MFL & INCLUSION

LEARNING & TEACHING
prerequisite skills

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In my project work with schools it has become increasingly clear that many of the barriers faced by pupils who appear to be struggling are due to the fact that they do not possess the necessary prior skills. If we fail to identify and remedy that deficiency, nothing else we do to promote progress for those pupils is likely to be effective. An example:

In a school in where the MFL department was keen to develop reading skills in French with a small number of S4 (15/16 yrs) learners who were struggling, a teacher from pupil support department was brought in to work with the group. After a term working on reading skills, when the pupils were still displaying reluctance to use a dictionary to help them interpret the text, the teachers decided to look specifically at dictionary skills, beginning with familiarity with the alphabet, alphabetic sequencing etc. use of headwords, etc. These all turned out to be very shaky, so the second term was spent on exercises to strengthen these skills. As a result, the pupils' scores for in reading improved and their results in the Reading paper at the end of the session exceeded all expectations. The MFL department is currently engaged in embedding dictionary skills in all language programmes.
The teacher has since written up this experience as a case study for publication in the Scottish Languages Review:
http://www.scilt.stir.ac.uk/SLR/Current%20Issue/SLR14Bleasdale%20final.pdf
The story was picked up by the Times Educational Supplement. See the story here:
http://www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2327018

We came across many more examples of situations where the existence of prerequisite skills was taken for granted but where they were in fact lacking. The following paper on teaching prerequisite skills is based on the experiences of teachers and post graduate students working in Scottish schools.

You may like to read what Valerie Thornber has to say about the need to explicitly teach the small high frequency Words which we assume pupils will pick up - but often don't (again, from the Scottish Languages Review):
http://www.scilt.stir.ac.uk/SLR/Current%20Issue/SLR14Thornber-V2.pdf

11.8.09 Dictionary Skills
A very helpful download from the Easy Learning Resources section of Collins website. Intended as a guide to using their Easy Learning French Dictionary, it contains lots of useful advice.
http://www.collinslanguage.com/extras/resources/easy-learning/french.aspx
 

14.9.09 Telling the time
An annotated lists of websites for learning how to and practising telling time (in English, mainly - but that's a start) is available at http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/07/23/the-best-sites-for-learning-how-to-tell-time
 

8.6.10 Basic dictionary skills
Thirty-two activities based on OUP's Oxford Learner's French Dictionary. Free to download from OUP's website:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199127436.do
 

SOUND BITE:

We must be prepared to start from where pupils actually are,
not from where we would like them to be.