Michelle Panting, Primary Languages Consultant
for Swindon Borough Council, reports on a
successful joint project involving a primary and
secondary school in her region.
One primary school in Swindon has developed a simple and
effective peer assessment approach to language learning, as part of
a joint project with a local secondary school. The
project uses ICT and a software tool called Making
the News, freely available to all schools up and down the
country from their grids for learning.
Using Making the News, schools can create a mini
website that can feature work uploaded by pupils and
teachers. This can be anything from sound files, Word documents and
PowerPoint presentations to videos and animations. The work is
then open for anyone in the world to comment on. This can be
children's primary classmates, previous primary pupils now at
secondary school, parents, grandparents, partner schools abroad,
teachers and secondary teachers.
At the beginning of the project, the teachers
asked their primary pupils to write a short paragraph
talking about what they had been learning recently and their
opinions about learning French. Whilst this was mainly done in
English, many tried to include some French.
These are a couple of examples of pupils
first entries:
|
Bonjour les amis ! Je m'appelle Jack. J'ai dix ans. J'aime
jouer au Football Americain. J'ai un chat mon chat s'appelle
Kipper. Mon anniversaire est le vingt neuf avril. Quel age
as-tu?
Au revoir!
|
|
Bonjour,
Last year we learnt about food. This year we are learning about
French schools.
Between the three of us we have deux chats. French is sometimes
confusing because they have funny lines and we think it is called
an accent but we are not very sure. Also, when we speak French we
have to remember not to pronounce some letters.
Au revoir
|
All of the schools' Making the News community were invited to
comment on the entries. Year 7 pupils at the secondary school were
particularly encouraged to comment and to provide constructive
criticism. Examples of feedback these pupils gave include:
|
Wow! I am so impressed with your French. You have written
everything in very good French. Très bien, Jack!
|
|
Bonjour je m'appelle Josh. You could have done your
paragraph with a bit more French.
- j'ai un chien mais j'avais un chat
- j'ai un frère et une soeur j'ai habite Swindon j'ai onze ans mais
j'ai presque douze.
|
|
I like your work it’s good a place to improve to write
j'aime maybe for favourite things.
|
The schools then moved on to designing a unit of
work that would end with primary pupils writing and performing
their own weather forecasts. The Year 7 pupils then
watched video recordings of the reports and commented on
them. The result was an extremely enjoyable, motivating and
challenging activity.
By providing them with a real purpose for
their language learning, this simple and easy way of introducing
some very informal means of assessment has increased the motivation
of learners in both Year 6 and 7. The Year 6 pupils have pride
in their achievements and are enjoying the opportunity to show
off what they have learnt to their peers, family members and future
teachers (and anyone else in the world!). The Year 7 pupils are
motivated by their role as the ‘experts’, providing
constructive criticism of how the Year 6s could improve their
work.
This approach to assessment has proved
so successful that the primary school now plans to incorporate
Making the News into their French scheme of work. Each term, pupils
from Years 3-6 will work towards a final outcome, which will then
be posted on the site.
As the site develops, pupils will have an
online record of their learning in French throughout Key Stage 2
and develop a relationship with their future
secondary teachers. In turn, secondary teachers will gain
a very clear understanding of what their new pupils have learnt at
primary school and the language learning skills and strategies they
have developed. This opportunity has been welcomed and
the secondary school is now encouraging other primaries in the
cluster to get involved in making some news of their own!
Find out more about the project and the resources created by
visiting Swindon's page on the CILT
transition project website.