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Phonological and phonics task.

Sentences displayed on the screen. Teacher picks one chunk from one sentences, writes on a WMB and hides it. Students take turn to say in the TL what chunk they think it is written on the WMB. Good to check pronunciation and decoding skills.

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Edit a text by inserting extra words.
Read out the original text/sentences omitting the extra words. Students underline every word in the text you do not read. This task can be used for word identification, metalinguistic awareness and parsing skills (using grammar in the sentence to make meaning).

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MODELLING: words, chunks and language  structures are presented and modelled aurally using a Sentence Builder.                       AWARENESS RAISING: raise students' awareness of phonological, grammatical or syntactic issues.                   RECEPTIVE PROCESSING: develop receptive knowledge through LAM and RAM, containing 95-98% comprehensible input, input-flooding.                  STRUCTURE PRODUCTION: Highly structured tasks, from Listening and Reading to pushed output.       EXPANSION: students practise further chunks and become more aware of grammar structures through use. Chunks practised with new and old vocabulary through systematic recycling (interleaving).         AUTONOMY: the language is practised productively without scaffolding, but still in familiar contexts. Extensive recycling and interleaving.        ROUTINISATION: Focus on automaticity, working on fast retrieval (both receptive and productive skills).       SPONTANEITY: practice in unfamiliar contexts, requiring students to perform with little or no preparation.                                                           (Table 8.1  The MARS-EARS pedagogical cycle, Breaking the Sound Barrier. Teaching Language Learners How to Listen, Conti/Smith 2019)    

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MODELLING: words, chunks and language  structures are presented and modelled aurally using a Sentence Builder.                       AWARENESS RAISING: raise students' awareness of phonological, grammatical or syntactic issues.                   RECEPTIVE PROCESSING: develop receptive knowledge through LAM and RAM, containing 95-98% comprehensible input, input-flooding.                  STRUCTURE PRODUCTION: Highly structured tasks, from Listening and Reading to pushed output.       EXPANSION: students practise further chunks and become more aware of grammar structures through use. Chunks practised with new and old vocabulary through systematic recycling (interleaving).         AUTONOMY: the language is practised productively without scaffolding, but still in familiar contexts. Extensive recycling and interleaving.        ROUTINISATION: Focus on automaticity, working on fast retrieval (both receptive and productive skills).       SPONTANEITY: practice in unfamiliar contexts, requiring students to perform with little or no preparation.                                                           (Table 8.1  The MARS-EARS pedagogical cycle, Breaking the Sound Barrier. Teaching Language Learners How to Listen, Conti/Smith 2019)    

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Translation task. 3 students, 2 players and 1 referee. One player starts translating sentence from the top, gradually adding more words. When s/he makes a mistake the other player translates (from the top). The referee listens and judges when mistakes are made (he can have correct translation sheet). Set this task during remote learning as individual speaking and ss loved recording voice on vocaroo. Other tools flipgrid etc, could be used.

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PowerPoints and resources based on EPI approach by @simograv

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MFL ideas and resources created by Simona Gravina for Primary and Secondary classes KS2,KS3,KS4

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Interactive Sentence Builders generating r all sorts of sentence-level tasks, including gap-fills, sentence scrambles, word-by-word or chunk-by-chunk rebuilds, dictation (using TTS), translation both ways, with varying degrees of support and scaffold. It is a joint project by the people who brought you The Language Gym and the people who brought you TeachVid, Textivate and TaskMagic. (Martin Lapworth)

SentenceBuilders - About

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A look back at the 1st year of SentenceBuilders.com

16th April 2022 marks 1 year since SentenceBuilders was launched.

It's been a busy year!

Let's look back at how the site has developed in its first 12 months.

1. SB Premium Content

The original concept for the SentenceBuilders website was as a vehicle for providing interactive SentenceBuilders and interactive activities based on the SentenceBuilders from the best-selling Sentence Builders books from The Language Gym. (We only decided to add some rudimentary authoring functionality in the few weeks prior to launch!!)

So how has the SB Premium content developed in this 1st year?

THEN...

Read more »

Tracking student activity on SentenceBuilders.com

On SentenceBuilders.com there are several ways that students can get involved in interactive activities -- each involving a certain level of performance tracking -- so there's plenty of feedback available to teachers on student progress, effort, accuracy and time spent.

1. ASSIGNMENTS

On SentenceBuilders you can set assignments based on any resource, whether an "SB premium" resource (created by the SentenceBuilders team for the website), or a "community" resource (created by our users).

Assignments can be "pre-defined" or "DIY"...

Read more »

Direct translations + word order transformations: a German example

Very often the direct translation of chunks within a SentenceBuilder into English can produce L1 English sentences that are far from ideal.

Here's a German example:

In this example the English translation for the sentence (e.g. I ate ice cream) has been split across the first SB row so that it matches the German, as we would expect. In fact, though, the sentences generated by the SB are, for example:

Ich habe Eis gegessen >> I ice cream ate
Du hast Fußball gespielt >> You football played
Sie hat eine Tour gemacht >> She a tour did

This is logical and inevitable if the language is entered into the SB in this way and the sentences are not transformed.

So how can we improve on this?

Read more »

Team Competitions

Inside the "Edit" tab of every class there is now (as of 28th March 2022) a "Manage teams" button. When you click this, you see a pop-up that looks something like the one in the image above.

This pop-up allows you to define teams for TEAM COMPETITIONS :)

When you go to set a Competition for your class, you'll now be asked to choose a "Competition mode", which means choosing between individuals or teams.

Here's how the competition teams settings work:

Read more »

Some "creating a SentenceBuilders resource" walk-throughs...

Below you'll find a few "walk-through" videos in which I attempt to talk you through the process of converting a basic paper-based / column-based sentence builder into something that will work on SentenceBuilders.com, avoiding many of the pitfalls that are explained in detail in this blog post: "Creating [complex] interactive SentenceBuilder machines that work"

The video preview image for each video shows the finished SentenceBuilder. I've also included links to versions of the finished resources on the SentenceBuilders website (accessible by those who have a subscription).

French - Giving my name and age

The video:

The link to a similar finished resource:
https://www.sentencebuilders.com/resource/17

French - School subjects, likes and dislikes

The video:

The link to a similar finished resource:
https://www.sentencebuilders.com/resource/48

Spanish - Describing people - "ser" + adjectives (m/f/pl)

The video:

The link to a similar finished resource:
https://www.sentencebuilders.com/resource/68

Hope you find this useful :)

Creating complex SentenceBuilders - a fabulous video guide by Julia Morris (@JuschMo)

SentenceBuilders subscriber Julia Morris has produced a REALLY USEFUL video user-guide for users of SentenceBuilders.com, which she has shared via her YouTube channel.

It is aimed at those users of the site who wish to use the authoring options to create their own SentenceBuilders (which, to be fair, is most of the teacher subscribers...)

Julia's guide deals with most aspects of creating your own resources, including:

Clearing data to start a new resource

Hints on adding content, including capitalization, etc.

Using the various SB tools to add rows and columns, split and merge cells etc.

Factors influencing SB design

Colour-coding of SB cells

Understanding "flow" (in-depth explanation with examples)

Adding vertical columns to enable "flow"

Excluding "impossible" routes / enforcing certain combinations (cell exclusions)

Using the "SB routes / Cell combos" pop-up

Using the Transformations pop-up

Excluding certain words from gap-fills

Introduction to vocab chunks and TTS transformations

"Verify now"

Uploading your resource

Here's the video. Enjoy!

Julia's video guide is a really good accompaniment to this (written) user-guide: "Creating [complex] interactive SentenceBuilder machines that work"

Hope you find this useful :o)

A NEW and updated SentenceBuilders review by "Learn with J" (@JeNoMfl)

Jérôme Nogues (@JeNoMfl on Twitter) has done it again! This post features his second comprehensive review of the SentenceBuilders website (January 2022) to include many of the new features that have been added to the site since the original review (May 2021).

You can access both of these reviews on Jérôme's "Learn with J" YouTube channel.

The first one (from May 2021) is already on the SentenceBuilders blog here.

This second review, at 41 minutes in length, covers even more than the first one. (Mainly because there's so much more to cover now!) Another epic review, extremely clear and detailed, as you can see for yourself below.

Below the video, you will see a list of the topics covered, as well as the times in the video at which they occur.

Times below are a guide to content. If you view the video on Jérôme's YouTube channel (click the link above in the video player to view it in YouTube), you'll see the same time points listed below the video, and you'll be able to navigate to the section of the video by clicking on the time link. (On this page, though, they are here as a guide only.)

00:11 Main interface

01:25 Using SB Premium Resources

02:50 Text to Speech speed change

03:02 Sound options

03:12 Print options NEW

4:28 Pdf button - Create worksheets!! NEW

6:59 Teacher tools

11:05 Copy chunks and sentences NEW

13:18 Activity view

14:07 Blue activities tab

14:18 Vocab chunks section

16:02 Delayed dictation

17:57 Jigsaw rebuild

18:46 Random & Circuits tabs

19:55 Community Resources

20:51 My Resources & Text Search

21:38 Create a SB NEW

31:55 Create a class

32:23 Adding students

33:41 Share usernames & passwords with students

34:12 Reset a password

34:42 Set an Assignment

37:36 Student view

38:30 Create a competition

40:15 Final opinion NEW

Hope you find this useful :)

Worksheet printing options (with French "Cadeaux de Noël" examples)

Worksheet printing options have now been added to SentenceBuilders.com :o)

The worksheets pop-up is accessed via a new "PDF" button which teachers should see next to the SB print button below every SentenceBuilder on its resource page.

The sentences that are included in worksheets are randomly selected from the 100s or 1000s of sentences generated by each SentenceBuilder resource.

As you can see from the image of the pop-up (at the top of this post), you can select the activity type (from a total of 11 -- correct as of 18th December 2021) and the number of questions to include, and you can also change the font size of the text in the activities.

Each worksheet can include up to 3 sections. Here's an example of one with 3 sections:

Below are examples of all 11 formats available at the time of publication. They are all based on a French "Cadeaux de Noël / Christmas Presents" resource, which can be found on the site in the following location:

Read more »

Exporting random chunks & sentences

We recently added some functionality that allows teachers to export lists of chunks or sentences for use elsewhere.

The pop-up is accessed via the "Teacher Tools" button which teachers should see below every SB on its resource page:

The options in the pop-up (see image at top of post) are fairly straightforward. You choose between chunks and sentences, the number that you wish to export, what to copy, and how to separate pairs (if pairs are selected).

Read more »

Using the "Teacher Tools" to generate random prompts for front of class interaction

The "Teacher Tools" pop-up can be found to the bottom right of every SentenceBuilder on SentenceBuilders.com

This pop-up offers all sorts of options for exploiting the SentenceBuilder for front-of-class interactions.

Random L1 prompt

If you select the "Random L1 prompt" (in this case English) option, a random sentence -- selected from the potentially thousands of available sentences -- appears below the SentenceBuilder.

Read more »

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Very often the direct translation of chunks within a SentenceBuilder into English can produce L1 English sentences that are far from ideal. Here's a German example: In this example the English translation for the sentence (e.g. I ate ice cream) has been split across the first SB row so that it matches the German, as we would expect.

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MARS-EARS                               A pedagogical cycle

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MARS-EARS                               A pedagogical cycle

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Listen and spot the mistakes

Teacher first reads sentences with the correct pronunciation, practice repetition. Then Will read sentences making mistakes, pronouncing words wrongly or missing a word. Students have printed sheet to highlight mistakes or write on White Mini Board.

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Listen and repeat the sentence

Teacher pretends to throw a ball (sentence in the TL) to a student who has to 'catch', repeat all the words correctly and throw back to teacher.

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Reading Aloud

Sentences displayed on the board, preferably ones which show language patterns you want to practise. Each student has 4 pieces of paper, post-it where secretly writes a sentence from the list. Students go around the class, reading a sentence to a classmate. If the other person has that sentence on one of their post-it, they must hand over the card ('it is stolen'). In order to decide who reads a sentence first, students can play rock/paper/scissors.

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Adaptation from @StefPianigiani
Same Reading aloud activity but in pairs.
3 post-it notes each. Play Rock/paper/scissor, who loses ask the question. The winner reads 2 sentences. If he/she guesses one or both of the 3 sentences these are stolen, but thrown away.  First one remaining without notes/sentences is the looser.

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Give students sentences/short paragraphs with no spaces between words. Teacher reads out loud at different speeds. Students to listen and identify words/ put spaces to separate words.

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From the Spanish Primary Sentence Builders book (Gravina, Pianigiani, Conti, Viñales), 2021, The Language Gym

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Listen, memorize, say it

Sentences displayed on screen. Students listen to and memorize one sentence. Then sentence disappears and teacher distracts students by counting/ singing for 10 seconds before they can say or write the sentence.

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Choral/ Solo repetition

Despacito: repeat sentence in the TL slowly, break in syllables, clapping hands
Rápido: same sentence repeat a bit faster
Muy rápido: repeat faster

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Reading aloud. Who is Lying?

Work in  pairs. Sentences displayed on the screen. Student A secretly writes 1 sentence on a WMB (tablet/paper). Student  A will choose to read the actual sentence or another one, thereby lying to student B. You get points if:
-you guess your opponent is telling the truth;
-you guess your opponent is lying to you
-your opponent says you lied, but you didn't.

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Listen and repeat in the TL in a ghost voice/ baby voice/ boys and girls groups
Read chunks/ sentences in a 'ghost voice' . Younger students enjoy this, I also try baby voices/ boys/girls to act in a fun way while repeating chunks slowly and clearly.

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Students work in pairs with one pen /pencil and 1 dice. One person with the pen will start copying a short text in L2 (or sentences from the SB). The other person rolls the dice until he gets a 6 (can choose a different number). Then they can swap the dice for the pen. The winner is the person who finishes to copy first. Template @Aurelie_LHT

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Template from @StefPianigiani Student picks 6 numbers (from 1 to 9, depending on number of sentences displayed).Teacher reads sentence in the TL. First student who crosses out all the numbers (sentences) is the winner.

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From chunk to sentences. You can add Audio file or teacher reads transcript. Students listen and write down what they hear.  The sentence gets longer each time. Can be done in L2 or translating from L2 to L1.

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Listen and Identify the correct chunks

With young KS2 learners I normally do this with chunks in L2, older students in L1. Students are given a grid with chunks. They listen and highlight (colour in) the chunks to form the sentence. I ask them to read the sentence in L2 and translate in English.

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Students have  sentences in English to be translated. Chunks in TL in a grid. Students work their way up the grid, building the sentences in L2. This could be done both as receptive or structured production task. With more advanced learners a timer could add an extra challenge (as in the picture attached).

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Listen and repeat the sentences in the correct order

Play in group of 3, 1 referee and 2 players. Referee reds sentences out in a specific order. Players need to remember and repeat sentences in the TL in the same order. Every time  1 player makes a mistake the other player starts from the beginning. They have 3 lives each.

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Students read similar short texts which have a few different details. Activities can be:
1. Find the L2 chunks/words in the text
2. Open questions
3. Find who...?
4. True or False
5. Bad translation
Follow-up- spot the difference etc

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Give students a text and a list of words , some of which are included in the text and others which aren't. You could set a time limit. Students read text several time to find details either L2 to L2 or L1 to L2

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Well-known pair game. In turns students form a sentence in L2 to find the ships , words/chunks or phonics if playing Battleship phonics.

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Translation activity where the English translation contains mistakes. Can give a time limit. Ask them to identify the mistakes and explain why it is wrong. Extra challenge -mistakes in L2 text to identify and change.

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Great starter or plenary task to practise syntactic order of words. Teacher can read out sentences or display/print them. Model example with same patterns. SS write down words in L2 in the correct column (Verb/Adjective etc)

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Work in pairs. Each person gets half of the worksheet. One reads sentence in English, the other translates in L2. If they get it perfect award 2 points, if there are mistakes 1 point. The winner is the person with more points. Students to compare answers and discuss mistakes.

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Reading task. Students to find equivalent chunks in L2 and tick (crossed out) equivalent English from grid.

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Popular board game. The rules are as follows: in groups of three students (2 player + 1 referee) or five (2 teams of two players and one referee), players take turn in rolling a dice. Whichever case the player/team lands based on their dice score, they will have 10-15 seconds to translate the relative sentence(s) into the target language orally. The referee will then tell the players (with the help of the answer sheet) if their translation is correct.

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Work in pairs

You have to prepare a talk to deliver to your friend in 4 minutes. Then give same talk to another friend in 3 minutes. Try again in 2 minutes.

No notes allowed.

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Tick or Cross idea applied to video, to practise receptive skills

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Resource can be downloaded here
https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-12546591

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SB on Flippity - Chunking with Manipulative

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SB on Flippity - Chunking with Manipulative

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Idea with audio file on vocaroo from @MissFedrizzi

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SB about the pandemic, used durant remote learning

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SB about the pandemic, used durant remote learning

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Based on sentences builder "¿Qué has aprendido durante la pandemia?" inspired by @StefPianigiani

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Quiz game on Wordwall based on SB.

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Autonomy and fast retrieval , interleaving and expansion. From SB to listening and reading tasks based on a video https://www.teachvid.com/resource/QNnDsEMYbsbG2Iygzx10?v=learn-mode

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Original template from @Aurelie_LTH
Each letter represents the first letter of a word, i.e., J.M.A.S = Je M’Appelle Sophie
Pupils need to go from one
stone to the next.

If they get a sentence
wrong, they go back to the beginning.

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Idea from Dannielle Warren @morganmfl "100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Outstanding MFL Lessons".

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Philosophy and Principles

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Gianfranco Conti   Philosophy in 45 Minutes!

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Chunking, Comprehensible Input, Flooded Input, Controlled Input, Thorough Processing, Pushed Output, Recycling, Automaticity

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Fig.1 - the MARS EARS framework
0. Introduction
In the first post in this series dedicated to my teaching approach, Extensive Processing Instruction (or E.P.I.), I discussed the M.A.R.S. E.A.R.S. framework in its broad lines.

In the present post I will concern myself with the eight key principles that are crucial for the success of my approach and anyone wanting to adopt E.P.I. ought to heed.

Note that if you haven't read my previous post, 'How I teach lexicogrammar (Part 1) ' I strongly recommend you do before reading on, so as to gain a better understanding of what follows.
1. Chunking
E.P.I. prioritises the teaching of chunks derived from Communicative Functions ( see post here) over the teaching of single words and traditional grammar, in the belief that this approach (1) reflects the way the brain is hard-wired to acquire languages; (2) speeds up fluency as it is a faster and more efficient way of producing language; (3) facilitates processing by reducing the cognitive load on working memory; (4) makes language learning more about communication and implicit learning and less about explicit learning and application of rules.

Whilst grammar still places a prominent role in EPI, it serves the expression of communicative functions, hence EPI is about communicative lexicogrammar, construction grammar and usage-based grammar.

For more on the rationale and implementation of chunking, please refer to this previous post of mine
2. Comprehensible Input
Masses of research have evidenced that with average-ability learners any L2 input that is less than 98 % comprehensible (i.e. understandable by the listeners/readers without help) is very unlikely to be conducive to learning. With more gifted learners, 90 % may suffice. Any input below the 80% comprehensibility threshold is likely to cause serious comprehension issues .

It is obvious, then, that if we aim to model L2 language through aural/writen tasks, , we must provide students with comprehensible input which contains language they are largely familiar with. This is very rarely the case with most of published world languages teaching materials, especially coursebooks and, in my experience, with a lot of target language input given by instructors in EFL and WL/MFL classrooms worldwide. The main reason: the belief, rooted in the CLT approach, that students should be given input which is as 'authentic' as possible.

However, asking students to perform listening/reading comprehension tasks on aural texts containing a substantive amount of language beyond their comprehensibility threshold encourages the deployment of compensatory strategies (e.g. guessing) rather than the promoting of noticing and modelling of syntax, morphology, lexis and phonology.

Moreover, this practice may be perceived as unfair by the students (e.g. "why am I being asked to listen to/read something I haven't learnt and don't understand?"), may engender student anxiety and, should the student fail, undermine their self-efficacy and motivation.

Another dimension of input comprehensibility relates to the speed rate at which aural texts are usually delivered. As noted previously, speed of processing is a function of listening fluency, hence, a beginner student-listener should not be asked to perform a task on texts delivered at native or near-native speed. Yet, this practice is very common in secondary schools in England, with negative consequence for L2-student motivation.

I believe the speed of delivery with beginners ought to be commensurate to their level of listening fluency even at the risk of sounding patently non-native, and should be increased gradually and judiciously as L2 learners' proficiency grows.
3. Flooded Input
Mothers excel at providing their infant children with masses of input which is simplified, repetitive, highly patterned and rightly pitched to their current level of language proficiency. They 'flood' their input with instance after instance of the words or phrases they want their little ones to learn, going back to those words in various ways in their input; in other words, they provide 'flooded input'.

E.P.I. is big on flooded input. I believe that, at the risk of not sounding authentic, L2 teachers must provide their students with masses of input 'flooded' with occurrences of the target linguistic patterns.

This is intuitive: if we want our students to acquire a specific pool of new chunks or to consolidate previously learnt ones, we need to ensure that they occur many times over in our (98% comprehensible) input in order to facilitate their noticing and retention.

Fig. 2 - Nursery rhymes contain lots of flooded input

Flooded input is especially crucial when we deal with items which are less easily noticed by L2 learners (e.g. prepositions, connectives, pronouns, copulas, word-endings) because of their morphology, position in a sentence or simply because of their frequency in L2 input and are consequently acquired quite late by L2 learners. By flooding the aural input with such items thereby increasing the students' exposure to them, we are more likely to enhance their chances to notice and consequently acquire them.

By the same token, by patterning the input, we ensure that it follows a repetitive and predictable structure which facilitates understanding and retention of the target items. This is very much what happens in the nursery rhymes, songs and stories that children are fed throughout their infancy.

Fig. 3 - A patterned poem flooded with the same target structure

Our emphasis on flooded and patterned input is another major reason why E.P.I. advocates the use of aural/written texts 'manufactured' for L2 teaching purposes. One of the benefits of such texts is that they may contain as many instances as we feel fit of items that occur very rarely in the aural input students normally process in the typical L2 classroom. Think about 'negatives', for instance: how many 'authentic' texts describe events using lots of negative structures?

Narrow reading (NR) and Narrow listening (NL) texts are extreme examples of flooded and highly patterned input. NR and NL consist of clusters of texts (I typically use 4 to 6) which are totally identical except for a few details here and there (see examples in figures 4 and 5 below.

Fig 4 - a set of Spanish narrow reading texts with tasks designed for a year 8 class

Fig 5 - EFL narrow reading texts for French students

Every single interactive read-aloud game described here (e.g. the globally successful 'Sentence stealer') aims at providing lots of flooded input.

Fig 6 - The read aloud game 'Sentence Stealer' in a lesson on the immediate future in Spanish. Even to non Spanish-speakers the input-flooding is quite obvious.
4. Controlled Input
We believe that in instructed L2 instruction the input we provide our students with needs to be tightly controlled in order to possess all of the attributes discussed above. Note that at the initial stage of a new EPI instructional sequence the input provided to the learners in the Receptive Processing phase (the R in the MARS sequence) does not deviate in any way from the new language patterns and lexical items presented in the modelling phase

L2 learners respond very well to controlled input, because (1) it allows for more recycling of the new items; (2) at the early stages of an instructional sequence, it facilitates processing and reduces cognitive load, as the students do not need to resort to dictionaries or expert help to understand the input; (3) it makes them feel 'safer, as it decreases the chances of encountering material they are not familiar with.
5. Thorough processing
As noted above, the reading and listening tasks typically found in textbooks and most other published resources usually require students to answer questions on a text that range from 'who , where, how, etc.' questions to 'True or False' ones. This encourages what we call 'Partial processing', as the students do not process the text in its entirety; rather, they skim and/or scan for key words or other intra- or even extra-textual cues which may help them answer the questions. They may, once identified the portions of the text which contain the needed information, read them more thoroughly; however, unless the questions or tasks on the text are numerous and cover every single sentence in the text, several parts of that text will not be processed deeply enough to impact learning.

Moreover, one of the most serious limitations of working memory is its inability to focus on form and meaning at the same time. Hence, if students are asked to perform on texts only task which focus on meaning (e.g. typical 'who?', 'where?', 'what ?' 'when' or 'True or false' comprehension questions) they will not be able to learn much about the linguistic features in the text, especially the less salient ones.

Yet, for those who, like us, lay a strong emphasis on repeated exposure to the target chunks, lexical patterns and structures in the belief that repeated exposure enhances L2 acquisition, this is an important shortcoming; we want our students to process the text in its entirety; to pay attention to each and every target item so that (1) they become more aware of the way known items behave in a range of phonological, lexical and structural contexts thereby enhancing their acquisition; (2) notice unknown items thereby beginning their acquisition and, (3) if the text contains material that may enhance their knowledge of the world or their well-being, they benefit from it to the fullest extent rather than gathering 'bitty' information.

Hence, we advocate that L2 reading and listening tasks should mostly involve thorough processing of the target texts. Typical examples of thorough processing tasks are translations, dictations and error-identification tasks. Some of my favourites:

Bad translation: the students are given a text in the target language and a translation of the text containing and X number of mistakes. The students are tasked with spotting the mistakes in the translation

Faulty description: the students are shown a picture and given four narrow reading texts each providing a description of the picture in the target language which contains one more inaccuracies. The students are tasked with spotting the inaccuracies

Spot the intruder: the students are given a text which contains extraneous words which don't fit grammatically or in meaning (depending on the focus). The task is to spot the extraneous word

Sentence puzzles: the students must reconstruct a jumbled-up sentence containing the target sentence pattern and lexis

Delayed dictation: the teacher utters a sentence that the students will be familiar with, or at least 95-98 % comprehensible input, and tell them to 'hold it inside their heads'. As they try to keep it in their heads, s/he makes funny noises or utter random words in the target language to distract them for a few seconds. Finally, s/he asks them to write the words on their mini whiteboards and show you.

Gapped parallel texts: the students are given a text in the target language and a translation of that text whose gaps are designed to draw the students' attention to specific linguistic features.

Fig 7 - A 'Bad translation' task for students of Spanish

Fig 8 - Gapped Parallel text for learners of Spanish as a foreign language
6. Pushed Output
As just discussed, I believe that with novice learners the input we provide needs to be tightly controlled in order to possess all of the attributes discussed above. I do also believe that they must be given a wide range of opportunities for transforming every single bit of the input they process receptively into output.

This calls for an approach to the design of oral and written tasks which elicit the production, at the end of a typical instructional sequence (what I call 'Structured production'), of the very same L2 vocabulary and structures that were modelled and practised through listening and reading at the very beginning of that sequence.

Hence, if, say, you presented and practised through listening and/or reading 20 new vocabulary chunks and 2 new syntactic patterns, you would engage your students in oral and written tasks that force them to produce all of those vocabulary items and patterns many times over - alongside previously learnt linguistic items (interleaving) if you feel these will not cause cognitive overload and interference.

Fig 9 - From controlled input to pushed output

This points to the full integration E.P.I. envisages for listening/reading and to the key role listening holds in priming oracy. It also points to an important difference between Communicative Language Teaching (in its stronger forms) and EPI, i.e. t he fact that before engaging in unstructured productive oral and written tasks, L2-learners must sit through an intensive phase of highly structured communicative tasks and drills which recycle the target L2 items to death.

In my opinion, one of the greatest shortcomings of common classroom practice in England is that teachers go way too soon from the Presentation Phase to open-ended tasks and questions which do not enable the teacher to recycle and consolidate at will every single target item, as their students have the freedom to answer as they please -often using the same answer / set of answers in the same way from year 7 to year 11 !

Only highly structured production and targeted retrieval practice can provide sufficient opportunities for the L2 teacher to recycle the target chunks and patterns whilst staying within the limited scope of Feasible Output, i.e. output we know the students are capable of producing.

The effective E.P.I. teacher creates frequent opportunities in the Structured Production phase for Pushed Output which is Controlled (i.e. it is limited to the target patterns and chunks) and Feasible.

Fig 10 - An oral translation game for learners of Spanish as a foreign language involving retrieval practice

Translation drills, mostly interactional games, are the preferred means of elicit pushed output for the reason that they allow the teacher to control the student output as much as possible thereby ensuring that the target items are recycled at will. My favourite translation games and tasks are described here. The rationale for the preference of translation over pictures is that:

it promotes noticing key differences and similarities between he L1 and the L2, which promotes acquisition;

it forces the students to use specific chunks/patterns whereas pictures are less narrow in the output they elicit;

As explained in my previous post, after the students have had extensive Pushed Output practice, the teacher will stage tasks involving less structured speaking and writing tasks which involve more creativity and autonomy.

Fig 11 - Oral communictaive drills for learners of French as a foreign language
7. Recycling
I have discussed this point extensively in previous posts. Effective teaching is not just about the effective first lesson on a target item, but also about ensuring that after the intensive recycling that occurs at the initial stages of an instructional sequence that item is extensively recycled over the months and even years to come.

As I have often reiterated in this blog, intensive intra-lesson and inter-lesson recycling are both crucial, as most forgetting (around 56 % ) occurs one hour after processing a to-be-learnt item and after six days, in the absence of reinforcement, the learner is left with very little (30 %).

Fig 12 - Ebbinghaus curve of human forgetting rate

This is why my method is called E.P.I. , where the 'E' in the acronym stands for 'Extensive' and alludes to the emphasis my methodology lays on carefully planned recycling through Interleaving (explained in detail here), whereby any new set of chunks/patterns is learnt and practised with previously learnt items and recycled with new ones at spaced intervals.

Fig 13- Spaced practice

In the Expansion phase of a typical E.P.I. instructional sequence, for instance, having taught and practised structure 'Y' (e.g. Time marker + perfect tense of irregular verbs + prepositional phrase) and being satisfied that the students after a few lessons have routinised the structure in the context of the function 'Talking about what I did yesterday', before moving on to a new unit and new material, they will make sure (a) that structure 'Y' is practised with structures 'X' and 'W' learnt in previous units and (b) that it will be practised in all the units to come in some shape or form.

Fig 14 - The Expansion phase in the MARS EARS sequence

The best form of recycling involves of course, spaced practice, whereby material is revisited systematically at intervals that are frequent at the initial stages and become gradually sparser.

Of course, effective recycling require skillful and careful curriculum design and is much harder to implement when one teaches one meaty unit of work every six-seven weeks with two hours of contact time per week.

Hence, my advocacy of a 'Less is more' approach, whereby curriculum design in the formative years of L2 learning focuses more on the quality than the quantity of coverage and on the development of automaticity - which brings me to the next point.
8.Automaticity
Automaticity is the ultimate goal of E.P.I., as it is a key prerequisite of fluency. Hence, great emphasis is lain by the E.P.I. teacher on practising speed of retrieval. During the recycling phase, what I called 'EARS' in my previous post, tasks such as the '4,3,2 technique', 'Market place', 'Speed dating', 'Chain reaction' and 'Fast and Furious' are staged alongside traditional communicative tasks ( e.g. information gap activities) in order to train students in producing language under Real Operating Conditions.

Fig 15 - The 4,3,4 technique

Fig 16 - Chain Reaction. The students, who have three lives, are lined up and are tasked with translating orally on the spot (give them 5-6 seconds) from their L1 into the target language, each chunk as it appears on the slides, losing a life each time they get it wrong. Every time they pass or get something wrong they lose a life. Great as a starter or plenary.
9.Conclusion
Before venturing in subsequent posts in a more detailed account of the various stages in the MARS EARS sequence, from the M (modelling) to the S (spontaneity), I have hereby attempted to outline the key principles of my approach. Any language educator embracing EPI heed such principles as they are all interdependently crucial to its effectiveness.

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Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.)

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How I teach lexicogrammar (PART 2) - The 8 tenets of Extensive Processing Instruction in the novice-to-intermediate classroom

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Fig.1 - the MARS EARS framework 0. Introduction In the first post in this series dedicated to my teaching approach, Extensive Processing Instruction (or E.P.I.), I discussed the M.A.R.S. E.A.R.S. framework in its broad lines. In the present post I will concern myself with the eight key principles that are crucial for the success of...

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USING SENTENCE BUILDERS TO REDUCE COGNITIVE LOAD

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USING SENTENCE BUILDERS TO REDUCE COGNITIVE LOAD

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How do you teach grammar with a SB? by Dylan Viñales

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Acknowledgement: The Extensive Processing Instruction course was developed by Dr Conti while we worked together at Garden International School. Since he left full-time teaching to become an internationally acclaimed languages consultant I have continued to build on his practice and develop some of the methods that we originally worked on together. One area that has really evolved in this three year period is Sentence Builders, both in terms of how they are developed and how they are exploited.

This blog contrasts and critiques how a unit of work might be taught using a traditional “textbook” approach, and then goes into detail about how I would teach the same topic using Sentence Builders as the instructional base, and why. This leads into some development on the topic of explicit grammar teaching vs teaching language through lexicogrammar. Finally, I share what the effects of using this approach has been on Spanish teachers, students and even parents within the context of my current school.

Please note, that while I do not mention any particular textbook by name, I am also unable to name any mainstream provider (i.e. the usual big names), including books that have been published as recently as within the last 12 months, that do not fall into the “shallow processing” traps detailed in the first half of this blog.

The “Textbook” approach

“Teaching students how to describe themselves”.

Or “TL Too Soon”…

Over here, we see a typical “textbook” sequence to teach students how to talk about themselves. At a glance, the graphics look good, and it all seems quite neatly presented, allowing for multiple skills within a short period of instruction. But, if we break it down though, we see 9 adjectives presented in one small chunk “soy” (I am) + “adjective”, then after a series of two very short activities (a quick match-up and true/false activity), the book suggests that students are ready to creatively use the language to invent four dialogues. Two short exercises later, students are required to produce a piece of writing in which they describe themselves – likely at the end of just one or perhaps two lessons.

As always, nothing personal against this particular textbook (name not shown), but let me draw attention to two issues here:

1) Superficial content that leads students to a dead-end

First of all, the topic is covered across two pages, in very superficial detail, with very short texts, exploited with quick “shallow processing” activities (e.g. MCQs). This is a problem for a number of reasons. Students have only been given one real sentence starter, or “sentence head”, if you can even call it that : “Soy” (I am), followed by 8 positive character description adjectives, and only one negative. Of this list of 9 adjectives, four are close cognates (generoso=generous) and one is a not so close cognate (tranquilo=tranquil=peaceful/relaxed). Once students are familiar with this list and can say “Soy” (I am) + one or two adjectives they are likely to say,

“I can do this now. Let’s move on”

Sound familiar? And so you move on to the next page, where this particular textbook suggests you start talking about brothers and sisters and the irregular verb “tener” (to have). Why move on at this stage? Are we happy that students now know 8 positive adjectives, and only one single negative? I can only describe this as unfortunately unambitious.

Even if we were happy with students being able to give a limited and basic description of themselves, don’t we want them to be able to also give a physical description? Well, this particular book does eventually come back to physical descriptions… but only 68 pages, and I don’t know how many topics, later.

2) A grammar vacuum: Once out of context, forever out of context

At this point, “grammar” is presented, again (and throughout the book), out of context and in a vacuum. Huge demands are placed on a beginner/intermediate learner to correctly construct the language, and of course, because of the Cognitive Overload caused they consistently:

1. Make adjectival agreement errors.

2. Make verb conjugation errors.

Secondly, within the small amount of content being fleetingly introduced, there is not enough emphasis on feminine / masculine endings. They are presented clearly in the “Gramática” table, but while the formatting is clear, they are presented in a contextual vacuum. Are students getting enough structured input to assimilate these endings after seeing just one example? I would argue, based on the evidence that adjectival errors are SO rife that no, it is insufficient.

Wider Implications

The result of presenting language over a couple of pages of a textbook and then quickly moving on to a different topic, with little thought for recycling/interleaving, and with only tiny reading texts and sparse opportunities for deep processing, is the creation of students that have superficial knowledge of a small amount of content across multiple topics – or the creation of masses of work for teachers who have to complement the tiny amount of content in the books with their own material to counteract the shortfall.

In addition, by jumping from topic to topic, students will not only not be proficient in what they are currently covering, but they will also quickly forget the content because they have been rushed on too quickly to the next topic. I have heard and read feedback from teachers on MFL/WL forums criticising students for having “totally forgotten everything”, or only being able to “write one sentence” on a past topic. We can see students failing, and the students know they are failing, and with every failure and setback, their self-efficacy takes a hit. But is this their fault? Or is there a deeper-rooted issue based around the way in which textbooks present information, and around our own curriculum design?

“Teaching students how to describe themselves” using Extensive Processing Instruction.

To get around some of the issues mentioned above, here is how I would approach the same topic.

First of all, I would present language in a Sentence Builder, like this:

and like this:

There are four key features of the rationale for presenting language like this which I would like to mention:

1. Ambitious range of language : Students have a large variety of sentence heads (column 1) which allow for a extensive amount of real life communication. This is self-differentiating, with more able students naturally including a greater variety of language. This also means that you have a decent variety of structures to play around with, to make the topic more interesting – otherwise how do you make several permutations of  “Soy” (I am) + “adjective” engaging?

2. Real World Communication: I have presented physical and character descriptions at the same time. This is an essential for real world communication, so why would I present them separately? Or worse still, why would I present them several chapters apart? A student attempting to communicate will only be able to give half a description… and by the time they learn the other half, they’ll have forgotten the first bit. No wonder students often shy away from using what they’ve learnt in lessons!

3. Avoid Cognitive Overload : When designing any resource, and in all my planning, reducing Cognitive Overload is always a top priority. Therefore, I produce a separate Sentence Builder for boys and another for girls – it’s not a huge extra job, but it does have a big impact on student success. In addition, all items are presented in alphabetical order (where possible) and together with translations, for weaker students. The way the language is structured it is really, really hard to produce incorrect language – so students, from the first instance, when using this resource can produce a large amount of either controlled or independent output without making grammatical errors.

4. Seed-planting : Some of the sentence heads contain advanced structures that I know that students will need to use in later years, so by including them I am familiarising students early on. Case in point: “Ojalá fuera más…” (I wish I were more…) – several of my Y8-9s throw this into their speaking and writing in this topic and also in the context of describing relationships. Only a few will know that it’s the  ‘imperfect subjunctive’, as I will have only briefly mentioned this. But all know that this is a high level structure, and many are inclined to include it in their work. When we look at conditional structures in Y10, students already have a grounding, so can approach it more confidently.

N.B. For a whole blog on the “Seed-planting” principle (also part of the Conti methodology) see here

Perhaps the craziest (read, most ambitious) structure I seed-plant is what students have affectionately named the SMH (a ‘nod’ to the popular -shake my head- acronym) structure for juxtaposing past and present:

Si me hubieras preguntado hace 5 años habría dicho que… (if you had asked me 5 years ago I would have said that…) – followed by something like : “vivía en…” (I lived in…) “pero ahora vivo en …” (but now I live in a…)

Would I teach Y8s the formation of all parts of the imperfect subjunctive? Of course not, that would be madness. But is X, Y or Z language useful for a key communicative function? Yeah, totally. So why not throw it in? Communication first, and let the grammar fit.

I believe that if you don’t do it this way, you’re holding students back. Imagine the following scenario:

Y8 Student: OK Sir, I’ve mentioned a few details about how I am. Now how do I say, “I wish I was more…?”

Me: Yikes, reasonable that you’d want to say that, but that’ll need subjunctive… that’s a bit of a problem.

Y8 Student: Ok, so?

Me: Well, we’ll not see that till Y11, please wait 3 years and then I’ll tell you… And if you want to say “If I had more time I would…” then you’ll need to get into A Level first. But don’t worry, there’s always “soy tonto” for now. No need to thank me 🙂

In all seriousness though. While we would be likely to just give a top student such a structure as and when needed, by offering it within the safety of a sentence head inside our Sentence Builder we are opening up this structure to all students, and therefore increasing chances that more will use it, while reducing chances that they will make a mistake with it.

How do you teach grammar with a Sentence Builder?

Or, the curious tale of Lexicogrammar…

Well, firstly, since moving towards a UbD (understanding, or backwards by design) curriculum, based on the Conti “Extensive Processing Instruction” methodology I’ve made some important changes to the way I structure the curriculum. The reason I mention this is because it affects the way in which grammar is both organised and approached.

1. Working backwards from the end till the beginning of KS3, I know what topics/communicative functions I want my students to have covered by the end of Y9, to be ready for GCSE and then map out the curriculum accordingly. I then choose language, based on the communicative functions required for real world communication in the given topics. These topics are drawn from the key areas, in my case for CIE IGCSE. Language then builds towards students being able to have useful, meaningful, in depth, real-life conversations with natives outside of the classroom, or alternatively, score really high marks in an exam (helps keep the wolves at bay). Communication is my primary focus, and as a result the grammar fits in around the chosen language in a way which facilitates the communication, and not vice-versa (i.e. deciding the grammar and making the content fit – or worse still just grammar in a total vacuum).

2. There is no longer a main focus on “explicit grammar teaching”. In other words, I will no longer do a lesson on “how to form and use the imperfect” or “how to make adjectives feminine”. It’s a bit of a long story, but essentially, we advocate the teaching of lexicogrammar, or vocabulary (lexis) and grammar as inseparable constructs. In a blog post (PATTERNS FIRST – HOW I TEACH LEXICOGRAMMAR) which I worked on with Dr Conti last year, two of his assertions are that, firstly,

“Grammar and Lexis are too closely intertwined to be considered as distinct from one another”. (Conti, 2018)

and secondly,

“Grammar should not be taught to novice-to-intermediate learners in futile abstract categories such as ‘Perfect tense’, ‘Imperfect tense’, or ‘Prepositions’. (Conti, 2018)

Instead, we should be teaching “lexicogrammar”, with grammar taught via exposing students to chunks of language which facilitate communicative functions based on the topics of our choosing. Eventually, once students have assimilated, and become fluent in the key structures, there can be room for a discussion around grammar, with the teacher presenting the rules to help fill in any missing puzzle pieces for students. In the most ideal of scenarios, students will be able to work out their own grammar rules “inductively” based on their knowledge of language in context.

By approaching language in such a communicative and contextual way, Wilkins (1972) states that:

“Students can cover in half the time what is expected from a whole year of learning”

Any method which can accelerate learning in this way, while easing teacher load, is surely worth investigating.

Just out of interest, both points above put us on the polar opposite end of the spectrum compared to a heavily grammar orientated approach, such as in countries like Spain. Many of my Spanish friends, after 12 years of  3-4 hours of weekly lessons are able to understand written English fairly well, but have a total lack of confidence/fluency when it comes to speaking. These same friends have one thing in common though, the fascinating yet very pointless ability to recite – at shocking speed and completely out of context – scores of  irregular past tenses (base form/past simple/past participle) – “Swim” “Swam” “Swum”, “Think” Thought” Thought” “Run” Ran” “Run”.

Two obstacles to adopting this methodology (and workarounds)

Firstly, creating high quality Sentence Builders that are linguistically ambitious, while also catering to learners of all abilities can be a bit complicated and time-consuming! For more detail about how I build Sentence Builders, check out my last blog, which gives a few more insights into the design process. In addition, feel free to visit my TES page where there are a selection of free sample Sentence Builders to gain inspiration, and also other ready-made ones which can be purchased.

Secondly, because you are working from a finite amount of material, you will need to vary the activities you use in order to keep students engaged. This doesn’t need to be a weakness though. In my next blog post, I will talk about some of the activities that I have found to be most engaging and productive in lessons.

In the meantime, you can check out the following Dr Conti blogs for fun ways to approach receptive processing (introducing the language) and structured production (students putting the language into practice):

https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2018/07/30/patterns-first-how-i-teach-lexicogrammar-part-1/

https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/my-favourite-read-aloud-task-and-how-i-use-them/

And this one by Steve Smith (author of “The Language Teacher Toolkit” and “Becoming an Outstanding Languages Teacher”)  which has loads of ideas about how to exploit Sentence Builders,

https://frenchteachernet.blogspot.com/2019/05/have-repertoire-lighten-your-workload.html

And lastly, a previous blog of mine, which contains tips for teaching through listening, using Sentence Builders

https://mrvinalesmfl.wordpress.com/2019/05/10/why-my-mfl-students-love-their-listening-activities-and-how-yours-can-too/

So what has this meant for my students?

The result of presenting language using carefully structured (to avoid cognitive overload) yet ambitious Sentence Builders and then following the Extensive Processing Instruction approach, is that you have scope (in terms of the content provided to students) for going into “extensive” depth compared to a more traditional, “textbook” approach. By giving students the opportunity and time to develop language, without rushing through material, they can develop their “processing” speed and therefore have the chance to develop fluency across all skills. For this to be successful, you do need to plan in enough time for the “instruction” itself – in my case, I allow at least 8-10 weeks per major topic area and structure my curriculum so that topics are interleaved and build on each other from year to year.

Since adopting this approach, I have seen my happiest, most confident students ever. I have see students of lower ability who are more confident across all skills, and I have seen the mid and high ability thrive at previously impossible levels. I have seen greater uptake at IGCSE and this is now trickling across into A-level. I have seen students using Sentence Builders on a daily basis and I have had GCSE students ask me for access to KS3 Sentence Builders in order to revise certain topics (I have now made all Sentence Builders, organised by topic, available to all students in a hyperlinked doc. I have had particularly positive feedback from parents of students who find the language harder. Because all Sentence Builders are bilingual, they are able to support their children in their studies, even with no knowledge of Spanish.

Final Thoughts

Most students will learn and make decent progress no matter how you teach them. If I highlight what look like obvious failings of the “textbook” or traditional methods it is purely by way of contrast and to help understand the differences in the solutions that I then propose. The methodology and resources mentioned above are designed to accelerate progress and save both the student AND the teacher a considerable amount of time due to the error correction implications of flooding with large amounts of correct language in a way which prevents students from making agreement/verb/any errors prior to eventually moving to independent production.

Thanks for reading! Comments and feedback welcome, as always.

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How to guide beginners learners to a high level of fluency (Dylan Viñales ).

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Play by play, pattern by pattern: How I structure a typical sequence to guide beginner learners to a high level of fluency.

Blog aim

In the past I have shared resources, blogs and student work based on my implementation of Extensive Processing Instruction (henceforth E.P.I.) Part of the response to this sharing of (what I consider to be) good practice  is that colleagues have asked for a typical sequence of go to lessons and activities. In this blog, I outline all the activities I typically use, as well as the order I would do them in, and the rationale for using each activity, both in that particular order, and for using it at all.

Background

I have been using E.P.I. full time for three years now. I consider myself lucky to have worked alongside Dr Conti while he was developing the methodology and contributing to the creation of the same. I remember both vividly and with fondness our conversations on how to come up with a system that allows students to make best progress, based around the research on cognitive load, forgetting rates, and phonological constraints on working memory.

What am I trying to achieve in my lessons?

Aim 1) Real world, real time fluency

My aim is to create confident linguists who are able to speak/write with fluency and who are also passionate about the target language culture. Fluency is defined as : “the ability to speak or write a language easily, well, and quickly” (Cambridge Online Dictionary). To this end, to achieve fluency in any given topic a speaker needs to be able to interact with a certain lexical item (a word, a part of a word, or a string of words) in real time and in a variety of contexts. Personally, within the context of Spanish I put a lot of emphasis on the “quickly” part of fluency, with a lot of exercises having a clear and explicit focus on building speed of production, both recall and actual talking speed.

Aim 2) Fluency and cultural awareness

When can a word like “beach” be deemed to be fully assimilated? It is when a student can translate “la playa” into “beach”? Arguably, for the sake of fluency, we want students to be able to understand and use it in different contexts : “I went to the beach”, “I prefer the beach to the countryside”, “the beach is always hot”, and even in an idiomatic use, “life’s a beach”. A Spanish example of this would be usage of ‘leche’. It means milk, but is also used to mean ‘awesome’ in Spanish slang and appears in other idioms too.

Ideally, by the time my students get to the end of KS3 they will be confident in “bebo leche” (I drink milk) as well as the idiomatic usage “mi amiga es la leche” (my friend is awesome).

Milk usage 1 : “es la leche” – she is awesome (the milk)

Milk usage 2 : “tiene mala leche” – he is a bit nasty (has bad milk)

Aim 3) Long term retention

The other main aim is for all of the above, the fluency and the bits of cultural knowledge and understanding to be long lasting; avoiding the perennial issue of students forgetting, and then having to spend time relearning old material as opposed to moving on to new content. Or at worst, students losing motivation and being reticent to relearn past lexical items, or even whole topics. To overcome this issue, I design the curriculum so we spend longer on each topic (about one big topic per term), and programme the topics so they appear in logical order and so that content is interleaved and recycled at regular intervals.

My Typical E.P.I. Sequence

Below I will describe how I would order a sequence and the rationale behind this within the E.P.I framework. For the purpose of this blog, I will describe my approach to a Y7 beginner class. For more advanced groups, you can pick which steps, if any, to skip.

Sequence Summary

The sequence described below is largely based on the MARS EARS approach, with a few of my own twists. It is made up of the following points:

Prior to beginning the sequence

Starting Point 1) Create/source a Sentence Builder + Give it to students

The Sequence (summarised)

1) Modelling and Sensitising – Phonology

2) Modelling / Sensitising – Working on meaning

3) Awareness Raising (And how it fits into Lexicogrammar…)

4) Receptive processing / Structured Production

5) Expansion/Autonomy

6) Routinisation

7) Spontaneity

For each of the points there are a list of my (go to) most successful activities.

Pre-Sequence:

Create/source a Sentence Builder.

Sentence Builders are essential material for us in my department as we do not have a course book until KS5. You can purchase these or make your own. For a detailed guide on how I design Sentence Builders in a way which benefits students of all levels (weaker, middle and stronger), and more about the rationale behind this system/format for presenting information see an earlier blog I wrote here : Three Top Tips On How To Make Sentence Builders To Help All Students Progress.

Give the Sentence Builder to the students.

KS3 Sentence Builder on Daily Routine

I am lucky to have the choice to share the Sentence Builder electronically, via Google Classroom, or to print it out and share it physically. Given this choice, I nearly always go the paper-free way and share via the classroom. If printing, I recommend removing all colours and just going for a plain black and white version.

Step 1) Modelling and Sensitising – Phonology

Phonology and Pronunciation

The first priority for me is to familiarise students with the language in the new unit. Within this, my first focus is on sounds/phonology. In the case of a beginner class, I know they will not be confident about how to pronounce certain key sounds in Spanish like “g/j/ll/h” therefore I will usually go through the following steps.

1. Call and response, varying speeds and tonality. Single words or chunks – little to no focus on meaning, just phonology.

2. Call and response, varying size of chunk. For this, you can make a zero-prep tongue twister by combining items from the SB. As above, no real focus on meaning yet, just phonology.

E.g. Me: “Almuerzo”

S : “Almuerzo”

Me: “Almuerzo Como”

S : “Almuerzo como”

Me: “Almuerzo como como en la cantina…” etc

Then, as above, but with an increasing list size until students start to become overloaded. Working with the items in the same order they appear reduces cognitive load – the focus here is on phonology, not memory per sé.

3. Pushed Output. Ask students to tell their neighbour how to say a particular word, which I point at on the projected Sentence Builder. “¿Cómo se dice ‘ésta’ palabra?” Student quietly pronounces word for their neighbour. At this stage I am working on getting students to practise the sounds and raising awareness about different sounds.

4. Semi-independent production. Ask students to work in pairs or groups of three read out a section of the Sentence Builder, or a set of prepared sentences from the Sentence Builder. This is low-risk reading practice and a chance for them to have a go at independent pronunciation without the whole class listening. In their group, the person or people listening are tasked with giving feedback on any sounds that have been mispronounced.

During this activity I walk around the room and listen for mispronunciations. If a sound is still causing widespread difficulty, I will make a note and then go back to steps 1) and 2) above to work on it as a class.

5. Faulty Echo – A Contian favourite involved reading out a sentence correctly, and then repeating it but with an added mistake. Students have to identify the mistake.

E.g. Good Me: “Mi persona favorita en el mundo es mi hermano” (correctly, with silent H)

Faulty Echo Me: As above, but with a guttural HHH on ‘hermano”

Student (*snickers* then writes on mini white board): “Hermano”

Students love this activity. I love this activity. The next stage for me, once students are getting the hang of things is to just say one sentence, and include an error into it – students have to directly identify the error.

Step 2) Modelling / Sensitising – Working on meaning

Once students are warmed-up and quite confident with how words are pronounced we move on to some games focusing on meaning. The aim here is to flood students with examples of how the language in the sentence builder can be put into practice. There is a set routine that I follow, although the games themselves vary (to keep things fresh for everyone).

1. Zero Prep Listening : Finish my word – this is still a sound sensitisation technique, but that works on meaning and on the initial creation of a roadmap of chunks within the long-term memory.

E.g. Me (in Spanish) : “Todos los días me despierto a las sei…..”  (Every morning I wake up at si…….”)

S (writes on mini white board) : “s”

Our aim, as discussed is to make fluent, fast thinking, speakers. So I employ the following adaptations to try and meet that goal:

Adaptation 1. Increase speed of chunk. Once they have heard the “Todos los días me despierto a las…” structure a few times and it looks like everyone is coping well, I start increasing the speed until I reach a near native pace. Because they are only required to finish a syllable at the end of the word, I am focusing the majority of their available working memory on comprehension and only placing small constraints on the production side. This makes the activity doable, and success is key for their self-efficacy, which is key for everything, basically.

On the contrary, if I gave them a really quick sentence and required them to very quickly access a whole word and then write it down correctly, there would be too many functions going on, cognitive overload would occur and many students would crash and burn.

Adaptation 2. Increase length of chunk and add distractors. Instead of just one sentence, make your output longer. Stay within the Sentence Builder and within the 95% Comprehensible Input zone, or venture out for a bit and then come back in.

E.g. Me: “Por la mañana siempre me despierto a las seis y luego me levanto. Mi hermano se llama Paco y siempre se levanta a las siete. ¡Mi hermano es muy estúpido! En fin, finalmente, por la mañana a las nueve salgo de ca…”

(In the morning I always wake up at six and then I get up. My brother is called Paco and he always gets up at seven. My brother is very dumb! Anyway, finally, in the morning at nine I leave the hou…)

Sorry brother Paco! Got you again. The idea here is that I have added in a couple of distractor sentences so students are presented with a bit of a challenge if they are going to keep up throughout the whole text. I am also planting some seeds and giving early exposure to the next linguistic focus – third person daily routine.

Adaptation 3. Increase length of chunk and add ‘false endings’

E.g. Me: Todos los días me despierto a las seis y después me lev…….

S (starts writing on MWB): “anto”

Me (carries on speaking – some mild cursing in background): …anto y después desayuno con mi hermano. Finalmente salgo de casa y voy al colegio en co…

S: “che”

In this game, which I don’t ever announce, but just do as a natural extension (and a bit of a prank), I find one of the highest levels of engagement and focus of any activity.

The stakes are very low. Students only have to write down 2-4 letters at any given time and the game resets with every new sentence. This is great as weaker or slower students are constantly back in the game, as opposed to a more traditional dictation task where, if you fall behind it becomes impossible to catch up. With this game, anyone can win, and when your weaker students succeed, it’s a very easy and genuine scenario to be able to load them with praise. I.E “Anddddd the fastest ever person ever of this round was….. COLIN!!” Powerful stuff for getting students on board, and a good self-efficacy boost too.

2. Zero Prep Listening : Finish my sentence – this technique works on listening for meaning. Essentially, say the beginning of a sentence and then students finish your sentence with a logical word

Adaptations: As above, you can vary sentence lengths and add distractors. For added complexity, you could also make sentences that require a particular agreement (e.g. mi hermana es… “simpática” etc)
For more details on my other go to listening exercises, and the rationale behind why I value then, see my last blog on: Creating Enjoyable Listening Lessons In The Mfl Classroom – A Practical Guide.

Step 3) Awareness Raising

And how it fits into Lexicogrammar…

Lexicogrammar =  the notion that grammar is an integral, non-separable part of language.

Awareness Raising = highlighting grammar issues / making students aware of important linguistic features.

The E.P.I. methodology does not encourage an explicit focus on grammar as the starting point to any sequence of learning. In turn, this has at times been interpreted as “there is no grammar instruction” at all in E.P.I. This is not the case. E.P.I. advocates a “Patterns First” (also the title of Part 1 of Dr Conti’s blog on Lexicogrammar – linked throughout this blog) approach. In other words, allow students to become familiar with the language patterns and structures and then work backwards from there.

For example, once students have been flooded with, and had some experience of producing structures such as “Cuando era pequeño/a vivía en España y siempre jugaba al tenis con mis amigos” (When I was young I used to live in Spain and I always played tennis with my friends) this is a good time to look into the grammar behind the imperfect tense, either inductively (students working out the rules for themselves based on the examples provided) or deductively (teacher explaining the rules and giving examples etc).

The awareness raising and receptive processing strands of the methodology are a good time to mention, or raise awareness about, some of the linguistic items being covered. My main focus, nonetheless, remains practice makes perfect. For example, in my Sentence Builders, I specify, as a non-negotiable that it is impossible to make a wrong combination (see some of the exemplar SBs on my TES area for examples), therefore I address masculine/feminine agreement in the following way:

I stand in front of the following two Sentence Builders and ask students to work in pairs to work out the differences and the logic behind the black/blue colour coding

They quickly come up with the following:

– Feminine/masculine adjectives end in an “A”/”O”

– “encantador” which ends in an “R” gains an “A” in feminine

– The Physical and Character Descriptions (adjectives) in blue are the same in both masculine and feminine.

The end. That’s it for now. I’m happy to have raised awareness, but I want to get back to flooding them with comprehensible input, and playing loads of receptive processing / structured production games where students are producing correct language. When they eventually write a text (or prepare a speech, or just talk) autonomously, they hardly ever make any agreement errors because they’ve been flooded with correct language and I’ve directed girls to use the female sentence builder, and boys to use the male one. Why fossilise incorrect language when you can be flooding correct language?

Step 4) Receptive processing / Structured Production

Receptive Processing = providing a flood of input so students see structures multiple times, such that these start to be assimilated.

Structured Production = where students produce the language in a structured and safe context.

For the next part of the sequence: receptive processing/structured production, my go tos are:

1. Delayed Copying – I don’t leave home without it. This staple requires students to see a sentence which then disappears, and then copy down what they’ve seen – Target Language to Target Language.

The rationale behind this activity ties into students having to successfully store lexical items in their phonological loops (the part within working memory where sound is stored, in a loop). This phonological loop is one of our most unstable and evolutionary rubbish resources (sorry humans!) so we are required to focus 100% on the task at hand in order to not forget the item. The advantage though is that we are forced into serious amounts of repetition if we want to succeed, and this is one key way of having items enter the long term memory – so we’re tricking students into memorising information while they think they’re just playing an exciting game.

For a free template/exemplar – click here. Mine is very basic, but I’ve seen some really cool ones with a ‘beat the mouse/rat’ game element to it. I personally prefer a basic one as I have full autonomy of how long to show an item before I remove it (and whether to give students a “bonus ‘second’ peek”).

2. Disappearing Text – I do this on the back of Delayed Copying, usually with the same, but slightly modified sentences. This activity also requires memorisation and focus. I run this as a speaking though. Students are shown sentences in which letters progressively disappear. They are required to be able to read out sentences correctly despite the missing letters.

3. Algo Game – This is a paired information gap-fill whose name I coined after the fact that when I play it, I ask students to say ‘algo’ which means ‘something’ in Spanish, whenever they get to a gap. It is referenced in the the latest Conti/Smith bestseller ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier’. While the name “Algo Game” is new, information gap fills themselves are not and have been around, in different shapes and sizes since as far back as the 70s. For more info about this activity check out Steve’s blog: Paired listening gap-fill (Steve Smith – Language Teacher Toolkit)

4. Narrow reading – I come up with a text using items from the Sentence Builder (always with the 95% comprehensible input mark in mind). I then copy that text, making a few changes, but keeping the same structures that I am trying to flood. I do this again until I have a set of four or five texts. At this point I run these texts through Martin Lapworth’s Textivate.com and create a sequence of activities. Please note that Textivate is a paid resource.

My top 5 Textivate activities are:

a) ‘Gap fill’ – usually custom made, where I choose what gaps I want in my text. This is only slightly slower than just choosing random words but loads better because you can choose to take out verbs/adjectives or whatever you want. You can also put in some tricky distractors (simpático, where the real answer needs to be simpática – devious!) and also, some hilarious distractors (a random word like “elefante” for no reason at all other than to keep things interesting).

b) ‘Tile organiser’ – students need to reorganise the text into the correct order

c) ‘Millionaire’ – students need to choose the next sentence

d) ‘Find the next word/chunk’ – self explanatory

e) ‘Football game’ – students need to choose the correct word in order to not lose their turn and be able to pass or shoot. Some of the most retro graphics and game play out there, but a student favourite.

Narrow Reading is an excellent example of thorough processing. It is the opposite of the more conventional, textbook approach where students answer a few quick questions on a text and then move on (having only skimmed the text to glean the specific information required). Texts need to be exploited at all levels of grain for ‘noticing’ to occur. This is why successful narrow reading exercises focus on spelling, lexis, grammar and eventually meaning and discourse building. Thorough processing of texts is an essential tool in the passage from receptive processing to structured production.

Step 5) Expansion & Autonomy

Unpicking the grammar & The road to Independent Production

Expansion = expanding upon the grammar modelled thus far (like a normal grammar lesson, basically, but done near the end of a sequence, not at the beginning).

If the Sentence Builder has focused on 1st or 3rd persons of the past preterite tense, in the Expansion phase, students will be taught, inductively (student-led) or deductively (teacher-led) about all other persons of the verb, for example.

Autonomy = checking if students can retrieve the language without a Sentence Builder (this would be a good time for an assessment, if you wanted to.)

By the time we get this far, students are now ready to start producing language with more autonomy. The big advantage of waiting this long (about two to three weeks at least) before getting them to start showing some creativity and independence is that by this point, the students are likely to be able to produce a base of correct, high level language (the Sentence Builder is the limit of my world).

At this stage, two very low prep activities that are of particular benefit to students are:

1. 4-3-2 speaking (students can use Sentence Builder to prepare)

This is a really useful activity. For younger groups I sometimes adapt it to 3,2,90secs. It is useful to place students in groups of 3 and then have two students give feedback after each round. In my experience, students, when given the right support and guidance, can give accuracy and honest feedback to each other. By the end of the process, students always recognise their fluency gains and are aware of next steps to improve.

2) Group writing – I make a shared Google Document and get students to work in groups of about 4 students (so 4-5 separate groups on different pages of the same doc if a class size of 15 -20). Students then write their answers to a set of stimulus, which I write on the board, or within the same doc. If you were doing this non-electronically, you could use a visualiser to show students work and discuss good practice / errors, in addition to students looking at what others in their group are writing.

I find this advantageous because students can see what a small group of peers is writing, thus they can cross-reference for accuracy. It is a preferred model for me as a stepping stone to totally independent writing.

At this stage, I accept questions from students looking to expand outside the Sentence Builder and either directly help them or direct them to Wordreference.com or other resources.

Adaptation 1 : The Steal Zone. As above but students are encouraged to copy good language from their peers. This works best when working online, but could potentially also work offline, although the copying would be more time consuming.

Adaptation 2 : The Help Zone. As per regular activity, but students are rewarded if they can spot and correct any errors (typos / adjective errors / errors as a result of moving away from the Sentence Builder) their friends have made. This last adaptation could equally be done ‘offline’ by getting students to share their work and do some peer reviewing.

Step 6) Routinisation

Routinisation = Building up speed for REAL LIFE usage

The idea here is to increase retrieval speed and avoid excessive forgetting by students by planning opportunities for regular recycling. Thus the language becomes routinely used.

The routinisation phase will occur near the end of a unit of work, the last 5-6 or ideally more lessons at the end of term, when, having learnt all the target chunks and grammar structures practised thus far, the students are finally having a go at using language for what it should be used: real life communication. In this phase you would stage tasks involving production under time constraints and repetition.

Some useful activities here are:

4-3-2 Speaking (as mentioned above, but with no scaffold this time)

Timed translations

Speed dating

Step 7) Spontaneity

This is the final stage of the E.P.I. sequence. Ideally, by the time you have been through the steps above, from modelling and awareness raising through to structured and independent production, students will have become confident in the language patterns and content. At this point the aim is to “test” the students fluency. Why “test”? Because I do not really want to give them a test, in the traditional sense of the word.

Traditional test = memorise for a specific predictable stimulus. Spend a long time memorising some text. Reproduce the text. Win/lose.

Please note: I might still get students to write an essay, or do a translation, or recite a speech, at the very very end of the unit, but that’s a different story.

At this stage I would suggest giving students a task-based activity where they are forced to use the language learnt over the unit, but in a real-life scenario. Below is a screenshot of a recent Dr Conti post on the GILT Facebook group.

Some examples of task-based learning activities for end of unit checking on learning are ‘opinion-gap’ tasks (giving opinions based on stimulus), ‘reasoning-gap’ tasks (deriving information based on information provided), ‘information-gap’ tasks (decoding and transferring information from one person to another).

I will blog more about spontaneity at a later time.

Concluding thoughts

In this post I have detailed a typical sequence, as well as shared the activities that have proven to be most successful with my own students over the years. In addition, I have given, where possible, a rationale for each of the steps. The E.P.I. methodology has brought about several benefits for my students and my team – reduced time spent on error correction, student gains in fluency and long term retention and also increased take-up at IGCSE. I hope that some of what you have read will have been of use to you and can be implemented into your own practice.  Thanks for reading!

Acknowledgement : For further detail on E.P.I. check out Dr Conti’s original blogs on E.P.I. / MARS EARS and Lexicogrammar – Part 1 and Part 2

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Second Language Teaching CPD 25 about Sentence Builders by Steve Smith

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Second language teaching CPD 25 About sentence builders

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Gianfranco on Curriculum Design (part 1): Intent

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INTENT Part 2                       Intent: content planning, the textbook and fluency

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INTENT Part 2                       Intent: content planning, the textbook and fluency

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Gianfranco on Curriculum Design (part 2) - Intent: content planning, the textbook and fluency

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Reflections on 3 days webinar with Dr Conti by Barri Moc

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I recently had the pleasure of attending the Becoming an E.P.I Teacher training course with the amazing Dr Gianfranco Conti, which consisted of 3 fast and furious webinars and a deep dive into Extensive Processing Instruction. Coincidentally, we have also recently finished the Welsh Sentence Builders 1 translation of the original Spanish Sentence Builders book by Gianfranco and the amazing Dylan Viñales. This post is a follow up on my reflections on the approach, which you can read here!

The productivity of the Language Gym team, and other collaborators such as Steve Smith, has been amazing since my first session with Gianfranco. We now have Breaking the Sound Barrier exploring in depth Listening As Modelling principles and an amazing book, Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know. Add to this the wide range of Sentence Builder books in many languages and the opportunity to access professional learning via webinars and we are spoilt for input on E.P.I. and for this I am certainly very grateful as it’s enables me to develop a deeper understanding which is translating into my classroom practice.

There were many takeaways from these sessions but some things stopped me in my tracks, although I could not do justice to the amount of detailed references to research and application given by Gianfranco and his vast experience and depth of knowledge. Therefore, I offer my own reflections here only in the hope it stirs some thinking for those teaching languages in the classroom and it promotes further discussion as we continue to develop Curriculum for Wales.

Session 1

The focus here was all about the importance of ‘priming’ and ‘modelling’ using worked examples in the form of sentence builders as opposed to explicit grammar instruction which often excludes many due to it’s abstract nature and difficulty.

The first point raised by Gianfranco that had me fixed was his assertion that mastery is not acquisition! I had never really considered or been challenged to consider the difference, and yet it makes perfect sense. As language teachers, we often forget to work beyond mastery of procedural knowledge so as to ensure it’s acquired or automatized. This has lots of implications regarding getting from the patterns to proficiency within the context of the target lexical items we’re working with. The four keys: understanding meaning, communication meaning, mastering form and fluency; in equal measure. How many of us stop at the third and neglect the fluency practice needed to ensure the lexical items are acquired fully and fixed in long term memory?

A second point from this session that struck me was the assertion that memory is context dependant, or learning something in one context does not automatically transfer to another. So as we are moving along in our content and practice with learners in the classroom, this can actually work against the process, and yet transfer is surely our ultimate aim. E.P.I. is a usage based approach and includes implicit and incidental learning, where sub-conscious learning is more durable and gives rise to the huge importance of priming: lexical priming, semantic priming, phonological priming and structural priming. Who knew the humble sentence builder contains so much usefulness in promoting implicit learning opportunities for learners, as we flood the input through listening and reading around them, and why the specific activities offered with the approach are specifically matched to priming for a specific purpose, rather than just activities to provide retrieval.

Gianfranco spoke about ‘learned attention’! This is an important phenomenon particularly for those learning a language that is very different from their first language. Using ‘input enhancing’ techniques to help learners pay attention to new grammatical features as we often need to re-wire the brain to acquire the grammar, which can take years by the way. This demands a deep understanding of what will be strange/difficult for the learners in order to provide the necessary exposure over time. This was a huge part of working on the Welsh Sentence Builder books as we looked for ways to address masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives, mutations of all kinds and word order. Carefully selecting structures and adding extra format to draw the learners attention to these abstract and difficult concepts over time will help them acquire the grammar in context as opposed to a set of rules only.

The next takeaway was to do with the ability of the brain when dealing with meaning and form. Dr Conti pointed out clearly to us that the brain cannot focus on meaning and form at the same time. How crazy it was for me learning this fact after 25 years of being in the classroom! This is why it’s so important to interleave activities/practice that focus on both in equal measure but not at the same time. There’s no wonder the cognitive load on learners is pushed off the scale if we do not manage this very carefully. Deep processing of less content is desirable through listening, reading, writing and speaking in terms of meaning and form and lots of opportunities to train for fluency – fast processing without effort.

Session 2

The overriding focus of this session for me was all about micro-skills and that any curriculum design needs to include space and opportunity to ensure all micro-skills are primed and developed within the design. Listening as modelling, reading as modelling and structured production all contribute toward deep processing and development of all the micro-skills needed for acquisition to occur.

MARS EARS is not just a random framework of things to do in a sequence but is a purposeful approach to ensuring learners have the best chance of implicit learning through input flooding and achieve multiple exposures to the lexical items from every possible angle; and each activity needs to be very carefully selected for a specific purpose which address any specific areas of difficulty.

The importance of listening cannot be ignored and a deep understanding of the processes and skills involved in listening is needed, along with an appreciation of the limitations of the phonological loop as it’s a serial working process and attention is needed on both meaning and form. Bottom up listening and not top down, which only leads to guessing based on key word sounds and reducing confidence in the learner. Self-efficacy cannot be overlooked and careful design of activities within the sequence to ensure 98% comprehensible input, with any new items managed purposefully. Preventing anxiety and developing a can do attitude is vital to the process.

There is a need for us to focus on the function words as well as developing more awareness of verbs, nouns and adjectives. Lots of input enhancement to help learners notice and pay attention to difference. This is achieved by exploiting texts or scripted listening from all angles and through all the micro-skills by extensive repetition of the highly patterned input and very careful choice of activities that exploit the whole text as we alternate between form and meaning. Why am I doing this activity? Is it intelligent and does it have a deliberate purpose within the design?

Session 3

The thrust of this session for me was all about getting past mastery and into fluency. Effortless production of the language items at speed without planning is the goal and this should happen across all four skills. The processes need to be understood deeply in order to provide the optimal conditions for fluency training.

Another bullet for me was this statement: Fluency is task-specific so priming for fluency should be ongoing throughout the whole MARS EARS framework. This is where task repetition is key and the tasks should be a meaningful communicative tasks that are generated from new lexical items and mixed with prior learning. The MARS EARS framework is more of a 3 stage process that’s interlinked: priming, structured output, fluency. How often have I felt frustrated with learners for not getting there when in actual fact it was my lack of structured output practice that meant they did not progress into fluency with the lexical items being learned? Too many!! In addition to this, have I taken the time and opportunity to prime them for the task through carefully designing repeated exposure of the items and then giving the learners ample time to rehearse in many different and engaging ways? Pre-task planning is vital and lots of different communicative tasks desirable. This will reduce cognitive load and allow learners to actually use the language they’ve learnt in a real-life context many times over before fluency can develop through all four skills areas.

I’m so grateful to Gianfranco and Dylan for helping me to develop my understanding of this approach and I’m more conscious now of what I don’t know than ever before. I’m so grateful to have the slides from the course to look back over and question. My advice to any language teacher who has not read Gianfranco’s books, blogs or been to a session face to face or online is to do so as soon as possible. The depth of thinking and understanding underpinning the approach will give you much food for thought, as it has for me. Whether you adopt it fully or experiment with parts of it, I’m positive your learners will benefit in ways you cannot imagine. 🐧

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Spanish KS3 Curriculum based on MARS EARS approach by Esmeralda Salgado

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I've just had a wonderful CPD day today. In the morning I attended, albeit virtually, the ALLswmfl conference with great speakers and in the afternoon we had our first Clubhouse MFL discussion organised by Katie Lockett, where we were discussing MFL uptake to GCSE. At some point the question on what an excellent KS3 curriculum looks like popped out, which has inspired me to write this entry. I am not implying our KS3 curriculum is perfect or excellent but it is working very well. By working I mean is enthusing our students and our pupils are enjoying Spanish at KS3, resulting in many choosing this language for GCSE (a MFL is compulsory in my school at this level in most cases).

What are the elements of our Spanish curriculum?

Adoption of the MARS EARS approach by Gianfranco Conti and the use of Sentence Builders

Getting away from textbooks (we use Mira/Viva in the background, just to extract listening and reading material to some extent)

The notion that Less is More: we only teach three big topics in Y7/8 and four in Y9.

Interleaving of structures and topics. In fact, we dedicate nearly the Summer Term at KS3, to revise all the topics/ Sentence Builders/ Grammar studied since September.

The identification of some High Impact expressions or Taste of Fluency Expressions/Universals using Gianfranco Conti's nomenclature, which are introduced at Y7 and are recycled thoroughly throughout the whole KS3 journey.

The identification of High Frequency Words. We obtained these from the NCELP and we have tried to incorporate as many of these to our Sentence Builders.

Cultural projects clearly embedded and well structured into the curriculum with specific Sentence Builders attached to them, thus, avoiding the use of Google Translate.

Why adopting the MARS EARS approach?

This approach focusses on Lexicogrammar and develops skills in our learners by teaching less content but more functions aiming to achieve fluency in the students. For a whole explanation of this methodology visit The Language Gym Blog or read the book Break the Sound Barrier, which I thoroughly recommend, by Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith.

The approach has four differentiated stages:

Modelling of chunks or Sentence Builders

Awareness Rising through planned repetition of structures, led by the teacher.

Receptive processing. This means controlled input of the selected chunks via planned listening and reading activities, such as narrow readings or listenings among many others!.

Structured production: pushed output of the selected chunks. This stage will require grammar practice and drilling once the intended chunks have been assimilated and embedded in our students' longer term memory.

Expansion. Automatisation. Routanisation. Spontaneity. This is the last stage of the language journey and difficult to get to, where students learn to use the learned language creatively and spontaneously.

Why does it work?

This approach works because it breaks up the language in affordable chunks which are easier to assimilate by students as they reduce cognitive load in the working memory. It takes less time to retrieve a chunk of language than trying to retrieve words individually and then apply grammatical structures to them, such as verb endings and adjective agreement. Carrying out the second action can be frustrating, breaks fluency, results in inaccuracy and demotivates students to speak. Retrieving chunks, on the other hand, is more efficient from the point of view of working memory. It is the first step to fluency and reflects how we learn our mother tongue. I recommend reading Memory, what every Language Teacher should know by Steve Smith and Gianfranco Conti too, where they explain, beautifully well, the way our memory works and why a lexicogrammar approach is best.

Because our curriculum is designed to deal with one/two pages of Sentence Builders for a whole term, students have a lot of time to embed these into their long term memory, start seeing patterns and, we, the teachers, can dedicate more time to planning spontaneity, via  structured production and many, many, many retrieval practice tasks and planned manipulation of the language.

Students feel they are in control, feel motivated as they can start speaking and feel they are making progress! For this to work, we must be FREE which is why my department decided not to use textbooks in the strict sense. Most importantly, the whole department contributed, to certain extent, to this curriculum so we all had ownership of it and shared they same goal: to achieve fluency in our students while making them independent learners in their language language.

This approach allowed us to apply the Just right effect, which I have mentioned in so many other blogposts: the curriculum is not too easy, neither too difficult (as there must be some pain in learning) and allowed us, not the publishers, to decide our own balance of structures and grammar to teach our students.

The interleaving aspect of the approach and embedded retrieval practice are also key to its success!

Our high Impact expressions, including Imperfect Subjunctive structures, are repeated throughout the whole KS3 course and are meant to plant the seed for assimilation of more difficult structures, that traditionally are not learned until GCSE/Alevel. However, why can't a Y7 student say " si pudiera me gustaría cantar como los ángeles" (If I could I would like to sing like the angels. Use of imperfect subjuntive in Spanish and an idiomatic expression)  under the topic of Free Time or " me gustaría que mi madre fuera menos estricta" ( I would like my mum to be less strict, which requires the use of impefect subjunctive in Spanish) under the topic of describing personality?

The key here is to recycle such structures in as many different topics as possible! " me gustaría que mi rutina fuera más tranquila" in Y8 or "me gustaría que mi ciudad fuera más moderna" in Y9.

Less ability students love this approach because it gives them a structure and, as Sentence Builders reduce cognitive load and we do not study too much content, they can remember more and have the time to assimilate these chunks well.

High ability pupils fly in this approach because they can start being fluent very quickly and start manipulating the language freely by adapting the key structures. I had a Y9 student who taught himself the imperfect subjunctive as the seed of curiosity was planted in him via the sentence builder and wanted to find out more! High ability pupils will also spot patterns quickly and start applying grammar freely, with our guidance. In other words, for these students, the Sentence Builders constitute a springboard to the wonderful world of grammar and word manipulation.

Project Based learning and Culture

I believe these are an essential intrinsic aspect of the language journey, as they present a great opportunity to develop Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness, in Liam Printer's words, thus motivation! So we must harness this opportunity, but in a planned manner.

Our curriculum allows for some project based learning linked to specific Sentence Builders:

Y7 students complete a project on Miró, where they will study his pictures in English and will learn a Specific Sentence builder to describe these. Students then create their own Miró's inspired pictures and describe them orally or in writing in our own Art Gallery. This allows to learn to express feelings and more abstract language.

Y9 students study Coco for 6 weeks. This allows students to study el Día de los Muertos and talk about family relationships, clothes and festivities using the film as a background, which will spark discussion, albeit in English but we do not mind!. The final project requires students to create a film guide on Coco, explaining the plot, what happens in the film, giving opinions on it and thinking what will happen to the main character in a second part of the film, using the future tense.

Schemes of Work

We do not use weekly SoWs but termly. We decide what to cover in a term, linked to a Sentence Builder page or two pages, then, each teacher, plans how long to spend on each subtopic/ section of the Sentence Builder.

Why? because every teacher is different and most importantly, each class is different! a top set may be quicker at embedding our Sentence Builder and will carry out more creative tasks while a bottom set will need more activities in the Structured Production stage.

I cannot dictate what to cover each week! What happens if the teacher is absent? Panic! It is better to plan in the long term, having, interleaving at the core of such planning. We share resources, yes, but each teacher will need to plan and adapt those resources to the needs of their students. Having said that, all members of the department will follow the MARS EARS approach. The system would not work otherwise!

Our SoWs do not dictate what to do but  guide the teachers through the MARS EARS approach and give them a wide range of activities to choose from to carry it out . In other words, our SoW is like a teaching manual with many suggested ideas/tasks to carry out in the classroom, many of which I took out from Breaking the Sound Barrier and the mfltwitterati community.

I don't like giving teachers PPTs to follow but equip them, after reflecting together, with the tools needed to carry out the MARS EARS approach, which has its foundation in a pre agreed set of Sentence Builders.

For an example of our departmental KS3 SoWs in Spanish click here.

A compilation of MARS EARS ideas at a glance:

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I’ve just had a wonderful CPD day today. In the morning I attended, albeit virtually, the ALLswmfl conference with great speakers and in the...

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Esmeralda Salgado explains how you can use Sentence Builders to plan a sequence of lessons at Key Stage 4 based on lexicogrammar approach by G Conti

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As we approach the beginning of a new term, it has been nice to hear from many teachers who are planning to ditch the textbook, or limit its use, to start introducing a lexicogrammar approach to their MFL lessons. Several people have personally asked me to show a sequence of lessons showing how I teach MFL with Sentence Builders, using many activities advocated by Gianfranco Conti. In this post I will be showing how I do so, specifically at KS4. I want to focus on a sequence of lessons at GCSE level, as I want to demonstrate that such approach can be adopted at any Key Stage, not only, KS3. I will show a typical sequence of 9 lessons on the classic topic of Holidays, which I typically teach in September at Y10, using high impact, low preparation resources.

I share with my students the first Sentence Builder on the topic of holidays via OneNote. Students are already familiar with around 90% of this vocabulary and structures as this is a popular topic at KS3, in my case, the topic is taught extensively in Y8 and much of the vocabulary, has been recycled in many other topics since Y7 to promote fluency. When introducing a topic, where applicable, I always start introducing verbs in the infinitive form. I do so since Y7, as it allows me to focus on grammatical concepts smoothly later on. During our first lesson, I display the Sentence Builder below in the IWB and model structures via chorus repetition (different voices, moods etc..).

I tend to follow repetition activities with classical dictation activities using mini whiteboards, creating, in situ, sentences from the sheet below. Delayed dictation tasks, where I say a sentence and students are now allowed to write it down until after 10 seconds later, is another good activity to promote memorisation of structures after repetition.

I like these activities, as I can start forming very simple sentences to move to more complicated ones, progressively, varying the speed of utterances to suit my students ability. Interleaving and Retrieval practice are key here, as I incorporate vocabulary and structures from past topics.

Finally, students carry out translation, from Spanish into English, tasks, via mini whiteboards. All these activities require zero preparation on resources as I work spontaneously through the Sentence Builders sheet.

For homework, students will need to learn the vocabulary, (worth two homework tasks), using a Quizlet course, which corresponds entirely with the Sentence Builder below. Pace is key in this lesson, so students stay engaged! Giving little rewards for x number of correct, mini whiteboard answers.

Lessons 2 and 3

I always start my lessons with a quick fire Retrieval Practice session on the vocabulary introduced in previous lessons and past terms/years structures! After, that, I start working on Structured Production and lots of more Modelling via Listening and Reading. This means, using listening and reading tasks as learning activities not testing tools.

There are a wide range of activities to choose from at this stage but a typical sequence would be, Stealing Sentences, a Conti's classic, at three levels.

I can continue with the following Listening activities (more modelling!): Listening Battleships and Bad Translation tasks, where I read a test at different speeds and students need, firstly, highlight the differences with their given copy and secondly write the actual differences. On a previous blogpost, I give ideas on how to explode Listening Battleships if I decide to do so for extra practice! If needed, for higher ability students, I may ask them to translate the bad translation activity into Spanish.

Lessons 4 and 5

At this point, all lessons will start with strong retrieval practice, via call-out questioning and use of mini whiteboards, for that I tend to use a Wheel of Names activity or Flippity.

After my Retrieval Starter, I plan more structured practice activities. One pen and one dice translation works well. Finally, I can use a game, which requires zero preparation, such as Stone, Paper and Scissors, for students to work in pairs and, orally, to reproduce sentences, using the previous wheel of names activity, which I share with students via OneNote. As homework, translating the sentences from the wheel of names in writing, would be great to reinforce structures.

At this point, I introduce the second Sentence Builder on the topic, the "I form" of the present tense and carry out similar activities to lesson 1 for modelling purposes, interleaved with structured production tasks, with structures from previous lessons, to promote retrieval and to scaffold fluency.

This stage, in essence, is another retrieval practice task as the vocabulary in this new Sentence Builder, is exactly the same as in the previous one, but now focussing on the "I form". Students need to discriminate between the infinitive and the conjugated form of the verbs, which reinforces long term memory acquisition.

Questioning students to make them think on uses of infinitive after certain structures, such as "suelo or solía", which have already been introduced since Y7, are key at this stage to reinforce grammar and promote metacognition. Activities such as Read my Mind or Rock Climbing, inspired by Conti,can be done here. Ideas on how to maximise the activity Rock Climbing can be found here.

At this stage, we revise the present tense as a full paradigm. For that, I use many games using mini whiteboards or board games via Genially. The Language Gym: Verb Trainer mode, is a great activity to do at this stage, as a whole class competition .

When teaching grammar, as this is a revision lesson, I use Retrieval Practice techniques to make my students remember the endings of the Present Tense for regular verbs and revise main irregular and semirregular ones. As a summary of this tense, although not allowed to look at it unless I indicate so, for example, for scaffolding purposes, I give them a hand out on the present tense in Spanish.

Finally, students will carry out Reading activities for homework, taken from Keerboodle and/or Exampro on holidays in the present tense, to learn new vocabulary and practise GCSE exam technique.

After my usual Retrieval Starter, I start moving to the Fluency stage of learning on the topic of holidays in the present. Before doing so, I normally do a revision session on formulating questions, so students can ask each other questions, spontaneously in Spanish. This is not new for my students, therefore, this becomes another Retrieval activity which requires students to give me information through my key questioning.

I may quiz my students' ability to formulate questions via Quizizz and finally, they do independent oral conversations with their partners in a Survey or Speed dating format so that they ask several people different questions. Finally, to reinforce our Sentene Builders, I can ask students to prepare an oral presentation using Flipgrid. A writing task on Holidays in the present will be used at this stage, as a homework activity.

I then introduce a new Sentence Builder, "I form" in the Preterit Tense, in lesson 10. Again, this would be a revision on this tense as it was extensively studied during Y8 and Y9. A very similar format to the previous 9 lessons will follow but I vary my activities at each stage, to avoid a fatigue feeling from my students. As shared in other posts, these are the activities I choose from at each stage.

Similarly, to promote fluency, I interleave Structured Production and Fluency activities from previous Sentence Builders/topics, right after Modelling, when working on a new Sentence Builder. This interleaving strategy and recycling of structures and application of different grammar is key to achieve Fluency as it allows students to use the language in different contexts and start manipulating structures:

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Sentence Builders at KS4: A sequence of lessons, planning Fluency!

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As we approach the beginning of a new term, it has been nice to hear from many teachers who are planning to ditch the textbook , or limit it...

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Implementation of EPI from KS3 by Silvia Bastow

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The Curriculum - mapping and sequencing...

The most important fact to consider when reading this post is the context of your school.

We all teach in different types of schools - comprehensive state schools, Grammar schools, independent schools, private schools, selective schools, international schools... and our students come from different socio-economic backgrounds.

There isn't a 'one-size-fits-all' approach when mapping out and sequencing the curriculum. Our curriculum map is the collaboration of the whole department and the creation of it was supported by many discussions with colleagues from within the Trust as well (many thanks to Jill Lock for her initial ideas and guidance). These documents are working documents which are at the centre of our departmental meetings and are prone to change depending on regular reviews, experience and feedback. The document templates are used across all departments across our academy.

The focus of our curriculum is heavily directed to the development of students' communication skills, self-efficacy, strong and durable retention of language, independence and autonomy. Through the 3 pillars of progression - phonology, vocabulary and Grammar, students will gain a strong phonetic knowledge that enables them to converse (and pronounce new vocabulary) confidently and provides a reinforcement of many literacy skills from their first language. They will learn how to manipulate grammar to allow them to personalise information and retain core phrases that can be recycled in a large number of real-life situations. Through this knowledge and confidence, they will become resilient and competent linguists who are open-minded and versatile communicators.

By the end of KS3, students will understand what it is to be in discovering the world and its people, as well as having an interest and intention to travel in order to deepen their of the ways in which languages are interconnected and in which languages play a part in our daily lives. Students will develop an a linguist. Pupils will have a curiosity and fascination understanding of different cultures and societies. They will have an understanding extensive core of vocabulary and grammatical structures which will be learned and regularly practised and retrieved so that students are confident communicators in a variety of contexts across all 4 language skills. For students to achieve success in Languages, teachers ensure that there is regular and systematic practice of the essential knowledge so that students know their knowledge gaps and have the tools to practise effectively to close those gaps. This is achieved by implementing and embedding retrieval practice in all our lessons.

Students will leave the school with the knowledge and understanding that enable them to apply what they know to both familiar and unfamiliar contexts from family life to ethical issues and the world of work. This will help them to go on to achieve their potential, not just at A Level and in Higher Education but as global citizens living in a dynamic and interdependent world. Linguists at Ercall Wood Academy will have an appreciation for the world they live in and a deep understanding of their place in an ever-changing multi-cultural society. Throughaknowledgerichcurriculum, students will acquire the skills needed todevelopthefour mainskillsofreading,writing,speakingand listeninginthetarget language.Theinvaluablecommunicationskillsandcreativitydevelopedthroughlearningaforeignlanguage will foster a deeperunderstandingandappreciationofothercultureson a local, national and international stage.

RESEARCH-INFORMED: https://gianfrancoconti.com/

When communicating 75% of the time is spent l istening and speaking (Adler, R., Rosenfeld, L. and Proctor, R., 2001) - L:45%, S: 30% and 25% on reading (16%) and writing (9%) - [The Language Gym], therefore our curriculum will focus on these 2 skills before progressing onto the written production. Language will be taught in chunks (not individual words) as this supports fluency and LTM recall.

"Language learning is not simply about combining words and applying grammar rules but rather the retrieval of the patterns and combinations we are primed for." (Micheal Hoey - Lexical Priming 2005)

"L2 research has shown that making use of formulaic expressions and memorizing long chunks of text (and making substitutions within them) is far more efficient and effective than learning to assemble new linguistic strings in the process of language production." (Nation,2013 Ellis,2015)

Chunks can then be manipulated.

" A chunk is a frequently recurring, meaningful string of two or more words either fixed or with variable slots which can be learned as a single unit, without the need to analyse its elements. Once committed to (long term) memory; a chunk can be retrieved and used 'as is' or with modifications, if necessary, bypassing the need to generate it from individual words and grammatical rules." (Selivan, 2018).

Through a thorough and frequent exposure to the language of that topic or the communicative function, students will be able to pick up subtleties such as phonemes, syllables, meaning, lexis, Grammar and syntax.
The implementation of our curriculum:
Our languages department employs to ensure students learn in an a range of strategies enjoyable, positive and inclusive environment. All members of staff have studied and are applying the Dr Gianfranco Conti's approach (a respected MFL teacher, specialist and linguist) of his Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI) method. To enable our students to become successful language learners, we have reviewed our curriculum and created our own bespoke teaching resources to implement the EPI principles into our lessons.

Our EPI approach includes:

Sentence builders central to all lessons, enabling students to build accurate sentences

Extensive drilling of chunks of language through LAM and RAM using engaging games and speaking activities

Focus on listening and speaking skills at the start of every unit of work/sequence

Use of texts that are at least 95% comprehensible (comprehensible input) to build fluency and to avoid cognitive overload

Explicit teaching of language learning, decoding and parsing skill to support metacognition

Regular 'pop up' Grammar sessions

Systematic retrieval of knowledge to produce deep and durable learning

Core structures/chunks are presented and modelled in context through reading aloud (e.g. Sentence builders & subsequent activities) using 98 % comprehensible input. Pupils are gaining familiarity with the language (phonetically & translation into L1).

"With the majority of L 2 learners for listening and reading input to be conducive to learning, around 98 of the words must be familiar." (Nation, 2013)

2) AWARENESS RAISING - Sensitizes the learners to the patterns/rules governing the target chunks formation and use. (Recognition of grammar but not explained in depth YET.)

3) RECEPTIVE PROCESSING - Practising the core phrases until pupils are absolutely RECEPTIVELY confident BEFORE moving on to them producing them themselves. (Longer texts but still 98% comprehensible input.) Extensive processing - ( exposure to the language): the more exposure a learner has to the chunks, the more likely they are to retain the language.

Intensive Recycling in the lesson (Major memory loss within the first 20 minutes from first processing the word. Hence the importance of recycling the same items over and over again. Flooded input, Controlled input and Thorough processing are essential in order to maximize recycling.

4) STRUCTURED PRODUCTION - Intensive scaffolded and highly controlled production practice (PUSHED OUTPUT). Introduction of more 'thinking' and cognitive load - making students think back to what they have learnt & start to use it, but with support of SB/KO. Start to include L1 to L2 translations. (Pop-up Grammar can also be included at this stage.)

5) Structure is learnt in greater depth and practised with old and new vocabulary. Explicit work on grammar and generative processing - students expand to language patterns. Less use of KO/SBs & support to encourage them to really think!

is powerful because we learn best through ASSOCIATIVE learning, Interleaving by hooking the new to the old. The core structures are practised with old and new vocabulary and structures overtime through systematic recycling (scaffolding might still be necessary). After much (semi-) implicit practice the students (through deductive teaching or inductive learning) learn the rule(s) governing the target item(s) in greater depth. If applicable, more aspects of the rules governing the target items are modelled and practised (e.g., from one or two persons of the present tense, to all six persons).

6) Extensive oral and written practice in which the scaffolding is gradually faded out and spoken or written output is produced by pupils with little support. Language is practised productively without scaffolding but still in familiar contexts and focus is on fast retrieval (automaticity) The aim is to develop most students' autonomy in the use of the target structure by the end of this phase.

This phase continues throughout the academic year or even the following year(s) through systematic recycling across topics and Interleaving. Students perform structured and semi-structured tasks which may elicit the use of the target structure (surveys, interviews, role-plays, picture tasks, unstructured essays).

- where the focus is on fluency development. "A grammar structure can be said to have been acquired only when it has been automatized across all 4 skills and it is applied successfully across a wide range of contexts." (Smith & Conti, 2016)

8) SPONTANEITY - Spontaneous production of written / spoken language in response to questions or a task. Practise in unfamiliar contexts (and combining previously learned language). Practice in unplanned response through a stimulus that elicits the use of the target structure(s) is provided at spaced intervals over the year.

"Task based language teaching is a students-centred approach to second language instruction. Activities focus on having students use authentic target language in order to complete meaningful tasks, i.e., situations they might encounter in the real world and other project based assignments." (Ludwig, 2015)

: Extensive practice frequency and regularity being key. Use across a wide range of contexts. Practice occurs with language you know. Task repetition. Working to a time constraint in an effort to increase speed while understanding/producing an increasingly large quantity of input/output. Planning/preparing for tasks.

is the ultimate goal of language teaching. 10.) AUTOMATICITY Strong long-term retention is important but being able to retrieve what we have learnt fast and effortlessly is key in language learning.*

Sequencing the curriculum is essential to generate deep and durable learning in Languages.

Where possible we replicate the order by which children naturally acquire their first language. we therefore start in Year 7 by learning key phonics. The learning of these sounds is reinforced in every unit of work, when we introduce new Sentence builders/KOs.

In Year 7 pupils learn the verbs such as 'to be' and 'to have'. This knowledge is essential in order to be able to access the Year 8 and 9 curricula, where students learn to describe events in thekey grammatical ideas on which all languages are built. Students start by introducing themselves in the present tense, give opinions and talk about their possessions. This allows students to learn how adjectives behave, and the importance of the genders of nouns. Students also learn about the infinitives and how verbs are conjugated, including common irregular future as well as complex structures. past and

When appropriate we also 'seed-plant' chunks of language. Seed planting exposes students to common chunks of language before students are expected to understand the Grammar behind the phrase. For example, students learn the important phrase 'I would like' from the first term, even though the conditional is not taught explicitly until Year 9.

Our students want to succeed, and, through hard work and achievement, they want to learn more. Modelling is a key aspect of teaching in MFL to support oracy and fluency. Teachers explicitly teach students how to learn, self-quiz and revise so that they can be successful in regular knowledge retrieval and vocabulary tests. This helps to ensure long-term retention of core vocabulary and skills from KS3 through to KS4 and beyond. Opportunities at KS3 and 4 provide students with real world contexts to apply their knowledge, this includes visits from foreign students and speakers as well as drawing on the wealth of material available online to support cultural and social awareness. Key concepts are revisited over key stages as well as between lessons to ensure retrieval and recall and the development of long-term memory.

Example of sequential document - Year 7 - this document is being adapted at the moment as we feel there might still be too much content - due to the Pandemic, it is difficult to judge it and be objective. However, it might give you an idea how we sequence it...

The GCSE curriculum focuses on 5 themes which are then threaded throughout KS3 teaching:

Topic 2 - School activities/clubs

Topic 3 - Work/world of work

Topic 2 - Environmental issues

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The Curriculum - mapping and sequencing... The most important fact to consider when reading this post is the context of your school. We all teach in different types of schools - comprehensive state schools, Grammar schools, independent schools, private schools, selective schools, international schools... and our students come from different socio-economic backgrounds.

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MFL Books about                 Language Teaching, Listening, Classroom Practice 

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MFL Books about                 Language Teaching, Listening, Classroom Practice 

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* Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (Conti, Smith, 2019)

* The Language Teacher Toolkit (Smith, Conti, 2016)

* 100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Outstanding MFL Lessons (D. Warren 2019)

*SPANISH SENTENCE BUILDERS
A lexicogrammar approach (Beginner to pre-Intermediate) Conti, Viñales
Translated and adapted in French, German, Italian, Irish, Welsh, Chinese

Listening Teacher/ Student book (available in Spanish and French)

GCSE Revision (Spanish, French, German)

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Italian Sentence Builders is a workbook aimed at beginner to pre-intermediate students co-authored by three modern languages educators with over 50 years of extensive classroom experience between the three, both in the UK and internationally. This 'no-frills' book contains 19 units of work on very popular themes, jam-packed with graded vocabulary-building, reading, translation, retrieval practice and writing activities. Key vocabulary, lexical patterns and structures are recycled and interleaved throughout.

Each unit includes:
1) A sentence builder modelling the target constructions;
2) A set of vocabulary building activities;
3) A set of narrow reading texts exploited through a range of tasks focusing on both the meaning and structural levels of the text;
4) A set of retrieval-practice translation tasks;
5) A set of writing tasks targeting essential micro-skills such as spelling, lexical retrieval, syntax, editing and communication of meaning.

Based on the Extensive Processing Instruction (E.P.I.) principle that learners learn best from comprehensible and highly patterned input flooded with the target linguistic features, the authors have carefully designed each and every text and activity to enable the student to process and produce each item many times over. This occurs throughout each unit of work as well as in smaller grammar, vocabulary and question-skills micro-units located at regular intervals in the book, which aim at reinforcing the understanding and retention of the target grammar, vocabulary and question patterns.

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Italian Sentence Builders - A Lexicogrammar approach - Beginner to Pre-intermediate (The Language Gym - Sentence Builder Books)

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Buy Italian Sentence Builders - A Lexicogrammar approach - Beginner to Pre-intermediate (The Language Gym - Sentence Builder Books) by Conti, Dr Gianfranco, Viñales, Mr Dylan, Gravina, Mrs Simona, Pianigiani, Mr Stefano (ISBN: 9798677055546) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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Nadim Cham talks about his experience of applying EPI methodology and creating MARS EARS sequence of lessons with reference to a textbook.

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Reading/ writing task. Students needs to translate sentence in L2, putting together the syllables to make the words. Great chunking activities that could also be done as a Listening. This template is from the Spanish Primary Sentence Builders book.

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Modelling & AR templates by Aurélie Lethuilier

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Modelling & AR templates by Aurélie Lethuilier

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This sequence of slides has been created by the wonderful Aurélie to give ideas of various tasks that can be done during the Modelling/Awareness raising phase of the MARS EARS. Merci.

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Receptive processing templates by Aurélie Lethuilier

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Receptive processing templates by Aurélie Lethuilier

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These editable slides have been put together by Aurélie to offer a variety of activities to practise Listening/Reading-as-Modelling during the receptive phase of the MARS EARS.

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BOB UP
This idea is taken from Jake Hunton
Fun Learning Activities for Modern Languages:  A Complete Toolkit for Ensuring Engagement, Progress and Achievement

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DELAYED COPYING
One sentence displayed on the board. Teacher can read it a few times and ask students to memorize it. When the sentence will disappear from the board, students need to write it down in their WMB/book.

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In this video Christian Moretti-Byrnes explains how he uses SB throughout a unit of learning, from Modelling to Production, as part of his role of associate for Junior Cycle for Teachers, a Department of Education of Ireland agency.

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An example of implementing E.P.I. in Year 7(First Year Secondary School) 

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An example of implementing E.P.I. in Year 7(First Year Secondary School) 

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In this presentation Margarita Mortimer explains how she has embedded EPI in her Year 7 Spanish Curriculum.

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In this blog post Silvia Bastow explains how she uses Sentence Builders to maximise students' learning. It can be a useful read with practical ideas when introducing new vocabulary/grammar for anyone new to EPI methodology.

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There is an increasing number of language teachers; me being one of them; using Sentence Builders (previously referred to as substitution t...

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In this blog Dr Conti debunks ten misconceptions about EPI, explaining in detail how grammar and phonics are practised extensively through a powerful synergy of implicit and explicit learning.

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Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.)

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Ten reasons why you shouldn't adopt E.P.I. in your classroom

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Why this post? In the last decade or so, a large number of language educators around the globe have embraced my approach, EPI (aka Extensive Processing Instruction). Many teachers and schools have done so 'wholesale', applying it to all aspects of their MFL curriculum; others only partially, incorporating some aspects of my approach e.g.

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The real MARS EARS: How EPI sequence truly unfolds

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The real MARS EARS: How EPI sequence truly unfolds

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Gianfranco Conti's blog on the Language Gym

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This post is aimed at providing language educators interested in my approach with an up-to-date description of the MARSEARS instructional sequence faithful to the 'letter' and 'spirit' of EPI, as opposed to the many adaptations and hybridizations floating on social media these days, which may be as or even more effective, but often substantively misrepresent the original framework.
The MARSEARS sequence
As can be seen in figure 1 below, a typical unit of work lasts a term and consists of five sub-units: four of which deal with new material and consist of MARSEA (Modelling, Awareness-raising, Receptive processing, Structured Production, Expansion and Autonomy) and two of RS (Routinization and Spontaneity) which aim at consolidating and automatizing that material, as well as interweaving it with materials from previous units (e.g. in Term 2 in year 8, you will interweave core vocabulary and grammar from Term 1 in year 8, and if you can, from Terms 1,2 and 3 in year 7). The holes in between units can be used for revision and/or fluency training. Important: I recommend that the structured production phase (in green in figure 1) last two lessons with average-ability learners rather than one, as indicated in the picture.
: a macro-unit is subdivided in five sub-units. The first four sub-units include the MARSEA sequence, whilst the last sub-unit include the RS phases which culminate in the spontaneity assessment task. The ticks refer to the recycling of the target items (the material included in the sentence builders). Items 5 to 8 refer to the new items, whereas items 1 to 4 refer to the ones taught in the previous unit.

1 - Modelling - the target sentence pattern(s) is (are) modelled through sentence builders or any other means. I prefer sentence builders, occasionally preceded by a round of two of flashcards to sensitize the students to any new vocabulary included in the target sentence builder. Activating prior lexical or morpho-syntactic knowledge prior to the modelling of the target construction will obviously help, should the target sentence builder include previously encountered material (for instance: if you are teaching the perfect tense of verbs requiring the auxiliary 'Avoir' in French, you may want to activate their knowledge of the present indicative of AVOIR and the meaning of the verbs you have included in the sentence builders).
Figure 2 - A sample German sentence builder from http://www.sentencebuilders.com

2 - Awareness-raising - the learners' attention is drawn to specific features in the model sentences, e.g. SSC (symbol-to-sound correspondence), phonotactics (e.g. liaison), intonation patterns, grammar and syntax. This is snappy pop-up grammar and pop-up phonics awareness-raising aimed at sensitizing the learners to specific linguistic features in the input, so that when they encounter them multiple times in the next (receptive) phase they are more likely to pay attention to and eventually internalize them.

3 - Receptive processing - in the first part of this phase, the focus is on sentence-level processing only, at least with beginner to pre-intermediate students. The teacher engages the students in the repeated processing of the model sentences through a variety of enjoyable snappy activities mostly through the aural medium. The input is flooded with multiple occurrences of the target pattern and the instructor is deliberate in targeting the whole range of listening and reading sub-skills: phonological and graphological processing (both at phonemic and syllabic level); segmenting; lexical retrieval, parsing (grammar and syntax), and semantic (meaning) processing. The activities include a balance of focus-on-form (phonics, grammar, syntax and function words) and focus-on-meaning activities. Scripted listening (i.e. listening whilst reading) activities enable the students to develop decoding (SSC) and segmenting skills, key for vocabulary acquisition through the aural medium.

In the second part of this phase, the teacher proceeds to work on connected texts, which include current and previously studied material. The texts usually include narrow listening and narrow reading texts, i.e. near-identical texts where the discourse structure is identical but some of the lexical items differ. The highly-patterned texts are flooded with the target features and contain at least 90 % comprehensible input. Input-enhancement (both acoustic and visual) draws attention to the target features.

The input-flooding, input-enhancement, repeated processing and thorough-processing elicited by the tasks included in the instructional sequences throughout this phase, allow for multiple encounters with the target input, which is likely to result in implicit learning. Throughout the phase the teacher will EXPLICITLY and repeatedly point the students' attention to the target phonological, grammatical and syntactic features thereby ensuring that IMPLICIT and EXPLICIT learning work in synergy. Deep-processing activities can also be embedded in this phase to elicit the greater cognitive investment that according to much research (e.g. Leow, 2015) results in longer-lasting learning.

Important: the listening and reading activities staged in this phase are not your typical receptive activities. They are Listening-As-Modelling (LAM) and Reading-As-Modelling (RAM) activities which are designed to model speaking and writing as part of your effort to convert input into output. This doesn't mean you won't stage any traditional Listening and Reading comprehensions. You will do both. For obvious reasons, though, with beginner-to-intermediate learners you will stage listening-for-learning (LAM) tasks prior to engaging in listening-for-testing ones.

4 - Structured production - in the first part of this pushed-output phase, the beginner-to-pre-intermediate learners engage in chunking-aloud games/tasks (e.g. Sentence stealer, Sentence chaos, Mind-reading, Lie-detector) which elicit repeated processing of the target sentence patterns. These games, too, will involve an alternation of focus-on-meaning and focus-on-form activities. These games aim at enhancing decoding skills, phonotactic and articulatory fluency. More importantly, chunking-aloud games, being fun and inclusive, foster learner willingness to communicate and participate, two key pre-requisites for the attainment of oral fluency.

In the second part of this phase, the learners engage in retrieval practice and in highly structured oral and written communicative activities. Initial individual or pair-work written activities - carried out using worksheets or digital resources - help transitioning from receptive to productive retrieval and pave the way for a series of engaging and enjoyable oral retrieval practice activities (some of which, not all, are described here). The latter involve group work and are totally student-managed, typically consisting of competitions between two players with a referee/coach (equipped with an answer sheet) providing instant positive or negative feedback and awarding points. The fact that these activities are totally student-managed means that the teacher can devote his/her attention to monitoring learner performance whilst moving around the classroom. This enables him/her to gather a lot of observational data and engage in the provision of formative feedback.

5 - Expansion - this phase is about learning explicitly the morpho-syntactic patterns that have already been processed many times over. The teacher may decide to do this deductively (explicitly teaching the grammar); through guided discovery (leading the students with guiding questions to work out the grammar rules) or totally inductively (the learners, given a number of sentences exemplifying the target rules infer the rules by themselves). Receptive and productive activities from the previous phases (in which the target rule is task-essential) can be employed here.

6 - Autonomous recall - this is where short achievement tests are staged. These are snappy, easy-to mark, low-stake assessments aimed at ascertaining whether the students have attained at least receptive mastery of the target input (or productive if you are dealing with groups of higher attainers). As far as I am concerned, I prefer to make the first three assessments (whether form- or meaning-focused) receptive in nature and the last two productive. The rationale: the ability to perform productive retrieval emerges later than receptive. Also, throughout the structured productive phase in each sub-unit I have usually already obtained a good idea of where my students are in terms of productive retrieval in non-exam conditions. A grammar assessment component, initially receptive and later productive, can be included with the right groups at the end of each sub-unit..

7-Routinization/Fluency training - in this phase, a number of truly engaging and enjoyable pushed-output activities are staged which aim at consolidating the target material and speeding up its receptive and productive retrieval. The activities, based on Paul Nation's research into fluency training, typically involve: (1) repeated processing, (2) task-repetition; (3) pre-task priming; (4) pre-task planning; (5) incrementally challenging timed constraints. As happens in the previous phases, one will alternate tasks which focus on negotiation of meaning ('Messengers', 'Dictogloss', 'Five', Detective and Informants', 'All for one and one for all', 'Secret sentences', 'View and Recall race') with others which focus on form (e.g. 'Chain reading'; 'Chain dictation', 'Tongue twisters', 'Fast and Furious', 'Puzzle race'). Very important: since automatization means making what is already known more easily and rapidly retrievable, the language used in this phase should include only familiar lexis and gramma r.

8 - Spontaneity - In this phase communicative tasks (e.g. Oral picture-description tasks; Interviews; Role-plays) require the students to produce UNPLANNED output under time constraints to simulate R.O.C. (Real Operating Conditions). One of these tasks can be used too for assessment purposes. With lower-ability learners, the assessment could include some planning time and even a short priming task.
Wow! This is long !
An understandable reaction is to consider this too long and time-consuming. The answer: fluency can't be achieved using the traditional PPP approach or short instructional sequences of a couple of lessons, as textbooks purport to do. Students need to receive substantive structured receptive and productive practice to be able to attain that degree of proceduralization of the input which will ensure long-term retention. Much textbook-based teaching fails in this regard and, consequently, more than often teachers at KS4 (15-16 years old) have to reteach what was taught at KS3 (years 11 to 13) all over again wasting valuable time (now THAT is time-consuming!). Also, going 'slower' means being more inclusive thereby increasing the chances of a higher future GCSE and A-level uptake. Fortunately, at KS3 one can afford to go slower, as the focus should be on fostering fluency development and a passion for language learning, rather than manufacturing cohorts of exam takers.

Note that at KS4, the EPI teacher will be able to go faster, having built strong foundations at KS2 and 3, as opposed to flimsy declarative knowledge, as often happens.
Conclusion
In this post I have provided an outline of the MARSEARS sequence faithful to the true letter and spirit of EPI. Teachers are, of course, very free to adapt it to their own contexts always hopefully cognizant of the fact that they can't hope to create fluency at KS3, unless they teach exceptionally gifted learners, in three or four lessons or by stopping at the structured production phase as some advocate.

The aim of this sequence is to be inclusive and create durable learning. Each phase in the sequence primes the next one. So, whilst the challenge increases gradually, the students get to next phase prepared and more confident. Building learner can-do attitude, is key in the design and delivery of an EPI instructional sequence, as self-efficacy is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of language learning success.

Obviously, each MARSEARS sequence must not be considered in isolation but in the relation to the curriculum as a whole, always ensuring that the core items you have identified as the non-negotiables, the must-learn phonics, vocabulary and grammar are constantly recycled across contexts, consistently with the Transfer Appropriate Processing principle and with what we know about memory decay and proactive/retroactive interference (Bjork's law of disuse).

Finally, the key to successful teaching is ensuring that the students - all of them - enjoy learning and succeed at it on a daily basis. Unless this happens, students are unlikely to develop a passion for language learning. Traditional PPP, especially when consisting of masses of grammar learning, however well-planned and systematic, is unlikely to be inclusive and exciting for the average teenager.

To find out more about the approach, do get hold of the best-selling book authored by myself and Steve Smith, "Breaking the Sound Barrier: teaching learners how to listen". or attend my upcoming workshops

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Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.)

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The real MARSEARS: how an EPI sequence TRULY unfolds

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Why this post? This post is aimed at providing language educators interested in my approach with an up-to-date description of the MARSEARS instructional sequence faithful to the 'letter' and 'spirit' of EPI, as opposed to the many adaptations and hybridizations floating on social media these days, which may be as or even more effective, but...

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Plenary or starter activity.
In groups: Children line up in front of the screen. First in the line starts translate sentence L1 to L2- when they make a mistake go at the back of the queue and next child starts translating from first chunk. Each students has 3 lives. 1 student /or teacher has answer sheet (referee).
Can have a list of sentences split in chunks, from easier to more challenging. Good retrieval for vocabulary/grammar structures.

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1. Modelling & Awareness Raising - Copy.pptx

2. Receptive Processing Phase - Copy.pptx

3. Structured production - Copy.pptx

4. Expansion, Autonomy, Routinisation, Spontaneity.pptx

5. Overview activities - MARS EARS - V4.pptx

7. Template lesson sequence.pptx

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Primary Welsh- Pembrokeshire County Council resources

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Primary Welsh- Pembrokeshire County Council resources

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Fframwaith Addysgu CC2 + CC3 Teaching Framework PS2 + PS3

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Christian’s video is not playing for me. 

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Christian’s video is not playing for me. 