In this Episode, Dr Bisson talks to Professor Emma Marsden about a really important change coming to the French, German and Spanish curriculum in England. There is going to be a more defined and constrained list of words that students have to learn and that are allowed to be on the GCSE exams. Is this going to make a difference to the number of students that choose to study languages at secondary schools? We think so! Join us to find out how many words are on the list and how this change came about.

To find out more behind-the-scenes information about this topic or about our podcast, please visit our webpage, languagescientists.dmu.ac.uk. This is where you can go to ask questions, leave comments, or even participate in our current research! We'd love to hear from YOU.

Follow Dr Zavaleta and Dr Bisson on twitter: @dr_klzavaleta and @mjbisson

Or get in touch via email: kaitlyn.zavaleta@dmu.ac.uk and marie-josee.bisson@dmu.ac.uk

Links to some of the initiatives mentioned in the podcast

Oasis research summaries: read one-page accessible research summaries

LP Pedagogy resources: access over 1000 language resources, schemes of works and word lists

Multiling Profiler: check that a text meets the language knowledge of your learners

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

If you have a connection to languages, this is the podcast for you. Whether you're a language learner, a language teacher, a language researcher, or anyone who's interested in languages. I'm Dr. Marie-Josee Bisson and alongside my colleague, Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta. We are the language scientists and this is our podcast. We are senior lecturers in psychology at De Montfort University, and we conduct research in the area of language learning. Throughout this series, we hope to translate the science behind language learning into informative and useful practical advice. So sit back and enjoy. Today we are joined by Professor Emma Marsden from the University of York, who will tell us about what is being done currently to the language learning curriculum in England. So welcome, Emma.

Professor Emma Marsden

Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Now, Emma is a professor in Second Language Education at the University of York. She did her undergraduate degree in French and Hispanic Studies at the University of Nottingham. She then completed a postgraduate certificate in education at the University of Manchester and she became a modern foreign language teacher. And so she taught languages in secondary school for three years and she then returned to studying and completed a master's and PhD in applied Linguistics at the University of Southampton. She also did a post doc on implicit grammar learning, and she finally took up her position as a lecturer at the University of York, where she still works now as a professor. Emma is involved in many initiatives to try and address the problem of the decline in language uptake in schools in England. And so I'm really excited to have Emma here today to talk to us about this. But before we jump into that topic, we always ask our contributors to tell us a little bit about their language background. So Emma, what languages do you speak? Although your little intro here about what you studied might give us some clues, but what language did you speak and how did you learn them?

Professor Emma Marsden

Okay, so I grew up as a monolingual English speaker, basically until I was about till I was 11, till I went to secondary school where I learnt French as a foreign language in classrooms. My very first introduction to language was when I used to get a lift from a family friend and he always used to shout au revoir a demain. And I used to have to reply, a demain. And I think that was a bit like, Well, this is interesting, quirky little thing. And so then at secondary school I learnt French. When I was at the sixth form, I picked up Spanish as a GCSE, then went to university to do joint honours. And so those are my two main languages. Then and when with English, then when I was a teacher of French and Spanish, I decided I needed a bit of German, so i picked up German GCSE and then as do you do, You know, picking up a third foreign language and working at the National Centre has helped me rejuvenate a little bit of that German. But I'm not, not so-called German. And then also when I was doing MA, I wanted to experience learning a very different language and I picked up a I studied Japanese but was at the back of the class and kind of just just experienced it, really writing a little learn a diary of my experiences so that that's my language background, really.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Very interesting. And during your degree, did you do any like study abroad type of or exchanges when you lived in the country?

Professor Emma Marsden

Yes, I went to Barcelona to learn Castilian, interestingly. So obviously when I got there I was surrounded by Catalan and I did, I understand quite a lot of Catalan but I was there to learn Castilian. And then I also spent a year in Chile again speaking Spanish, and that was in between my MA and my PhD. I went to Chile and was an English teacher but was I speaking a lot of Spanish there. So yeah, goodness knows what my accent is like now.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Well, the important thing is to be able to communicate. As long as that comes across, that's fine,isn't it.

Professor Emma Marsden

Yeah.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

The accent is a part of your personality.

Professor Emma Marsden

Absolutely, something a topic of conversation.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Why is it important to you that we learn languages?

Professor Emma Marsden

I think the first reason is to just put ourselves outside ourselves and to realise that there are other ways of thinking about similar things, other ways of expressing ideas. And I think my second would then be it opens the door to seeing new cultures, and I'm sure that's the answer that lots of people give you, it opens it broadens your horizons and allows me to study lots of great literature. And so some wonderful ideas have stayed with me throughout my life and I don't think I would have got those through English translations. And it's allowed me to meet some fantastic people and have some really wonderful experiences that I wouldn't have had as a monolingual Anglophone, I think. And then I have learned a lot about my own language and other languages. It's helped me learn other languages. But this interest in your own language, I think, and a much greater awareness of how English works is something that I found really important for all sorts of things writing and helping others to write and learning other languages. That's probably enough rationale.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

That's quite a few reasons. Yeah, thank you for that. Okay, so let's jump into the topic of today. And do you want to tell us a little bit about what is happening to language learning in England?

Professor Emma Marsden

Okay. Well, for the past few years, there has been declines in the numbers of students choosing to study languages at all levels at GCSEs, at A-levels and degree level. And at the same time, we're being told that languages are very important for some of the reasons I've just been explaining.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Mm hmm.

Professor Emma Marsden

And personally, socially, intellectually, academically. But also one of the key rationales that the government often talks about is business and that the country needs people who are linguists to be bridges to other communities to engage in business and global affairs. And so this is a serious problem for us and the country. And there are many ways of addressing this, and all of them require time and money. But my attention over the last couple of years has been focused on one approach to trying to encourage more 16 year olds to choose to study a language GCSE. And that focus has been on French, German and Spanish GCSE. Only at the moment,though of course, there are many other languages that are spoken in the UK. And I would mention at this point as well, I, I think that one of our challenges is that we probably don't well, I know we don't nurture our bilinguals and trilingual enough and that we have, you know, 20% of the population about who arrive at primary school with English as an additional language. And so therefore they have another language which is really to be nurtured and and valued and acknowledged and accredited. And I think we need to do a better job of that in the country. But today, my focus is going to be on French, German, Spanish, because those are the languages I'm familiar with. And we are in a situation in England where because of historical reasons, those are the languages that we focus on in schools. That's not to say, of course, that we shouldn't diversify and and study lots of other languages, but the current state of affairs is that most teachers are and most GCSEs are taken in French, German, Spanish. And so, yeah, I've been focusing on changes to the GCSE recently.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Yes. So something's being done to the curriculum?

Professor Emma Marsden

Yes.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

What people are actually learning in class.

Professor Emma Marsden

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So these are the words that we want students to know in order to take the GCSE. We want them to know those words, to want to be able to communicate in those languages, but the words that will be on the exam.

Professor Emma Marsden

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So it's a tiny amount.

Professor Emma Marsden

It's a tiny amount. So it's really important to manage expectations of students and teachers and and stakeholders and A-level writers and degree and people at universities. You know, what knowledge can we really expect people to have aged 16? And so one of the tasks was just to think, well, how much, how many how many words might, you know, at that age, after that much exposure? And there was surprisingly little research out there about about that. And one rather pragmatic approach is just to think, well, how many hours of they got, How many words can you learn in an hour? And theres your number, theres your total. And so there have been estimations that children in our in our education system can learn between 3 to 5 words an hour and retain those after so many years.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Professor Emma Marsden

That's a really important thing.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Because they'll have to relearn on them and these words will have to come back.

Professor Emma Marsden

Right? Right. And there is some research that tells us about how often you need to see a word, incidentally, to be able to pick it up and know it. And now we're in different circumstances and different ways to read it and hear it and say it and write it.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Yeah.

Professor Emma Marsden

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So that's the new magical number.

Professor Emma Marsden

And that's the new magical number it just is various different pieces of evidence pointed to this, a similar number. Another piece of evidence that we used was, wow, how many words does it take to create exam papers? How many, the awarding organisation.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Have little paragraphs of texts.

Professor Emma Marsden

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So that number of words seemed to make sense from the three different angles that you that you mentioned there.

Professor Emma Marsden

That's right. Yeah.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So that means that now that we know the number of words that needs to be learned, there's going to be more of an alignment between what's being taught in the classroom and what's actually on the exam paper.

Professor Emma Marsden

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

I agree that's really important because that's going to put off people choosing to do a GCSE if they're feeling too uncertain about, you know, what do I need to know for the exam kind of thing? What content do I need to know? Because that was really difficult to say

Professor Emma Marsden

Right.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

For certain.

Professor Emma Marsden

Right?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Yeah.

Professor Emma Marsden

So and one of the of the finding that we uncovered when we were analysing the exam papers was that only about 10% of the words on the awarding organisations lists on average can appear in every exam. So only 10% of the words you could be absolutely sure would turn up, leaving 90% of the words, well, they may or they may not turn up. And so that could have been one reason for negatively influencing the achievement motivation cycle, that if you feel that you're working really hard and you're learning these words, but then they're just not turning up on the papers, and that could be one source of demotivation.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So, but were there extra words that were on the papers that were not even on the word lists aswell?

Professor Emma Marsden

Yes. Well, yes. So as I mentioned, they did have to do that. The awarding organisations had to put words on that were not on their word lists. And because that was one of the stipulations of the subject content, but also we feel that that had gone perhaps too far. So the other and really important point to emphasise is that lexical inferencing is a very important part of language learning and the language experience, and that means you're going to meet words that you don't know and you need to be resilient and try to work them out and not let.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

But this is the same thing in our native language. We can see words all the time as we read and we just we don't even stop on them, we carry on reading because through the context, through the other words that we know we can figure out what that word meant. And we just learned that, yes, that's incidental learning.

Professor Emma Marsden

Incidental learning.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Exactly.

Professor Emma Marsden

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So is this something you feel teachers can teach the students how to derive the meaning from the surrounding words? How to be word detectives?

Professor Emma Marsden

Yes, I think it's an important part of teaching and learning. It is part of the strategies really that students need to be exposed to words that they're not that familiar with. However, there's loads of research evidence showing how fragile that skill is, particularly in the early stages. So when you don't know and if you if you imagine a sentence with 11 words in and you don't know eight of them very well or they're sort of fragile, you're not going to be able to influence the meaning of words because it just isn't enough that the foundations are not there. So by defining the lexicon and saying these are the really useful words that you're going to know, then you can kind of bootstrap. And at that stage then you're launched and you can inference more successfully. So there's an evidence saying people's inferencing skill depends on their proficiency, their age, because as you get older, you get better at being able to make good guesses and your world knowledge improves. And so your inferencing skills can improve and you get better at analysing language as you get older. And and some people are better than others at analysing language and working and inferring meaning. So it was important to give to be fairer to all students. It feels sensible to give them to define the goalpost and say these are the words that you need to know. If you know these words, then inferencing will become easier for you later.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So do you think this will have a positive impact on people choosing to do a language? Do you think we are going to see an improvement there. This is the hope, im assuming?

Professor Emma Marsden

Exactly, this is the hope. I think if it is operationalised, well, then, yes, it has the potential to do that. I think if the messaging around it is positive, then it will help. I've heard some negative messaging around, oh, you know, just learning word lists is not a good thing or implying messaging, implying that having a list of words is a negative thing, whereas it could be positively messaged that, well, having this list of words is going to really help teachers to know the words that are going to be on the exam paper and to be able to give.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

I think, yeah, absolutely. I mean, as a as a previous teacher of French myself, you know, we we get carried away sometimes and we you know, I remember doing this game with clothing so vocabulary for clothes and I think there was at least 30 different clothing names that I was teaching them just because this is a topic that the you know, obviously they were enjoying. And when we were doing this, this fashion show, we closed anyways. But the point is, they don't need to know 30 different names for clothes to be able to communicate in French. They're not that important. You know, if you know the basics, you might need to know five or six pieces of clothing,but not definitely not that high number. And this is what that word list is going to do, is going to reduce the number of items in some of those topics that perhaps us teachers would get carried away with. But we might, you know, add some other words that are really important because we know they're on the list. But, you know, it it might not be a topic that we we necessarily need to cover. So but I mean, that means there's going to be lots of changes as well to textbooks. I'm assuming they're going to have to be redesigned now.

Professor Emma Marsden

That is part of Wash back. Yes. I mean, we are a society that puts a lot of emphasis on high stakes exams. And so they have a lot of wash back into curriculum design,into textbooks, into teacher training. And so this will, and it should be seen in textbook design. And my colleague Natalie Finlayson and I, in collaboration with Laurence Anthony at the University of Waseda in Japan, have developed a tool called the multiling profiler, and that is being used by awarding organisations and publishers to be able to tell them what is in the text that they're writing so that they're more aware of the lexicon that is being used and they can check it against word lists that are built into the profile. So it means that you can put in a text that you might use in listening or reading and then check it against a word list and find out whether there are too many words that are not on the list or not enough words that are on the list. You're at least aware of the content and you can adapt it accordingly. And so, yeah, I hope I hope our listeners have a dig around on the multiling profiler and it's for we think it's the only tool that profiles French, German and Spanish texts. And we've also embedded some lists that are very nuanced according to the curriculum. So for example, imagine a teacher wants to teach year eight Spanish term three week seven, and they want to know, well, is this text appropriate for this learner at this stage? And so we've created some wordlist that is a new ones that each week of the curriculum so they can,you know, which words have been introduced and what the word families are like at each stage. So at the point where past tense is introduced, the word family suddenly increases because now every verb carries all the past tenses with it.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

So these resources are already available for teachers. So where are they? Can you tell us so people can have look.

Professor Emma Marsden

The multiling profile.net is the place to go for the multiling profiler and the resources are held at a site called L D Pedagogy for language driven pedagogy.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

And then so those word lists that we discussed are already available there.

Professor Emma Marsden

The word lists are on that site. Yes.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Schemes of work, like you mentioned, per week. You know what vocabulary makes sense to introduce here based on what they already learned?

Professor Emma Marsden

That's right.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

In previous weeks and previous years. So that's going to be really useful for teachers. Yeah. And I know that you've been involved with other initiatives, which we haven't had time to cover yet, but do you want to just give us a very brief summary of the national centres there with those hubs to help schools, language schools and also Oasis summaries? You've got two more things to mention.

Professor Emma Marsden

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

I've submitted choices myself, and you can submit directly to Oasis once you've, if you've published a paper in the past, before Oasis was born, you can still submit directly to Oasis. But yeah, it's very easy. You just need to write a, write a one page summary and then hopefully someone will read it and they might think, Oh, I might try that in my classroom, too see what happens. yeah.

Professor Emma Marsden

We've done some research with the teachers and over 90% of them said that the summaries were useful and that they gave them ideas and that they would and they have. It's changed I think about 60, 70% said reading a summary changed something about the way they were thinking or and that that's all you can really hopeful is just to to broaden the toolkit and give access to research that was just behind.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

And it's nice that it's just one page and it's very to the point.

Professor Emma Marsden

Right.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Because let's face this, teachers. Teachers don't have time to read research papers that are 20, 30 pages long. And there's no point when you could just read it in one page. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I hope people check those out as well. So I will include some show notes with the links to all these websites that we've mentioned today the National Centre, the Oasis, the L P Pedagogy website, and any of the things that Emma think that I, I could put up there for, for people to have a look at that would be really useful full of resources for teachers.

Professor Emma Marsden

Thank you. And and researchers I hope as well the Multilink profiler would maybe be helpful for researchers who want to analyse text and we've been using it too for research recently so.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Now, Emma, before we finish today's episode, is there something you would like to mention? So something you'd like people to remember in particular from today's episode?

Professor Emma Marsden

And one thing is that when you mentioned the lists of the long list of clothes that you used to teach, and I have a 16 year old daughter who similarly comes home with long, word lists full food items that I've never had to say in French or Spanish. And in fact, we never really say them. She came and said, I've got to learn the word for hake. What's hake, like a billiards. What's billiards? So maybe that's a good thing. But and so when we've been choosing the words, we've been influenced by large corpora that tell us about the frequency of words in the language. So I just wanted to mention that at the end, that one way of deciding which words to teach is to look at what people really use a lot in the language. And we've checked that these new word lists performed well against all sorts of different corpora. So big general corpora where speech and writing and different registers, different genres are all put in and like to create millions and millions of words. And then we've also checked against smaller corpora, say, of adolescent literature, of A-level papers, of Internet language just scraped from the Internet. And each time the word lists that's informed by frequency, hands down, each time provides better preparation, better coverage for those texts. So we think that these word lists should give people a sense of achievement, that they can access more text than they could with a more topic driven vocabulary list.

Absolutely. So it makes a lot of sense to teach the students the words that are more frequent in that language.

Professor Emma Marsden

Right. And then they're able to describe these items of clothes rather than know the exact word that build to use circumlocution and get round it and use these high frequency words to describe something.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

Absolutely or in their own time, they can learn some more vocab for clothes if they're interested in clothes.

Professor Emma Marsden

Absolutely.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

But it doesn't have to be on the list of words that they have to learn right. Emma, it's been really interesting to chat to you about all this today, so thank you very much for joining us. This was now the last episode in series two of the Language Scientists podcast, so I hope that you've enjoyed it, everyone listening. But there will be, of course, more series to come soo stay tuned. To find out more behind the scenes information about this topic or about our podcasts, please visit our web page languagescientists.dmu.ac.uk. This is where you can go to ask questions, leave comments, or even participate in our current research. We'd love to hear from you. Thank you for listening and thank you to the Montfort University for funding this series of the podcast. I'm Dr. Marie-Josee Bisson. And you've been listening to the Language Scientists Podcast.