The finished product

Hello again!

As promised, I would like to present to you all the finished product of our hard work. Our completed poster is currently sitting pride of place in Strathclyde’s McCance building as part of the 3rd Year Project Exhibition.

As a group, we went down the printed route, rather than hand-crafted, as we felt that this would be more suitable for our material. After a solid 8 hours in front of a computer with Fraser and Amanda, here is the end result!

We are ultimately indebted to Fraser and the wonder of his Photoshop skills!

We are so happy with how the poster has turned out and feel that it reflects our project perfectly. The sense of pride in seeing it pinned in place really made the hard work worth while!

I am also adding the QR code for our presentation, for anyone who would like to have a closer look at our completed work. In it, you will find some further information about things I did not get the chance to cover in this blog, so it may be worth a read, however, I should point out that it is all in French!

We are presenting our work on Thursday 17th, so we have all of our fingers and toes crossed that we do justice to our work!

Thank you for sharing this journey with us, and for taking an interest in our work.

It has been a stressful semester, but the finished product has very much been worth it!

The poster

Hello! So that is us all up to date!

Now that we are happy with our lesson plan, we have started work on our poster that will soon be displayed as part of an exhibition alongside the 3rd year projects of not only French students, but Spanish and Italian students as well.

Fraser has come up with a rough mock up for us to work from, which looks a little something like this:

As a group, we are leaning towards doing more of a professional poster, however are currently working together to think of ways in which to make the poster a bit more creative and visual. Once we have done so, I will be sure to post the results for you to have a look at.

I look forward to being able to show you all the finished product!

The lesson plan

Hello again, thanks for sticking with us so far! So here it is, our very own lesson plan!

Ideas to incorporate "The Gruffalo" into language lessons

• Read through the book - even just a few pages at a time. First in English, then in French or alternatively French then English. This decision would be left to whoever is taking the class and whatever they feel most comfortable with.
• Both have their advantages, reading in English first will mean that they understand the content of the novel before hearing it in another language. However, children may lose interest this way as they will hear the English and then not pay attention to the read through in French (as they already know what has happened). 
• Alternatively, a read through of a few pages in French (so as not to overwhelm or bore young minds) may be more beneficial as their reward for attentiveness would be a read through of the book in English. Doing it this way means that you will have their attention for the pages that are in French.
• Another method may be to go through page by page, English-French or French-English. Although perhaps not the most practical lesson to carry out for a teacher, this would maintain connection between the two languages, ensure that children remained engaged in the story and also simplify the distinction between the two languages, as children would hear a bit of one then a bit of the other, rather than long chunks of each, as by this point they may not identify it as being linked to the English (or French) they have just heard.
• Create worksheets made for different 'categories' of French words. Children would be asked for both the English words and their French equivalents. Examples of categories:
• Animals
• Colours
• Outdoors (woods, trees, grass)
• Example of worksheet:

           ENGLISH: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

           FRENCH: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _







                         
   
      ENGLISH: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

      FRENCH: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
               

ENGLISH: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

FRENCH: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

• Touch and Feel Gruffalo – use to teach body parts (eyes, ears, mouth, nose, arms, legs, stomach).
• Could also be used to teach textures (soft, fluffy, smooth, hard).

• Gruffalo masks – Children will be asked to label parts of the face (continuation from lesson with Touch and Feel Gruffalo). Once they are finished, they can colour them in, cut them out and wear them. 

(available from http://www.gruffalo.com/join-in/join-in/)

Game plans:

• Language games

If the game is to be centred upon The Gruffalo then the idea would be to read the book at first in English and then for a second time in French to familiarise the children with the book, characters and words.

The idea of the game is a match up with flash cards that can be stuck to a whiteboard in a classroom. The cards can contain the animals and other simple words from The Gruffalo book with pictures in order to aid the children in recognising the words.

EXAMPLE:
                       
 



            LE GRUFFALO


                   





 



THE GRUFFALO









This exercise can be done whilst reading the book as well to further aid the children’s understanding. This idea can also be used for colours, animals, numbers and other simple words in order to engage children in learning French.

Use everyday objects (ie soft toys, coloured cups, lunchboxes, anything that is in the classroom) and give an object to each child – write on the board in the classroom the name of each object and it’s colour in English with the French alongside it.

Teach the children to say I have (J’ai) and then the name and colour of their object e.g. J’ai un livre bleu – I have a blue book.

The children could then switch objects and use the “Can I have…?” phrase “Puis-je avoir le livre bleu?” and swap items so they can also use phrases such as “S’il vous plait”, “Merci” and “De rien”. This would give children practice in utilisation of the language by means of actual interaction and conversation.

• Number Games 

1. In order to fully engage the children in both the French aspect of learning as well as the mathematical I would propose adapting an existing game to incorporate the two elements.

The existing game revolves around an “I am X, who has Y?” format but will be adapted into French to appear as the following:

Child 1 – « J’ai quatre, qui a quatre moins trois? »

Child 2 – « J’ai un, qui a un plus quatre ? »

Child 3 – « J’ai cinq, qui a sept moins trois ? »

This was a game which we remember using in primary school in English. It’s very useful in a classroom to increase synchronicity of students as well as demanding shared attention of the class to make sure that the game can continue smoothly. It will improve their number skills as well as their comprehension of French numbers, and maths in French in a more general sense.

The principles of this game are easily transferred further up the school, with more complex mathematical equations, possibly even coming to incorporate algebraic work later on, which would also allow for a degree of alphabetical work as well as number work.

2. The second game is essentially Bingo in French. One child (or a pair) is selected to be the number pickers and draw the numbers, calling them out. This would be more beneficial with an older class to allow for bigger numbers to be used – but equally it can be adapted to only go up to 25 very easily.

The children then have to listen to the numbers and make the connection to their board in front of them, enhancing both reasoning and French comprehension.

The children reading out the numbers also have to be able formulate the number from the ones they draw – maybe even adding in a few phrases likes “La chiffre prochaine est….” to really give them some theatricality to enjoy their time with the language. When a child wins they shout out “Lotto!” instead of “Bingo!”

If there are prizes, this is also another great opportunity to enhance vocabulary, stipulating that a child has to specify whether “J’aimerais la gomme s’il vous plait” or “J’aimerais le crayon”.


So this is what we have created in light of the information we have gathered over the last few weeks. Although we are not teachers, the above is just a suggestion of the kind of material we think would be good to use whilst teaching foreign languages to younger children as it is fun, engaging and interactive as well as being relevant, structured and instructive.

In an ideal world, we would have liked to have extended this even further, and perhaps we will! However, with the time restriction we face in this project, we were unable to include everything we would have liked to, but hopefully this will give you a clear enough example of the things we had in mind. We have sent this to Maureen McKenna in order to get some feedback on our work. Hopefully the results are good!

Check out my next post to have a look and see what work we have been doing for our poster so far!

Discovering 1+2

Hi everyone, thank you for taking an interest in our work so far.

I would like to use this post to talk about the interaction we have had with Glasgow City Council’s Executive Director of Education, Maureen McKenna.

We were very lucky in this aspect, as Fraser was able to contact Mrs McKenna regarding the current practices in place, methods, difficulties and outcomes of modern language teaching in Glasgow. This way, we were able to gain an insight into the forms of education that are currently being practised.

Maureen was kind enough to send us documents and website links about the “1+2” strategy that is currently being implemented in Scottish schools.

This strategy is as thus:

“We will introduce a norm for language learning in schools based on the European Union 1 + 2 model - that is we will create the conditions in which every child will learn two languages in addition to their own mother tongue. This will be rolled out over two Parliaments, and will create a new model for language acquisition in Scotland.”  (Scottish Government manifesto commitment, 2011)

From these documents, we were able to gather a wealth of information in order to aid us in forming our lesson plan. A lot of the information contained in the documents agreed with the points we had made so far. There is recognition of a need to introduce the learning of a foreign language earlier in the education system. The idea of “1+2” is for children to learn an additional two languages at the same time as learning their own native language.

We know that the younger children are, the more receptive they are to new things and new experiences, and have a greater ability to retain information. This is the foundation on which our project is built, and seeing the government’s plans for education in the future was extremely interesting for us and we are keen to see the results of this strategy’s implementation.

In the next blog entry I will include our proposed lesson plan as a result of the research we have carried out!

An amazing find!

Hi everyone! Let me tell you a bit more about the next stage of our project.

Although we were all very excited at the prospect of creating our own material, and the prospect of testing language learning at nursery level, we did indeed need to carefully consider if these things were actually possible.

Firstly, we got in touch with several teaching professionals, a classroom assistant, a primary school teacher and a nursery nurse in order to find out their own personal opinions about how languages are currently being taught.

From these interviews, we determined that although not impossible, nursery was perhaps not the opportune stage at which to introduce a second language. Therefore, we revised our plans in order to appeal to the early stages of primary school, with a target audience of ages 4-7.

In regards to the feasibility of creating our own material, we realised that creating our own children’s story and nursery rhymes was a rather tall order given the time restraints of our project. We would have to rethink our approach!

Instead, I researched the feasibility of translating an existing children’s book. Has it been done before? Could the rhyme element and semantic meaning both be transferred simultaneously? Were there any good examples of these books?

In doing this, I found that translations of well known and loved English children’s stories have been done before. For example, several of Julia Donaldson’s novels have now been translated into French, most famously “The Gruffalo”. The bestselling children’s book, written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, has sold more than 10.5 million copies worldwide!

Whilst looking into this, I came across an amazing find! A 30 year old teacher Laura, who although born and raised in France is of British origin and is a primary school teacher in Switzerland, has started a blog, a lot of which revolves around her own experiences of teaching young children. Her blog gives details of a class she took on “The Gruffalo”, which seemed to be extremely successful. Her method was to read the book first in English, and due to the illustrations it seems that the children picked up the meaning of the story rather well. She then proceeded to read the book in French, their native language.

It seemed to me as though doing something like this, but flipping it round so that in Scottish classrooms we read the French first and then finish off by reading the English, may prove to be rather effective. Laura’s class consisted of 22 5-6 year old, 17 of which were boys, and her lesson was a great success. This shows that perhaps 5-6 is an opportune age at which to begin introducing children to foreign languages, as long as the material is child friendly enough.

We personally thought that rather than attempting our own translation of a children’s book, it would be more productive to use a professional translation of one that has already been done. That way we know that the translation is accurate and the material is indeed suitable for our intended age group.

From the examples we found in Laura’s blog, the link to which I will provide below, we decided that “The Gruffalo” would be the centre focus of our proposed lesson plan. What better way to spark an interest from children than by using characters and stories that they already know and love.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you The Gruffalo!

Here is the link for Laura’s blog that I mentioned above:

Laura's Blog

Please take a look at her fantastic work using “The Gruffalo” in a class.

I also found videos of "The Gruffalo" in French that are worth a watch, even though they eventually didn't make it into our finalised lesson plan:

Le Gruffalo

This was probably the most fun aspect of the project for me so far; as I was able delve into the world of "The Gruffalo" and what made it even better was that it was in French and was perfect for the direction our project was going in.

The next blog update will be aimed at the further research we did regarding the information we received from Glasgow City Council’s Executive Director of Education in order to aid our work.

Please read about it below!

Where is all the fun?

Hi everyone! Okay, so first things first, we had to find out as much as we could about people’s attitude towards learning a foreign language as a whole.

After putting together a survey, we then posted it on social media sites in order to get as many responses as possible.

We basically wanted to find out about the experiences people have had learning languages. What they liked/disliked about it and why, as well as what they thought needed to be changed. The more feedback we got, the better equipped we would be in order to come up with materials that address the problems highlighted in the answers to our survey.

From the results of said survey, we came to the conclusion that people did not find learning a foreign language particularly fun in school. The information contained within the answers confirmed our thoughts on the matter. After exploring the reasons why people did not find language learning enjoyable, we found that a lot of people would have liked more of a focus on culture. Another point that was often raised was the fact that there were no native speakers in schools and that this was a serious flaw, although this falls outwith our jurisdiction.

After doing the survey, we could definitely make a case regarding the effectiveness of current material and methods in language teaching.

Where is all the fun?

This is when we started to focus on creating our own lesson plan that could be tried and tested in a classroom. Rather than coming up with bits and pieces here and there, why not create a structured lesson plan that could be easily implemented by teachers?

The question remained - what would our lesson plan consist of? There was a lot of work and research to be done!

In my next blog entry, I shall give details of some of the research we did and interviews we carried out, as well as the conclusions we drew from these in order to get a better sense of direction in our project as a whole.

I look forward to telling you more about this stage of our work.

Full steam ahead!

Hello again, let’s pick up from where we left off!

After having chosen a topic for our project that we were all happy with, we set about thinking about the different stages that the project itself was going to have.

For example, firstly we would have to research how languages are currently taught in Scottish schools and examine where we feel the flaws are. Then perhaps we could research how English is taught as a foreign language abroad and whether or not methods used overseas could be utilised in order to improve teaching here.

Even without research, we got the sense that the reason why languages are becoming less and less popular in schools is due to the fact that students do not find it interesting enough to continue studying. That was certainly the case for even us! Trying to change this general attitude was now the basis of our project.

How can we remedy this? – An opinion we shared was that the integration of modern language teaching is introduced at too late a stage in the education system. Why not look at introducing it at nursery level? Originally we hoped to create our very own materials (such as nursery rhymes, games, stories) that could then be tested out in a Glasgow primary school to see how successful we were. As young language students, we felt that we could bring in new exciting material that would be engaging and fun, rather than the methods in which we were taught, which consisted of memorising certain words with no real connection to any other aspect of our learning or indeed to the new language itself.

Then came the research. We had to examine the feasibility of teaching a foreign language at nursery level. How realistic were our plans to create new material? Is nursery in fact too early for the teaching of another language?

The following blog post will be focussed on revealing how some of our peers feel or have felt about learning a foreign language and how these experiences affected their attitude towards languages. This information proved invaluable to us in regards to our project.

Until then!