the exam boards is the fact that they dictate the type of learning that has to happen (as you say we are all measured and judged) i.e. mass memorisation without the need to truly understand the language you are producing. Surely the assessment needs to be designed to assess ability to understand and manipulate language rather than the ability to memorise it.

2.Perfect tense - I agree that the dfficulty should not necessarily dictate order, but I would argue that by building up really strong grammatical understanding we should rexamine the sequence of teaching grammar. I would argue that it could be more effective to go from the present to other non compound tenses (I don't accept the point that it is less useful than the perfect by the way) simply becasue when you do introduce the perfect tense and learn it really well, you can then move on to other wonderful tenses like the plu perfect, future perfect and conditional perfect! I am still at the embryonic stage of thinking abut this but will keep blogging about it but just because "it was ever so" does not mean that it should ever be!

3. I absolutely agree with you, I argued that we need to provide and support learner access to "comprehensible input" (I called this the holistic/atomistic stage) and although I was flippant about some teacher led styles, it was much more to do with the desired outcomes of those teachers (I, the expert, will teach you 10 pets) not the fact that they were teacher led. I hope if you watch the end of the video you will see that I argue for a blended curriculum rather than a dogmatic one.

I really enjoy the level of challenge you bring to the debate and hope we can chew the fat in person some day!
cheers
Chris

[Steve Smith]

You are right that exam boards dictate content, but we don't have to always teach what's in the spec, thankfully. I've always hated that backwash effect of assessment. Agree that CAs are seriously flawed and encouraging rote learning, though this can support weaker students, just as the old learned talk did.

With most of our students, given the limited time we are given for the job, we'll always struggle to get spontaneity or much internalised linguistic competence, which is why the boards allow rote learning.

I'll try and watch the rest of the presentation.

I wish in our job we had more time for discussion of methodology.

Cheers

Steve

[Lingi]

Great post. I especially liked number 6 and can remember how my parents tried to evaluate the stuff I was learning in school and how they didn't get many things. As a parent it is important to trust a teacher. If a parent does not trust the teacher, why should the kid?