Languages

The four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking are used as the basis for the majority of activities in the MFL classroom. As our experience and expertise in using technology grow, we have been able to modify and redefine both teaching practice and schemes of work to reflect this and to provide our learners with an enhanced learning experience, utilising technology to good effect.

Use of iPad across all four skills allows students to progress at their own pace. In listening, instead of the recording being played across the whole room, sound files can be pushed out to the students on iPad so they can then listen to the tracks and complete the work at their own pace. This is particularly valuable in Key Stage 4 (KS4) when students will be working on either Higher or Foundation level tasks. For KS4, we subscribe to www.thisislanguage.com. This is an excellent resource which the students use to complete Home Learning tasks to assist with their listening skills as well as other aspects of their language learning. The advantage for the teacher is that the amount of time the students spend on the task is automatically logged as is their level of success, meaning that the teacher can easily gauge the progress of the student.

The way speaking skills are practised has evolved and developed over time to incorporate iPad. Students can record speaking activities for Home Learning, which can be listened to by the teacher, rather than in a classroom environment, which some students find off-putting and embarrassing. We have found Mote to be an invaluable way to feedback on speaking tasks, as the verbal nature of it allows us to demonstrate correct pronunciation. The faculty has embraced Google Docs in KS4 as a way for the students to complete and update the answers to their general conversation questions in a live document.

Vocabulary learning and retrieval are key to success in MFL. Apps used to encourage and motivate students to learn vocab include Quizlet, Kahoot and Blooket. Blooket is a recent discovery and has added a real buzz to the learning environment. Students love that they compete against each other and the repetitive use of a predefined set of vocab ensures that vocab retrieval takes place in a fun and motivating way. Vocab tests are created on Socrative which ensures that the scores recorded by the students are accurate. iPad has also allowed us to move away from paper dictionaries, which the students struggled to use effectively and efficiently. Use of apps such as Word Reference and dict.cc have greatly increased the speed with which students can look up unknown words.

iPad helps us to differentiate materials for our students and support students with special educational needs. We can very easily assign different tasks via Google Classroom without others being aware. This has proved invaluable in boosting confidence amongst our weaker learners.

Thanks to iPad we have reconsidered and redefined the way in which cultural knowledge is imparted in MFL. The students can use iPad to undertake independent research on a given topic and specific videos can easily be shared for the students to watch in their own time. We believe this to be extremely beneficial in providing the students with the opportunity to understand the culture of the wider world.