Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

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Kraut
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Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby Kraut » Fri Nov 26, 2021 9:45 pm

found at reddit

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... uage-gcses
Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Making pupils in England ‘grind through list of words’ will not encourage uptake, DfE told


Proposals to make pupils in England learn a set of up to 1,700 frequently used words as part of government reforms to French, German and Spanish GCSEs have been rejected by headteachers and exam boards, who warn they will not “inject new life” into the study of modern languages.

Nine organisations with an interest in the teaching of languages in secondary schools have written to the government, demanding a rethink of plans to reform the teaching and assessment of modern foreign languages at GCSE level.
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby Kraut » Fri Nov 26, 2021 10:09 pm

How many words is 1700 words?
ON APR 8, 2021 BY DETERMINED LINGUISTIN MFL IN THE UK TODAY

It is proposed that in GCSE, students will be expected to learn 1700 words at Higher Tier. How does that compare? Well, it is less than the 2100 words that Realschule (equivalent of Foundation Tier) students learning French in Germany (for more comparisons, see this post)

https://transformmfl.wordpress.com/2021 ... 700-words/


What this shows is:

Higher tier students will be given a vocab list at least 44% smaller than the vocab list for O-level – and that’s a conservative estimate.
This disparity is actually very similar to the difference in attainment observed by Milton: in his study, GCSE learners knew 40% fewer words than their O-level counterparts did 20-40 years post-hoc. This new proposal engineers in a continuous decline in standards.
The O-level list was already weighted towards high frequency words – by a considerable margin. The idea of prioritising frequency is not new.
BUT the O-level list has roughly 50% high frequency words and 50% low frequency words – precisely the proportions recommended by researchers such as Milton (“An effective textbook is probably going to introduce frequent andinfrequent vocabulary in roughly equal amounts” 2009)
The total number of high frequency (top 2000) words on the list from O-level and the proposed GCSE are very similar: 1200 ish each)
But what O-level had was 1000 (at least) additional, extra words, in the lower (beyond the top 2000) frequency bands, which related to thematic and topic words (the ones which allow us to talk about things)
Remember that this Thimann book is an under-estimate of what was taught (he excludes cognates, grammar words and very common words), whereas the proposed GCSE list is exhaustive for both productive and receptive purposes.

If you want to see an example exam paper from precisely the year when students might have been using this vocab book, click here.




https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ ... npaper.pdf

1967J-French-OLevel-QuestionPaper
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby einzelne » Fri Nov 26, 2021 11:58 pm

1,700 is a drop in the ocean, really.
I think by the end of high school, a student needs to know at least 5k most frequent words.

Of course, it shouldn't be a mindless cramming. SLA exerts need to organize textbooks and adapted books on the basis of frequency lists. Sadly, I don't see any effort in that direction.
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby smallwhite » Sat Nov 27, 2021 3:47 am

Since my first self-taught L2, I’ve always liked GCSE study guides and vocabulary decks. I find the vocabulary useful and easy to grasp.
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby zgriptsuroica » Sat Nov 27, 2021 9:38 am

We have similar conversations here in the US about getting more students interested in learning a second language with similar results. The one thing I don't really see come up is suggesting making it more immediately useful by facilitating access to cultural output. I went through 6 years of French classes (not much in the scheme of things, but not terrible for public school here), and I never saw a single French novel or film in the school library. You didn't do much better in the public library in town, where you might borrow the Criterion Collection DVD of Les Diaboliques but you wouldn't find a single book in French. My classmates who took Spanish didn't fare any better in the school library, though I'm glad to say the public library had improved quite a bit in that regard. So you needed to sit through five years worth of classes before getting a ratty copy of Huis clos for a couple of months, and that was it. I think we watched two films in the 6 years I took it. It was prohibitively expensive to get French books on your own at the time (I needed to travel about 2 hours to get to the closest store that sold or could order them, and then it would often be $40 for a paperback if it was published within the last decade), so if you already weren't really feeling it and Sartre didn't just set your heart aflutter, there was a pretty high barrier to entry to just dip your toes in the water. Not to mention the fact that after spending $20 on train fare and another $30-$40 on a book, it might turn out to be too advanced for you, or just flat out suck even if it was on your level!

While I don't mean to project the shortcomings of our methods elsewhere, perhaps we might do better across the board by giving students a sense that a second language is something that is actually rewarding and engaging in its own right, rather than just being another subject to suffer through before forgetting entirely or fluff to pad out your CV.
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby SpanishInput » Sat Nov 27, 2021 8:46 pm

Kraut wrote:found at reddit
Making pupils in England ‘grind through list of words’ will not encourage uptake, DfE told


I'm in favor of learning words in order of how common they are, but it's best done in the context of dialogues. Not "grinding through word lists".
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby Ug_Caveman » Wed Dec 08, 2021 9:17 pm

einzelne wrote:1,700 is a drop in the ocean, really.
I think by the end of high school, a student needs to know at least 5k most frequent words.


I'd note GCSE's aren't the end of high (secondary) school in the United Kingdom, for most kids A-levels are. GCSE's are a qualification taken at 16, A-levels at 18 and the difference between the two is significant in terms of both breadth and depth of content.

And even then, I'm not sure someone with an A-level in a language would have 5000 words under their belt...
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby Le Baron » Thu Dec 09, 2021 4:08 pm

I agree with smallwhite that GCSE guides are generally good (I used some of them in school!). It's possible they have been greatly revised since then. GCSE was still quite new when I was at school and they ran alongside the old CSE and O Level and some people were doing O Level exams even as late as 1990. The common assumption was that the GCSE syllabus and exams were not as rigorous as O Levels. It's a fiery topic.

I won a scholarship to an 'independent school' after I'd been at a general comprehensive for two academic years. There was a bit of tension with these schools which were reluctant to abandon O Levels and also used outside qualifications like those offered by the Cambridge board. I did O level French and though I admittedly had some advantage, I saw both papers for the run-up to mock examinations and I think the O Level was harder. In the stock room there were old textbooks from the 60s and 70s (some still in use) and I remember one series by someone called 'Whitmarsh'. I think these books were more complicated than the replacement GCSE texts. However I wouldn't be quick to criticise because I think the GCSE texts presented things in a much clearer way.

We were already reading through both novels and plays at age 13/14 (I still have the hardback copy of Les mouches we used). So after about two years. Before that they had things similar to easy readers. In German we were already reading through simplified books in the first year. Latin was only taught in a very small group and followed the old O Level syllabus almost exactly. Maybe someone here did 'GCSE Latin'?

Okay enough autobiography. The Guardian article is short and even though it says 'grinding through a list of words', the DfE spokesperson says: vocabulary, phonics and grammar. So a bit more than just words. In some way that's how languages were taught in the past and the reality is that lots of conversational practice happened. However in the newer syllabuses they tend to only do what is necessary under pressure. This approach is not restricted to GCSE or the UK.

I don't even know why they bother teaching the same languages. Why don't they teach Polish or Urdu or some other language where pupils will actually get to use it? Why not Welsh since it's an official British language and a train ride away? Why not start with Esperanto for a year (preferably before hitting high school) then jump to French? They seem only to be ticking boxes for this subject.
Last edited by Le Baron on Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby DaveAgain » Thu Dec 09, 2021 4:19 pm

Le Baron wrote:I don't even know why they bother teaching the same languages. Why don't they teach Polish or Urdu or some other language where pupils will actually get to use it? Why not Welsh since it's an official British language and a train ride away? Why not start with Esperanto for a year (preferably before hitting high school) then jump to French? They seem to only be ticking boxes for this subject.
The British Council produced a report suggesting a ranking of languages the UK should prioritise, Languages for the Future.
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Re: Teachers reject plans to have pupils learn 1,700 words for language GCSEs

Postby Iversen » Sat Dec 11, 2021 10:40 am

I can't go into the discussion of the GCSEs since I don't know them. But I'm happy that I don't have to teach languages to kids and youngsters who hate the thought of being taught languages (even their own). So to avoid open rebellion you can't suggest to those types of pupils that "grinding wordlists" (or Anki) might be necessary to reach even the extremely low goal of 1700 words - and we all know that a passive vocabulary of 1700 is totally insufficient in practice. So then you have to stress things like interesting input and interaction, and I won't say those aren't necessary (although I found the 'small dialogues' nauseating while I was a school kid myself), but I doubt that there is time enough during ordinary school hours to get through all the input you need to pick up even those pitiful 1700 words. So basically the teachers have an impossible job to do, and in their desperation they just fire loose ammunition in all directions to seem progressive and smart -and those pupils who really want to learn languages efficiently are left to fend for themselves.

As for the choice of languages: in Denmark you have to learn (more) Danish and English, but the third language shouldn't be the same for everybody. Simple logic would say that German should be more common than it is, given our geographical position and the economical force of Germany, but apart from that the optimal situation would be to have a genuine spread of languages - plus of course the heritage languages of our immigrants.
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