Category Archives: languages

Six new teaching activities I think worked #mfl

Click here for more blog posts about teaching.

Here is a short list of six types of teaching activities that I tried for the first time last term that I think worked for me and my classes and that I will definitely be doing again.

Quiz quiz trade

I found out about this from this blogpost by MonsieurM and immediately thought it was an ace idea and put it into some of my lessons. I’ve used it in observed lessons and those who saw it liked it to, and awesomely I’ve started to hear about it being used in other MFL teachers’ lessons at school now too. If anything I might have used it a bit too much last term, and I have to rein it in a bit.

The idea is simple. You make a set of cards. Each student has their own card with a French phrase and the English translation. Students need to be familiar with the vocab before starting. Students stand up and find a partner. A reads the French phrase, B has to respond with what that means in English. A uses the English on her card to verify and to nudge B in the right direction. Once guessed, B reads her French phrase and A responds with English. Once both have done this, they swap their cards and go off and find another partner to begin again.

The activity lasts 8-10 minutes and you can then ease them into writing sentences of their own, starting with the last card they had, and then putting the vocab together themselves.

An example set of cards is here on the TES for teaching “In my bedroom” in French. It’s easy to make up the phrases you need – if you have 10 items of vocab in a lesson, plus 3 sentence stems such as “In my room I have”, “In my room I don’t have”, “In my room I would like” you can easily get to 30 unique cards.

You can also play quiz quiz trade getting the students to start off by writing their own cards, but you have to accept that not all of the cards will be perfect…

Dice writing

There’s something about giving dice to students that makes them suddenly more interested. If you gave them a vocab sheet and said, “randomly pick a sentence from each category and write it in your book,” sure, some would do it, and most would not settle to it. But if you give them a vocab sheet where the items are numbered and let the dice choose how to put the paragraphs together, somehow they are magically sucked into the activity, calm descends, the room goes quiet, and you can walk around the class watching children who definitely do not yet know how to write in the past tense in French, magically putting down perfect paragraphs into their exercise book. Once you remove the dice and support again, no-one will ever know from looking in their books, that they didn’t come up with the paragraphs themselves!

An example sheet is here on the TES – we were doing “describe a past weekend in town”. There are 1-5 items to choose from – if they threw a 6 they had a free choice of what to write.

There is a tiny danger that completely random selection of sentences meant slightly nonsensical paragraphs, for example: last weekend it rained so I went to the beach and sunbathed. The kids were delighted at some of the combinations and quite aware of the nonsense.

Differentiate up by giving a selection of mid-to higher level connectives and asking able students to include them in their paragraph.

I followed this activity with a paragraph of their choosing after the random one, and a homework where, having written the paragraph, they had to learn it off by heart to reproduce it under test conditions in the next lesson, as a skills practice for both their end of term assessment, and longer term, the sort of controlled assessment currently done at GCSE. (Although by the time these students reach KS4, who knows?!)

This idea was something I got and simplified from Vincent Everett. I can’t now find the exact resource, but he had a writing activity about a murder mystery, and who had killed whom with what was decided by dice.

Crossword reading comps

This came to our department from an NVQ languages training course and all of us have used it since. You take a text, and set the language teacher’s staple activity of “Find the French for…” Then you make a crossword out of the answers. The students will know they have got the answers right if the crossword works, so the activity is essentially self marking.

I have uploaded one I did – again from the KS3 topic of describing a past weekend. This one, I think, was pitched wrong – this was much too difficult to use to introduce the past tense, and even my most able students struggled to complete the activity.

You can make the crosswords using Puzzlemaker – once you have the grid, you can copy and paste it into a Word document. If the answer is a multi-word phrase, you have to delete the spaces when you input it into the crossword compiler: jemesuislevé I got up

Snakes and ladders

Another example of giving them dice… There are tons and tons of snakes and ladders grids on the TES, and using them in a language context is fairly easy. Groups of four students play snakes and ladders, and the squares without either snakes or ladders have pictures which they have to turn into a TL phrase.

Trichez!

Another idea I got from Monsieur M that I first thought would be limited to able older students, but realised could be used with younger, less experienced students too so long as the topic was strictly constrained.

You have a deck of cards some of which have French phrases on them, and a few have “Trichez!” (Cheat!) on them. Students draw a card. If they have a phrase, they read it out and place the card face down on the discard pile. If they have “Trichez!” they have to make up a phrase and say it and place the card etc etc. The challenge of the game is that they have to make up the phrase and say it without the other players spotting what they are doing. I gave them plastic counters as a way of keeping score, and played this with year 7 as part of a series of lessons on telling the time.

You can see how if you were doing this as part of revising ready for a speaking assessment you’d use a wide variety of different phrases from the topic. If you doing it with younger students, you just need to use only a very narrow set of phrases. Time telling was ideal. You might want to explicitly model strategies for playing with them, eg explain most people will get a trichez card at some point, so before you start playing, have a time phrase in your head and use that when the trichez card comes up.

Simple dice game

Having decided to use dice, I had been borrowing them from a colleague. I thought a needed a set for my own classroom to avoid having to borrow them too often, and bought a set on Amazon. The day they arrived, I didn’t have a lesson planned to use them, but I did have a lesson that ran short so I quickly invented a simple game.

As it happened, I had vocab lists on the board divided between four boxes, so I numbered the boxes 2, 3, 4 and 5 and set the rules. Throw the dice. If you get 2-5, you have a say a German phrase from that box, and your partner has to say what it means in English. If you throw a 1 you have to stand up, if you throw a 6 you get to sit down. (and then, to clarify – if you throw a 1 when you are already standing up you stay standing up; if you throw a 6 but you are already sitting down, you stay sitting down.)

Now all I need to do is think of some strategies to make them be more careful about not throwing the dice stupidly so that they fall off the table.

Oh, and they love the dice and there seems to be a tendency for them to go missing, so I have to be careful to count them out and count them in so I am not losing them.

And finally…

So here are some lovely activities I did last term that I enjoyed and I think my students did. They were new to me, but they might be old hat to you.

Strangely there are a bunch of things I did on teaching practice last year that I assumed I would use regularly and have just fallen out of my routines. Must bring them back! Battleships is the obvious one.

French mnemonics

When I came back to seriously working on my French after many years of neglecting, I found there were some words and phrases I could not get correct without checking every time, and so I started to try making mnemonics for myself to get acceptably consistent.

Of course there are some I was taught that still stick in my mind.

And there are one or two I am trying out to see if it improves my students’ accuracy, especially when it comes to tenses.

Here’s my top five for starters.

je m’appelle

I couldn’t get my head around the spelling of this so made up a rhyme:

When you spell
qui s’appelle
It’s got two Ps
and it’s got two Ls

(My students now always spell it with two Ps and two Ls, but still manage a dazzling array of different combinations of other letters, spaces and apostrophes, so we are not out of the woods yet. Gemappllle!)

vingt

Never sure of the spelling of this one, especially the n and the g. You just have to remember you can’t get to 20 without having some vin.

There’s an R in futuRe

Almost universally we teach the futur proche these days instead of the real future tense, and students need to use the correct form of aller along with the infinitive: je vais faire mes devoirs or je vais jouer au foot. There are many ways of getting it wrong but a common one is to use a conjugated form of the verb: je vais joue. So I tell them you can’t have futuRe without R – you need the form of the verb with an R at the end. A little complicated by RE verbs, but if they’re far enough through to be using those as well, they can probably cope.

Where wears a hat

Ou and où get mixed up. They are or and where. But which witch is which? I was taught that the longer word (in English) has the accent but where wears the hat is quite nice too.

I prefer wears a hat too

Je préfère needs accents either side of the F that form a hat. This gets messy when students have both je préfère and ma couleur préférée in their Wortschatz.

Have you got any awesome mnemonics? Feel free to add them in the comments.

Calligrammes and the ties that bind

I found this this afternoon as part of a useful post on how to use war poetry in MFL

cravatte

And rather liked it. As she explains it came from a period when poetry was beginning to be a written rather than oral medium, and so poets could experiment with how things looked on the page.

Follow the link above for some super examples of students’ work writing poems in French related to war.

Anyway, apart from being a nice piece of work, I approve of the sentiment in the words.

That painful tie you wear, decorous and civilised: take it off if you want to breathe.

A crazy thing happened at Creswell Crags

Yesterday, the first Sunday of half term I wanted to do something countryside-y, spurred on by PM’s reporting of autumnal colours and conscious that the trees outside my house had lately been hugely denuded by frost. There can’t be many days of leaf left in 2012.

I decided on Creswell Crags, a prehistoric site on the Notts/Derbyshire border, that I have been meaning to visit since first becoming aware of it, probably by reading about it on Liberal England.

And so we set off. Google Maps told me there were just three different roads between here and there, as I live off the A60 and the site is off the A60 north of Mansfield. The Mansfield bit was a little more complicated than that, but we arrived in good time.

I had prepared the change I would need for the car parking machine. Two pound coins. Once there, the machine ate one of them and refused to return it whilst refusing to recognise the second as a valid coin. When I went inside to ask the ladies at the reception desk in the very swanky new visitor centre, they told me not to worry, said there’d be no clamping today… and asked me if I spoke German.

What a strange, random question in the middle of North Notts. I admitted I did, and that I was actually a German teacher.

And they pointed in the direction of an elderly-looking lady with an awful lot of baggage, and told me she appeared unwell and they weren’t at all sure what to do with her.

I went over to talk to her. At first her speech was mostly English and peppered with the odd German word, but when I persisted with questions in German she switched to German. I didn’t understand all she said. I knew I recognised most of the words but the speed she spoke at and no repetition, I didn’t always have time to understand the meaning before she moved on.

The staff had been concerned because she didn’t appear to have a car, and Creswell Crags is remote, all the more so on a Sunday when the Robin Hood line doesn’t run and the local station is closed.

They were concerned most particularly with what the lady planned to do this evening. How was she going to get away from Creswell and where was she going to sleep? How could she possibly get away? Did she need someone to phone her a taxi?

I pointed out to here there were only two hours before the visitor centre closed and she had to start to make plans. She said she didn’t want to be bothered, she was always surrounded by people making a fuss, she would be fine so long as she could take her heart pills. Yesterday people had phoned the police about her and that was really not necessary, she would be fine. And was there anything she could do at Creswell for free?

So I found out, and told her (a temporary exhibition of a fossilized mammoth tusk on loan from the British Library, a walk around the lake.) And there’s a challenge to my German. I don’t have the words for hyena or mammoth at the front of my mind.

We found out for ourselves when the next cave tour was and went to have a posh cake while we waited. When we came back to buy our tickets and meet our guide, it turned out our cave party was to be us, our guide, and our new German friend.

It seemed during the tour that her understanding of the English guide was pretty good, helped no doubt by a German-language information sheet they had been able to find at the visitor desk.

And the tour was fascinating. Turns out this part of Notts was the most northerly part of Europe which didn’t completely freeze during the summers of the last ice age. Everywhere north of here was under up to a mile of ice and completely frozen. But balmy melted Creswell still had a summer in which vegetation grew, so herbivore animals migrated here, followed closely by hyenas and carnivores, and prehistoric man, who chased and killed the mammoths with flint axes, spears and by basically chasing the mammoths of the edge of a cliff until they splashed in the valley below.

They lived in the mouths of the caves, had fires on the outside, but not inside because the smoke would have been too much, and survived barely into their thirties because of the toll the nomadic lifestyle of chasing mammoths across Europe took on their bodies.

The tour took us into the shallow limestone caves, lit only by torches on our helmets, and the guide got a fascinating hour of information across out of essentially an empty cave and a few props. It was quite expensive, I think, but actually worth the money. And don’t mention the Giant Cave Spiders.

It would have been nice to see the cave with the prehistoric art in, the only discovered in England, and that only in 2003. But at this time of year that particular cave is out of bounds as it is filled with hibernating bats.

During this time, the German lady was mostly listening, occasionally asking questions that showed she wasn’t quite understanding everything but getting some times, and I would occasionally interject in German when I could and when it was necessary for safety, ie, don’t stand up until you get so far because the roof is low.

She was occasionally chuntering things in German I half understood, and asking some slightly odd questions. Do berries grow here? Are there witches and voodoo? Do you know the myth of Prometheus and the stealing of fire from the gods? When do you think that was? Was Prometheus here amongst the cave men? (…!)

As we walked back from the cave her chuntering became almost continuous and I started to piece together what had happened to her in the last few days. She had tried to stay at Edwinstowe youth hostel, but couldn’t as the place was booked out by a family all weekend. She’d caught a Stagecoach bus to Creswell and had tried to leave her bags in a pub whilst she wandered around the area on foot, but the pub had not let her. She’d wound up at the visitor centre after that. She was looking for a campsite (but had no tent) or a bunkhouse (as today was warmer than yesterday) but could not afford a hotel or B&B.

Once we got back to the visitor centre it was clear that the staff by now were very anxious about what to do with her. They were ten minutes from closing and she did not have a plan about what to do next. We tried to talk her through her options, and eventually I offered to give her a lift, either to Nottingham or Mansfield, which we had to drive through on the way home.

She was adamant she did not want to return to Nottingham. She had been there before and couldn’t find a bed. She’d visited the backpacker hostel but refused to say there as they didn’t have separate men and women dorms. We wondered whether we could get her to stay at the Gresham, a dismal hotel by the railway station, but one with rooms at a backpacker’s budget – at least I seemed to recall from signage outside. I tried to explain that if she wanted to make onward rail journeys, she would probably have to change in Nottingham anyway as most trains from Mansfield would go there.

But no, she didn’t want to go to Nottingham.

On the car journey away from Creswell she recommenced her talking in German. By now I was driving so my concentration was divided, and her speed and diction were not helpful. But I gleaned some facts of her life. She lived in Germany (but refused to be specific about where). She had been given notice to quit her house and had to find somewhere new from next January. She had come up with the idea of moving to the UK, because all the British people she had ever met in Germany were nice. She had been over here sort of backpacking (but not really with backpackable luggage, we could barely fit it in the car) for several months. She’d been in the Lake District, Norfolk and Lincolnshire and somehow wound up on the coalface in Nottinghamshire. She didn’t seem to have any firm plans for returning to Germany and had no idea where she would sleep. She did have a budget and was reluctant to go over it on any given day, hence refusing offers of hotels and B&Bs. It seems she had spent a lot of her budget for that day on a £6.50 cave tour. Her English was adequate but not great, and it transpired she’d learned it recently at night school as her own school days did not include languages.

Ultimately, we left her at Mansfield bus station, after her repeated insistence that she did not want to go back to Nottingham.

I’m not at all sure that what we did was in general a Good Thing. We did at least take from isolated, cold, woodland location and drop her in a town, but we didn’t really give her the help she needs. Then again she said she’d had previous contact with the police and that hadn’t made any lasting difference. Would help from the German embassy have been a good idea? Ultimately is she in charge of her life, even if she wants to wander alone, aimlessly, with no fixed plans for the evening, alarming she comes into contact with?

One of the questions from the staff at Creswell was, with the ellipsis very much in place, “Is she… alright?” And I don’t know. She didn’t know where she was (although we could fix that when she got out her map, and oriented her with respect to Buxton and Mansfield). She had no plans for the evening and no apparent understanding of the need to make them. She seemed lucid and able to speak, but then again she talked at me in German for about an hour without really wanting to make conversation, and simply refused to answer some of my questions, like where are you from? Do you have a ticket to return to German? Even what is your name…?

And I don’t suppose we will ever hear how this story ends, which is a little unsatisfactory. I hope she does end up all right.

New language teacher on Twitter

Veteran languages ICT guru Joe Dale retweeted a language teacher new to Twitter asking for interesting teaching and learning links.

I had a quick peek through the last few days worth of social media and responded thusly:

https://twitter.com/alexfoster/status/239043718697598976

A slightly obfuscated post for sure, so here is a bit more detail.

How Children Learn: Portraits of Classrooms Around the World

Just a fab series of photographs taken around the world, including the UK and on many other continents, of what classrooms and children look like. There are many things the same and some striking differences. What struck me? Several countries’ school uniforms look distinctly military to me. How interesting.

Dom’s MFL: Venn Diagrams and Thinking Skills

I’m a big fan of Dom’s MFL page. He’s a languages teacher with some interesting ideas. He blogs quite infrequently, but when he writes something the post is always worth reading. His idea of using Venn diagrams is awesome. It can be done with very little preparation, can be done on mini whiteboards, (une ardoise (ie a slate, also used in the French phrases around having a tab in bar) in French – what is the German for them?) good for thinking skills and as a plenary in that it gets students to show you what they have understood.

ClassDojo

Class Dojo is an awesome website I am itching to try with students. Little monsters represent your class on the board and you can use it to give them positive and negative behaviour points. Pretty cool just like that. For me it will help me learn names; for them it will help reinforce my classroom rules. Best of all? You can log into it simultaneously with your whiteboard and your mobile phone, and allocate points to students as you go around the class.

Zondle.com

Zondle.com is a website for playing games with vocab lists. You can set a learning homework for students to go and play games. You invite them using their school email addresses and you get a record of how often they have played the game. Once you have taught the website a vocab list, you can play any of a number of games with that one list, so students can choose the games to suit them. There are stereotypically boy games and stereotypically girl games as well as more neutral types, and because the students choose, it’s up to them whether they stick to stereotypes or not.

Ideas for teaching and practising telling the time

This is not from a blog I read, but from a link from the MFL Resources Yahoogroup, a fairly high volume mailing list of MFL teachers with some awesome ideas and a lot of help and support. (In the last few days there has been a great deal of mutual support about GCSE results that have been less than expected, and which is stressing out many practitioners)

The blog post itself has over a dozen ideas for teaching telling the time, which is one of those topics which is important but that isn’t immediately easy to make interesting.

A few wider points

1) I have wasted a lot of time on the internet in my summer holidays. But lots of good teaching ideas are going into my mind too!

2) I think increasingly it isn’t so much about making resources as building up places to look. TES is an obvious one (albeit with lousy search). MFL Twitterati and the MFL Resources list are also great.

3) MFL Twitterati 10 minute challenge. Click the link. Spend ten minutes a day/week looking at what other practitioners are doing. Something there will surely inspire you. If you are inspired, join in the conversation and share your own good practice.

4) There’s no way I will be able to keep up with these groups and soc med practices in term time! Bank your good ideas now.

(At least) three things that are wrong on so many levels

1) Theft in multi-storey car parks ((c) Tim Vine)

2) The leaning tower of Pisa (*) (@facesake)

3) Farting in lifts.

Also, getting caught telling filthy dyslexia jokes in the staffroom by the headteacher as he washes out his mug.

For the record, a student colleague kicked us off with the notion that DNA stands for National Dyslexic Association. And so I chipped in with my series of similar spelling jokes recorded over the years. The are as follows:

Dyslexic pimp – bought a warehouse
Dyslexic devil worshipper – sold his soul to Santa
Dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac – stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog (Jasper Carrott)

(Which also leads to the necrophiliac sadistic guy into bestiality who wondered if he was flogging a dead horse)

I also forgot the fabled slogan of the DNA – Dyslexics of the world – untie! – but I did get in the joke stolen from @Pundamentalism just this morning – his filthy reimagining of the old standard cheesy chatup line “If I could rearrange the alphabet I’d put DNA inside U.”

Fourteen years ago, I caused a bit of offence on Usenet with a series of schizophrenic jokes not hugely dissimilar from the ones above. Worryingly, the text of what I wrote on the Archers newsgroup fourteen years ago is still easily findable and I have just been rereading the subsequent exchange. In a way, I don’t know what’s more disturbing – that I can recall the exchange fourteen years later, or that it’s so easy to find throwaway conversations after such a long time. I rest assured that anyone going for dirt on me would have an awful lot to dig through.

And the substantive point, made by Simon Townley so well, still remains: outsider jokes like the schizophrenic and dyslexic ones are funny, but also have masses of capacity to offend those directly affected. They are almost always completely inaccurate in their characterization of the nature of the other. And so my conclusion: I will probably carry on telling these jokes, but they are almost certainly better placed in the pub than the staffroom. I have no idea what sort of sense of humour my present headteacher has.

(*) I have been consulting style guides to work out capitalization, but Guardian and Wikipedia silent thereon.

Tomorrow is the last Tuesday of teaching practice

For the last 14 weeks of term time I have hated Tuesdays because it is my “busy” day – I have been teaching four lessons out of the six slots on the timetable. It has caused me a lot of anxiety most weeks preparing for it. Two of the classes I only see once a week, and I share with another teacher, which is difficult because it is harder to build relationships, work out what they are capable of, and build up a head of steam. The other two are the only classes I see more than once, but have been difficult in their own special, other ways. All four groups, for different reasons, make me doubt any nascent ability as a teacher I might have. Consequently weekends and Mondays over the last few weeks have been getting harder and harder.

Knowing that tomorrow is my last ever one of these is a bit of a relief. But then again… in my mind is the ever present knowledge that next year, starting September, if I get a job that is, a four-lesson day will be at least the norm, if not one of an NQT’s lighter days. If I’ve struggled this much now how will I cope next year? There’s a variety of opinion about whether the NQT year is easier than the PGCE one, but the main conclusion I seem to be drawing is just that it is differently hard. Out go the essays and assignments, the bittiness and the gaps caused by sudden recall for university days; but in come the hard graft of maintaining class control by yourself, the longer term work with groups, the responsibility for young people’s futures and new and scary ways of being accountable to colleagues, headteachers and parents.

There is no question this has been a challenging year in which I have been questioning my sanity, my plans for the future and my sense of self. There are many aspects of working in schools and teaching which I am really enjoying. The classes that let you “feel like a teacher” where you can sense the progress and see your students engaging with the curriculum. The first time the “difficult Y11s” seem to like you enough to acknowledge your presence in a corridor rather than sullenly averting their eyes. Staffroom banter is awesome and working with other teachers is great. After many years away from languages, working in a community of linguists – at school, at university and online – is really inspiring.

But is it enough to counter the aspects of teaching that are causing the sleepless nights, the loss of appetite and the early morning up-chucking? No job yet for next year (although 3 interviews in schools have been productive and give me hope). I’m not yet very good at class control, behaviour management and even name-learning, from which any sort of maintenance of discipline and good teaching hangs, is a constant struggle.

I dunno.

Ask me next year.

Tom Bennett letting go #pgce #mfltwitterati

An awesome post by Tom Bennett talking about how a shocking night of street violence helped him find better equilibrium as a teacher. But the bit that really jumped out at me was at the beginning:

When I began to teach, I went home every night feeling like weeping, and spent lonely weeks racked with self-doubt and dismay. Children wouldn’t do the tasks I asked, and what kind of man was I? It was one of the lowest points of my life.

By my second year I wasn’t drowning any more, but I was barely breaking the surface. I fell into a familiar vortex of fail: my classes were all hard; they barely seemed to work when I asked; as time passed I did less and less about the behaviour because nothing seemed to make a difference, and I couldn’t cope with the effort of doing anything about it. As things got worse and worse, I circled the drain, hating myself, despairing for my ability as a teacher, and my ability to help children many of whom, seemed not to want to be helped. In many ways, I took their behaviour home with me every night, and it burned.

Oh boy, that sounds awfully familiar – and I’ve barely finished teaching practice and have had relatively little time swirling around the vortex of fail. Even Tom Bennett felt like that? *The* Tom Bennett? And it took several years to deal with it? And it was a street beating that helped him fix his classroom practice?

Why does anyone do this job?!

Tips on behaviour

Since I registered with the TES Online for job ads and free resources, they’ve been sending me regular emails with links to forum discussions, resources, daily job alerts, and links to blog posts from their wide panel of experts, in my topic and more widely.

I couldn’t possibly follow all the links. Who has time? But I do sample, and I have found some of the information patchy. Sometimes I’m too cynical – sounds like a good idea, but I could never make that work in my classroom. Sometimes it sounds too hard and I dismiss it.

But two links today in an email have been utterly fantastic and had me cheering as I read them.

Firstly Tom Bennett’s tips for new and inexperienced teachers and those who work with us – OMG, awesome! Read through, do! I don’t like everything Tom says elsewhere and haven’t always agreed with everything he suggests, but this article is amazeballs. At the start of teaching practice in particular I was concerned at his “always have a seating plan” instruction – now I’m increasingly sold.

Secondly, Phil Beadle’s specific advice on seating plans and room layouts. Have your tables in groups if at all possible, preferably groups of six. One of the rooms I teach in is in groups, and it is the home to some of the worst behaviour when I am teaching, at least partly because most of the students are not looking at me but at other students and it is really easy to start conversations. But I am increasingly of the view that a group layout is best for MFL if not other subjects, because whenever I plan those lessons I am always thinking more about group and pair work than the other room layouts, because they are already in groups of four.

My day at Languages World #lw2012 #mfltwitterati

Yesterday I spent a day at Manchester University for the Association of Language Learners‘ annual conference, Languages World.

It felt a strange day, and, at the end of a tough term, I wasn’t as fully awake as I could be. But there was plenty of useful and enjoyable information I picked up.

Firstly a session on teaching languages to children with special educational needs. Started off with some theories of teaching and second language acquisition which were similar to what we have encountered on our course, specifically Vygotsky and ZPD and Krashen’s comprehensible input. Moved onto some ways of using flashcards with lower ability students: constrain vocab. Use cognates. Ensure understanding before continuing to further vocab. Play games. Allow students not to speak if they do not want to. Use visuals. Make bar charts out of Duplo. Consider extra ways of being physical with learning – eg don’t write on a worksheet to learn parts of the body, stick post-its onto an inflatable alien. Use inflatable hammer to teach “my X hurts.” The session ended with lots of laugh as we watched Joey from Friends learning French.

Secondly, a session on “Blagging Blogging” which extolled the virtues of intensive computer use in teaching languages. Have a departmental blog, have a password protected blog for every class. Set and receive homework online. Get students to use their school email to send in their work and set homework which gets students to peer assess other people’s homework. It was suggested that Posterous was the best free host for schools because it’s the main one that lets you have lots of different blogs off one email address.

There were also endorsements for Prezi (better than powerpoint for presentations), Quizlet (a flashcard creating vocab learning site), Zondle (a series of vocab games that produced participating stats for your class, and so could be set for homework, and also that allows (eg) girls and boys to practice the same vocab playing radically different sorts of games)

Our session leader blogs at MsMFL and tweets here. Her resources and handout are on her blog.

I found this session most inspiring and this is the Big Thing that I most want to try when/if I get my own classes in the autumn.

Then we lunched, and exhibitioned, so I got a bagfull of stuff, of which notable highlights for good quality stuff were the Goethe Institute and the European Commission, both of whom had books for free and the offer of lots more help. I thanked the Goethe Institute for helping me with my own A-Levels, which the nice lady said was good to hear.

After lunch was a slightly damp-squibby “Secondary Show and Tell” session, which I had chosen because it was broader than the ICT Show and Tell or the German Show and Tell, but in truth, maybe three simultaneous Show and Tells was too many? No-one in the Secondary one had actually arrived prepared to show anything, and so those who presented did so on a rather more ad-hoc basis. It was an enormous lecture theatre with barely 20 people in it; and we heard from a) a lady from the north east teaching in a school which could not afford text books for French and who had therefore created her own scheme of work which looked pretty fine, from what we saw of it. b) a chap of some experience who showed a text manipulating game, as an activity that does not need much prep: start with a paragraph of text and remove either 1, 2 or 3 words from it. If 2 or 3, words must be adjacent. The remaining text must make grammatical sense, but you can change the meaning. c) me, talking about my magic tricks lesson. Should have taken the hankies with me! d) another student teacher talking about a lesson learning how to use Prezi – took 15 mins to teach and then in the following 45 mins, the students created good presentations about monuments in Berlin.

Then, almost entirely just because I wanted to change rooms, rather than for any more serious reason, I went up to a small room on a higher floor to hear a Spanish guy talk about bilingual education. There were some nuggety gems (eg bilingual education has beneficial effects on preventing/postponing Alzheimers [citation needed]), but partly because it was a postprandial graveyard slot and partly because the talk was greatly more theoretical than practical, I think the presenter lost most of his audience and got only a fraction of the way through his slides before his time was up.

Back down to the large lecture hall for the final panel discussion which included Joe Dale by Skype from the middle of the night in Australia, a guy from NAACE and a lady who uses Second Life in her classroom… Some of the fun bits included – a recap from what was being said about ICT and MFL in 1992 (eg “OMG! Wordprocessors!”) – a fab bit of awful machine translation about Madonna in Hungary that was debunked by a twitter person in the hall almost immediately – a challenge – do you think ICT will completely have revolutionised your classroom by 2022? (only two people present did, most people thought we’d still be mostly doing some sort of chalk and talk)

Worth a paragraph of its own if not a whole separate blog post – Joe Dale challenged people there to do the “10 minute mfltwitterati challenge” – spend 10 minutes a day for a week reading the twitter feed of the “mfltwitterati” – and see if, by the end of the week, you have found it worthwhile. All you have to do is go to this address and read for a few minutes. If you do that, you will get lots of support and lots of ideas. And, of course, the sense that the mfltwitterati are both teachers and ordinary people with a diverse set of interests. When I tried my first daysworth of looking at their messages for 10 minutes, I just got a huge wodge of posts about Saturday night TV. In my second attempt just now, I’ve found broadly off topic stuff, but also Miss T Dunne, who has just written a comprehensive review of everything she did at Languages World – and she was taking notes and can remember everything!

Some choice quotes from the day: “It has been clinically proven that boys cannot learn languages without dismantling a biro” (ahahahahahahahah!!!!!)

“Talk to the phone, the tourist isn’t listening” (about iPhone based speech translators)