Can Metacognitive Strategies Improve Writing Skills in MFL?
BY JENNY O'REILLY-TURNER (Abbeygate)
Brief background
Year 12 MFL (French and German) students in Autumn 2020 were lacking in confidence and experience in producing extended writing and translation work, having not completed their GCSEs and having had a break of several months from language learning as a result of lockdown. Many were keen and enthusiastic to learn but lacking in confidence and learning strategies to effectively make the progress expected of them in the first year of A-Levels in their writing skills.
Particularly affected were writing skills and the prospect of writing a sufficiently analytical literary essay of 300 words in Target Language (TL) on a set text/film was daunting. Students also struggled with the level of forensic linguistic grammatical detail in preparing a text for translation into TL and with the specific techniques required for writing a paraphrased summary of a written text or audio extract.
Metacognitive strategies such as ‘talking through the task’, a mental checklist of skills and concurrent task and outcome evaluation are all general skills which are also transferable between subjects and form the basis of beneficial generic learning skills, for all levels of ability, so it is hoped that by teaching these for MFL, students will also develop the ability to consider and apply these in alternative learning contexts.
These skills would in theory be in addition to the general language and content teaching taking place in lessons anyway. A number of the techniques such as ‘talking through the task’, self-evaluation of a concurrent task and use of core reference resources to embed higher level linguistic structures were already embedded in my teaching, so I took the opportunity to make them more explicit and to iterate to the students the reasons why we took certain steps in a certain way.
Aims of the project:
My research was intended to find out which metacognitive strategies would be the most successful ‘quick wins’ in helping them regain their linguistic confidence and also bring them to a level of ability required to produce extended, detailed and analytical pieces of written work such as literary essays, written summaries and translations into TL with the requisite levels of linguistic accuracy.
The need for these techniques became all the more important when we started remote learning again in January 2021. How to communicate and deploy these ‘quick win’ strategies remotely and maximise metacognition to achieve the same level engagement, particularly in a situation in which T&L time and the impact on learning outcomes was significantly affected by a change in learning circumstances?
Being a successful writer in TL is somewhat hampered at the best of times when students are tempted to use online translation tools such as Google Translate (with results of quite varying but generally poor quality), so the need to teach the skills in addition to the content was put into particularly sharp relief when we entered lockdown again in January. How could I teach them to become more independent writers, who didn’t have a need to resort to such tools, or even if they did use them, how could I train them to consider the suggested result in a more critical fashion, rather than just accepting whatever suggestion provided?
Why is this important to investigate?
Essay writing, translation and summary writing represent a significant proportion of the productive skills students need to master for examination. In addition, perceived confidence and ability in linguistic production (whether through speaking or writing) affects the overall confidence and motivation of a student in MFL: “I can’t write/speak French, so I can’t do it” even though receptive skills such as listening and reading comprehension are just as valuable in real life and in the examination.
Students arriving in Year 12 this year were also particularly daunted by the prospect of ‘writing an essay’ in TL, as regardless of lockdown and no GCSEs, this is a brand-new skill for students at A-Level. Google Translate & Co are a constant temptation.
Responses to an online feedback survey conducted in mid-Autumn 2020 revealed that students were particularly wary of these extended writing skills and felt that a focus on them would enhance their overall progress and confidence in learning. It was also clear from initial end of unit assessment grades in the same term that productive writing and translation skills needed a boost.
What is the existing evidence?
Developing students’ metacognitive knowledge of productive skills such as speaking and writing for a range of purposes in KS5 MFL is beneficial to students’ confidence and progress in general. (Knospe, 2018)
It is a practical means of allowing students to apply their grammatical and subject-based knowledge in an effective exam style exercise. (Fisher and Forbes 2015, Graham 2006, Haukas et al 2018)
Even if not every student uses every metacognitive strategy available, general awareness of a range of ‘talking through the task’ strategies and group/individual methods to tackle a writing task are still of benefit to students (Fisher & Forbes 2015; Forbes, 2018).
- The impact of expanding A Level students’ awareness and use of metacognitive learning strategies on confidence and proficiency in foreign language learning skills’, Forbes and Fisher, 2015
- ‘A Study of Students’ Metacognitive Beliefs about Foreign Language Study and Their Impact on Learning’, Graham, 2006
- ‘Metacognition in Language Learning and Teaching’, Haukas et al, 2018
- ‘“In German I Have to Think about It More than I Do in English” The Foreign Language Classroom as a Key Context for Developing Transferable Metacognitive Writing Strategies’, Forbes, 2018
- ‘Metacognitive Knowledge about Writing in a Foreign Language A Case Study’, Knospe 2018
Work completed so far (including any modifications due to lockdown)
Formal feedback surveys in Autumn about MFL learning
Initial student voice highlighted the need to focus on writing skills. A later feedback survey focused on writing skills and which elements students found trickier/easier and the skills they currently deployed in class (best summarised as “roll my sleeves up, write some stuff and hope for the best”!)
Intensive deployment of laminated higher level linguistic structure resources and grammatical checklists
I provided these reference materials for students already, setting the expectation that they are kept in day-to-day folders and brought to each lesson, but for the purposes of this project and for the project made much more explicit reference to them, directly incorporated them into lesson activities more regularly and explicitly made reference to the relevant AOs when using them in order to make a direct link between the resources and the mark scheme and thus to students’ own linguistic targets.
Short written answers and sentence starters/prompts
In order to ‘break down’ a complicated topic covered in class used to teach the historical context to the set literary text, to enable students to not only demonstrate comprehension but also and also build resilience to gradually writing more in TL, I developed a range of resources (examples here are from a min-series of lessons based around France in WW2 and the French Resistance) which required students to write, with structured support, answers of gradually increasing length and detail.
Students could decide whether to use the sentence starters and prompts provided and then construct an answer to fit with that or had free reign to write their own answer.
'Talking Through The Task’
Despite being an integral part of my teaching anyway, I explicitly named this process and began to refer to it as “developing your internal voice” or “being the parrot on your shoulder” with the aim being “In an exam, the first thing I want your internal voice to say is ‘What would Jen say about this?”. The students have already independently adopted this as asking themselves the question: “What would Jen say about this task?”. Students are now beginning to take the lead in class activities and take it in turns unprompted to talk through the task at hand.
Gnuggets aka ‘grammatical nuggets’
Whilst discussing translation strategies with each class, it was clear that the more traditional ‘chunking up’ technique was quite complex and wieldy. We therefore developed the idea of identifying Gnuggets (grammatical nugget) which helps to break up translations and for students to better visualise the grammatical knowledge required.
It identifies the parts of language which need to belong together and therefore be translated together, such as nouns with adjectival agreements or singular and plural subject nouns affecting later parts of a sentence. It is also easier to see how one gnugget earlier in the sentence affects others later in the sentence, which is particularly helpful when considering German word order after sub-ordinating conjunctions.
This chunking/gnuggeting of the texts also fits with the mark scheme – each element is worth one mark.
In addition to using a Gnugget List in which the translation elements of a sentence are listed vertically rather than horizontally in a sentence, we also have a pet Gnugget in the classroom which is a humorous reminder of our strategies.
On the left is an example of Gnugget List showing vertical instead of horizontal translation, including ‘thinking space’ for students write notes before writing the final answers on their exam papers. Just like ‘scrap paper for notes’, the Gnugget List is submitted with the final paper so that I can see the students’ working out and thought processes.
On the right is our pet Gnugget.
Initial translation end of unit scores tend to demonstrate this this has been very well received and is of great assistance for students translating into TL, a notoriously difficult skill for Yr 12s to master.
Collaborative essay planning and discussion of suitable linguistic structures to use
Whilst I have been a user of Padlet for collaborative work for some time, remote learning in January presented an ideal opportunity to deploy this technique further to develop essay writing skills. With Year 12 French we used Padlet to share and discuss ideas before collaboratively drafting our initial essay on the set text. The combination of shared resources, collaborative tasks and talking through the task proved ideal for remote learning.
We continue to use Padlet in class in any event, even during face-to-face learning as it serves as an excellent repository for notes and discussions and a permanent record of our efforts which can be accessed from devices and even downloaded as a pdf for student folders.
Remote talking through the task and use of online tools also gave us the opportunity to discuss and annotate the complex linguistic structures made available at the start of the course and discuss which examples students would deploy in essays, particularly considering which would score highly on AOs for range of language and level of critical analysis.
Screenshots from remote learning of collaborative documents showing analysis of high-level linguistic structures needed to write an analytical literary essay:
What are the preliminary findings – quantitative or qualitative
The initial findings are that being more explicit about the learning goals and making explicit reference to the skills and purposes for completing an exercise in a certain way are overwhelmingly positive in terms of student progress.
Of note is one student who was particularly weak in French with less effective learning strategies who - since the deployment of more explicit strategies for writing skills - has scored an average of a B in one recent end of unit assessment and is now able to write more confidently (if not always correctly) and produce a literary analysis essay. Whilst some of this progress will undoubtedly be down to having completed more substantive work in the course, given that her progress was made directly after January lockdown, it is tempting to conclude that this could be attributable to the metacognitive methods and strategies used.
Students are also now able to independently verbalise the skills and techniques used for each task: they now take it in turns to talk me through the activity rather than the other way round!
Use of Gnuggets and Gnugget Lists appear to have had a positive impact not only on specific translation tasks but also on students’ general understanding of grammar and being able to understand how different elements of language affect others and also apply this knowledge in their writing skills in other area such as summaries and more extended writing tasks. Combined with ‘talking through the task’ self-evaluation and the ability to spot and correct errors, it would appear that written grammatical errors in general appear to be decreasing and the quality of written work in terms of the relevant AOs for range and quality of language are increasing.
Particuarly pleasing is the unexpected outcome that dual-linguist French students studying Spanish have started to independently share the techniques and writing skills with the Spanish group, explaining “this is how you approach this type of exercise”, talking students through translations and introducing the concept of a Gnugget. These dual-linguists also report that essay writing in Spanish is much easier now as they have developed their internal voice, are talking themselves through the task, using and reusing more complex structures and concurrently self-evaluating and correcting their writing, with similar positive end of unit results.
