Effective strategies to support novice and expert learners in MFL: The power of modelling
Written by: Sylvia Bastow
4 min read
Silvia Bastow, Subject Leader for MFL, Ercall Wood Academy, UK
Every academic year, many language teachers are faced with a similar scenario: in September, they take on a new Year 10 GCSE class, they spend months progressively teaching a range of vocabulary and grammatical concepts in context, which they regularly retrieve, space and interleave – for example, the perfect past tense within the topic of ‘holiday, travel and tourism‘, the future tense within the topic of ‘school and education‘ and the conditional case within the topic of ‘world of work’.
After a period of time, they come to believe that their students are finally ready to attempt their first GCSE-style writing task. However, when the papers are taken in for marking, they feel rather disappointed with the outcomes of the exercise!
Despite the fact that the students were familiar with the mark scheme and the success criteria, many of them did not answer all the bullet points required by the task and did
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