Metacognitive strategies prove successful

Wednesday 01 November 2023

Changing the way French is taught has seen a huge increase in the number of students choosing to study it at GCSE at Les Beaucamps High School.

Dr Gianfranco Conti is considered to be an expert in teaching modern foreign languages and he has researched the impact of metacognitive strategies at primary, secondary and university levels.

Yesterday he led interactive training sessions for teachers from the island's secondary schools and some of the primary schools to share how they can offer new ways of learning French and Spanish, and possibly other MFLs too if there is the demand for them.

Dr Conti was focusing on 'Teaching Lexicogrammar: The Mars Ears Framework' - a system whereby teachers focus on oral and aural learning rather than reading and writing. 

He endorsed micro-listening skills such as decoding, lexical retrieval, syntactic parsing, holding chunks in working memory and meaning negotiation and construction which are proven to be more engaging for students than learning through text books.

"I'm doing a workshop on this method called extensive processing instruction, which has been proven around the world to enable students, especially the ones who feel normally defeated by language learning to actually buy into the process," he explained.

Pictured: Dr Gianfranco Conti and Agnes de Mauroy during yesterday's training session.

Dr Conti went on to explain how social status can affect learning, with studies in Europe showing that students from less affluent backgrounds are less likely to continue learning languages. He said that trend can be reversed through the immersive techniques he endorses.

"The textbooks rush through content, the text they're usually given in these books are not something that a student can digest because for instance, a student would have to understand 98% of any text.

"So there's many practices that traditionally have been perpetrated in foreign language, instructed for language acquisition, which unfortunately defeat a lot of the students. So we get from the students is a lot of research show students by language is too difficult, boring, too much work. And sadly, they complain that they don't feel confident speaking because most of the work that is done traditionally is reading and writing.

"(This way) the teacher is doing a lot of interactive work with the student to start with, to model and then the student interacting with one another so the emphasis is put on listening and speaking."

Yesterday's training was held at Les Beaucamps High School where Agnes de Mauroy, the Secondary School Partnership curriculum alignment lead for modern foreign languages, is based.

She said when she started at the school they had 19 students studying French at GCSE level - that is now up to 85.

Ms de Mauroy said Les Beaucamps has reintroduced Spanish as a result of the success with engaging students in French lessons and there is proving to be demand for reintroducing German at Les Varendes which may also be extended to other schools in future if necessary.