Skip to main content

"One size fits all" policies

I'd like to offer you three examples of where "one size fits all" education policies have a deleterious effect on the practice of modern language teaching.

The first is school timetables.

There was a time when most schools designed their timetable around periods of about 40 minutes, using double periods for practical subjects and games/PE. Later many state schools moved to a 25 period week with each period lasting one hour. This was in part, I feel sure, because of the popularity of the three part lesson (now largely discredited). In an attempt to raise levels in literacy and mathematics it was felt by the educational establishment that teachers should teach lessons based on a starter, main course and plenary. Model lessons were designed for primary teachers to ensure that even inexperienced or less effective teachers would be able to deliver a successful lesson.

Secondary schools latched on to this, and for this reason and others, many schools opted for one hour lessons. This did language teaching a great deal of harm, as it is generally well attested that the "little and often" principle works well in modern language teaching. In many secondary schools these days students get only two contacts a week for MFL, sometimes less, and this makes it hard for pupils of all abilities to retain language and to build up a momentum.

My second example is the system of controlled assessments designed for GCSE in England and Wales.

When it was decided that all subjects should have a 60% component of controlled assessment, MFL was pretty well obliged to allocate 60% of marks to speaking and writing, at the expense of listening and reading. Now, there are all sorts of issues with controlled assessments involving rote learning and reliability of the assessment, but more than this, we have had to downgrade what is arguably the most important skill in language acquisition, listening, and give greater weight to the least important, writing. This has undoubtedly distorted teaching.

Lastly, let me mention modules at AS and A2 level. These were designed with certain subjects in mind and there is no doubt that maths and science results have risen over the last few years partly because of the modular system. Modules have come under fire even in these subjects since it is claimed that they produce students with less overall understanding of the subjects. In MFL they make no sense, since a student's competence gradually build up over time and the sensible moment to assess is at the end of the course. The result of the policy is that a good deal of time and money is wasted on students re-taking AS modules in the upper sixth year.

What can we learn from this? "One size fits all" appeals to our sense of order. There is elegance in simplicity. But elegance does not equal efficacy. Modern language students and teachers have been ill served by reforms designed for higher status subjects. Future reforms should anticipate more skilfully the consequences ensuing from them. Timetabling and assessment need to be more flexible and cater for the needs of all subject areas.

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,