Skip to main content

Back to the A* issue

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-24031437-pupils-say-non-to-languages-because-its-too-hard-to-get-an-a.do

Clare Seccombe kindly tweeted a link to the above article in the Evening Standard. It's the severe grading issue raising its head again, but especially the question of A* grades. We have known for a long time that at GCSE modern languages are the hardest subjects to achieve high grades in. At A-level the picture is similar, but with a particular issue with regard to A* grades. I won't go over old ground here, as I have blogged about this before, but I was browsing an old Ofsted report from our school the other day. It dated from 2000 and referred to GCSE results from the year before. French results were particularly good, with a third of our cohort of about 120 students getting A* grades (about 40 A* grades). Last year the equivalent figure was 12.

I find it surprising that the claim is made that standards have remained the same. It is not true. Because the number of pupils entering for MFL has fallen hugely over the last few years, following the decision to make MFL optional at key Stage 4, it has been hard for the exam boards and the monitoring body (now Ofqual) to maintain the same standard for each grade. There are relatively more able students taking languages and far fewer less able candidates. This trend has not been accounted for to a great enough extent.  Essentially, it has got harder to achieve A* grades at GCSE. Alongside this, it is apparent that A* grades at A-Level in MFL are also too rare.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel for students and teachers of MFL at GCSE level. As the number of entries rises again with the advent of the Ebacc, then maybe we shall see a gradual return to the patterns of the late nineties.

It is so disappointing that we cannot trust the Ofqual and exam board statisticians to get things right.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,