Reading and Thinking across the Secondary Key Stages

1. Reading and Thinking across the Secondary Key Stages

2. Thinking about Reading for G & T Students Reading strategies Thinking skills • Choice of text material • Question types and activities • Encouraging independent wider reading • Develop linguistic competence as well as performance (Saussure: langue / parole)

3. The Development of Thinking Skills: Bloom’s Taxonomy Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis Synthesis Evaluation

4. The Development of Thinking Skills: Edward de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats (1985) “Here is a difficult newspaper article about bullfighting in Spain. I want you to decide as a group how you are going to tackle the text and use it to prepare for a debate on the pros and cons of bullfighting.

5. Transition to Key Stage 3 • From 2011 secondary schools in England will have to be ready for all of their Yr7 intake to have experienced MFL at primary school. • Questions to ask your departments and SLT / Curriculum Committee: 1. How will we adapt our Teaching and Learning policies in line with students’ prior knowledge? 2. What effects will the primary initiative have on the delivery of FL1 at secondary school? And does it matter if the FL1 at secondary level is actually the students’ FL2? Why? / Why not? 3. What MFL reading strategies are being taught in our primary feeder schools and how can we build on these in the secondary stage to avoid taking a step back?

6. Key Stage 3 Assuming no prior knowledge of FL1 • Assess the Students’ preferred learning styles and intelligences (esp. VAK) • Establish good AfL / AoL procedures with built in strategy delivery and assessment • Encourage peer learning, learning to learn, independence (e.g. use of dictionaries) • Use KS3 Framework to inform SoW but not control it • Decide as a team which reading strategies will best suit your students at which level. Develop thinking skills alongside strategies where appropriate. • Establish reading record diaries for library reading sessions by Yr9 at the latest.

7. Transition to Key Stage 4 • Develop guessing strategies • Develop a range of personal response strategies that enable students to express their views and opinions • Develop students’ ability to recognise and work with a range of tenses and moods in unfamiliar contexts • Broaden the range of authentic materials • Offer sufficient challenge to boost motivation and enthuse students to take languages to KS4 and to enjoy GCSE

8. Key Stage 4 • Reading should initially focus on developing the skills required of GCSE and similar courses in a covert way: add competitive elements and team building tasks that promote independence, pupil-centredness and peer learning. • Gradually incorporate GCSE (or similar) style question types and passages and select questions that share the same strategic approach. Get students to identify the most appropriate strategy for success and explain why. Consider time-saving issues and build in checks to account for errors. • Encourage students to begin to read for pleasure; exploit the internet as a source of information for research, homework, cultural discovery and reading for genuine information • Get groups of students to produce a TL newspaper for distribution / sale in the school – articles, letters, opinions about school life, quizzes and word puzzles

9. Transition to Key Stage 5 • Encourage independent reading • Have proper induction to library resources and appropriate study skills (e.g. use of internet / translation sites / dictionaries / encyclopaedias, etc.) • Subscribe to AS level style magazines (such as Authentik and others – see handout pack for suggestions) • Select articles that are of a social / political or economic nature for exploitation in class • Foster an ethos that reading for pleasure in a FL is a good thing. Give your recommended reads to students and write a book review for the library notice board

10. Key Stage 5 • Incorporate literary works / extracts to explore culture where possible • Establish a regular portfolio assignment • Set up weblogs in TL for debate / discussion of language and issues arising from written materials in class • Focus more on higher order thinking questions and strategies and link reading more closely with debating and arguing (oral) • Use reading as a means of exploring particular grammar features of the TL in a way that makes the students work out rules / patterns implicitly (e.g. subjunctive in German, use of impersonal verbs and reflexives in Spanish, the past historic in French) • Setting reading as a homework task with a few directed questions frees up lesson time for oral debates and discussions • Look at the language of political campaigns / slogans / advertising • Teach skills required for specific exam boards: paraphrasing / translation / synonyms / written replies to business letters / discussing a newspaper article / report / comprehension of a social issue (e.g. education, obesity, global warming, delinquency …) • Present students with graphs and charts and give directed questions that enable them to offer interpretations and justify their ideas • Facilitate the students to analyse the make up of a whole newspaper / magazine

11. Language Aptitude Tests Cf. Colleges of Oxford Classics Entrance Exam papers which test language aptitude. (One downloadable copy is included in your handout pack for use with your sixth form Oxbridge applicants).

12. 5 minutes time to reflect and discuss thinking skills in reading MFL