germanics > GerManiacs?

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After a brief interlude, technical issues have been resolved and the germanics blog is now to be found under msmfl.wordpress.com and www.germanics.co.uk, once the nameserver changes take effect in the next few days. 

The posterous version of this blog will no longer be updated. 

Thank you for your patience. 

Found in the bottom of my classroom cupboard:

Another post, another article, this time of MYLO in SecEd, ('Hello MYLO, hello world' 12 May 2011)    

Back in January, I reviewed this fine book on behaviour management techniques for JoTTER (Journal of Trainee Teacher Educational Research) of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education: My attention has today been drawn to the author's review of my review, on the behaviourguru blog. I have to say that every word of it is true and that it would be an honour to work alongside him in the future in some way on his next tome!        

Spotted in a Supermarkt near you (maybe)! 3001 ml bottles of fizzy pop, because shops are only obliged to take returns and pay back a deposit on bottles up to 3 litres and some shops/manufacturers simply can't be bothered to deal with the returns. Perhaps Germany's squeaky green image is becoming a little jaded?

My roving reporter in Germany has unearthed some goodies here. Firstly, if a black cat crosses your path on Friday 13th, then presumably you are then cursed with bad luck. The German lotto picture suggests though that if a white cat does the same, you will instead be blessed with good luck. And more excitingly (hold onto your seats dear readers), a bag of junk mail, flyers, magazines, newspapers and other 'authentic material' goodies. In my house, the recycling bin comes a poor second as a container for junk mail, take away menus, adverts and free stuff that comes through the door. Instead they get shoved in a massive envelope and sent every few months to Roving Reporter, who then reuses the envelope to send me his collection of junk. True recycling! The bits and pieces then get used to their natural death in language lessons in both countries. There is always a reliable and steady supply of more!

My pet project this year with Year 9 has been to introduce Group Talk as a regular and coherent part of lessons, in other words to get Yr 9 beginners confident enough to use German in the lesson to have spontaneous conversations and to begin to use the language to actually communicate with each other, rather than just parrot back what they have learned.

I developed these Group Talk strategies partly to help Yr 9 gain enough confidence in German to enable them to feel that taking it at KS4 despite only having learned it for a matter of months, was no longer a scary concept. To put this into a bit more context, we are an Upper school in Suffolk and students arrive in Yr9 from middle school, having learned French there since Yr 6.  They are therefore relatively confident about their abilities in French (which they continue at our place) but everyone picks up German as a second language. We have just one year to get themselves up to scratch to do GCSE. Take up at KS4 has in the past benefited French more than German, but this year the numbers appear to be more equally balanced. 

When I conducted an absolutely unofficial and unscientific survey amongst who have chosen German, many did say that they felt at ease with the language as a result of the emphasis on the speaking work that they had done in the lessons with me.  So: result! The resources that I used with the groups are available on Scribd and also on TES resources. 

• The ppt simply takes students through the stages of the lesson.  It is very student busy and PLTS/thinking-skills heavy, and other than chopping up a few cards and going round with a video camera to record their efforts, teacher input is relatively low.
• Students work in groups of 3-5 (any more and it gets cumbersome) and have a pack of Group Talk cards and a worksheet per group.  They then follow the activities on the worksheet, recording their answers and ideas in their books to refer to later.
• Encourage them to use their knowledge of phonics and pronunciation to work out how to say what is on the cards and also their language detective/reading skills to work out what the cards mean.
• By the end of the 50 minute lesson, many students were constructing their own mix-and-match conversations with the cards and were super confident about using tone of voice and intonation to really emphasise their speaking.  Some were even able to go further than the cards and adapt the language to make their own conversations.
• Whenever we work on a new topic, the Group Talk cards come out and students practice discussing their opinions and reasons about whatever we have covered. We have for example just done food, and so students were freely able to discuss their likes and dislikes about food, ask each other questions and tackle complex answers.

All resources can be downloaded from the TES here.