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One of the aims of the MULTIWRITE project is to develop teacher collaboration across language subjects. To get insights from an experienced researcher in this field, we travelled to England and to the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge there we talked to Associate Professor in Second Language Education, Karen Forbes.
In this episode, you will learn about the situation of languages other than English in schools in England. Then, in the second part of the episode, Karen tells us about her research on teacher collaboration before she gives us some advice on how we as teachers can collaborate across language subjects.
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Eli-Marie Drange: Welcome to this episode. We are now talking to Karen Forbes, who is Associate Professor in Second Language Education in the Faculty of Education at University of Cambridge. And we will talk with her about learning languages other than English in England. In Norway, many students think that it's not necessary to learn other languages than English because English is considered to be enough in this globalized world. But how is it in England? We will think that as English is the mother tongue of students, is it common that students know or speak other languages than English?
Karen Forbes: Yes, it is. First of all, hello and thank you very much for having me on your podcast. Yes, it is quite common. If you look at the overall statistics from the Department for Education, the most recent data suggests that around 20% of students in state-funded primary and secondary schools in England are recorded as EAL or speaking English as an additional language. That varies hugely depending on where you are in the country so you might get some schools in very diverse areas in London for example where almost all, or even all of the students are classed as EAL and in some rural areas it would be a lot less, so it does vary quite a lot across the country but I think the other important thing with this and with all sort of overarching statistics like this is to look behind it because actually if you look at the way the Department for Education records that data they suggest that, they define EAL for English as an additional language as students who are exposed to a language at home that's known or believed to be other than English and that's really broad, so that would include somebody, for example, if you had a student arriving today from Ukraine, for example, who had never studied English before, didn't know any English, there would be classed EAL, but it would also include, for example, second or third generation students who were born here, their parents were born here, but maybe they live at home with their grandmother and speak some Urdu with their grandmother. So they would also be classed under this label, so it's so broad that it's really important then to look within that. But I think that's a very long answer to your question. But essentially, yeah, we do have a lot of linguistic diversity in schools and really rich linguistic diversity in schools. It's not unusual for some secondary schools here to have maybe 20, 30, 40 different languages represented.
Eli-Marie Drange: But that are languages that we can say that are home languages, for instance. So would students have to learn other languages at school?
Karen Forbes: Yes, so obviously that's home languages but also languages are an important part of the curriculum and a compulsory part of the curriculum both in primary and the first stage of secondary school, so students have to learn a foreign language or a modern language from the ages of 7 to 14. So 7 to 11 at primary school that might be a bit of an introduction to a language, they might do bits of different languages during that time. And then in secondary school from 11 to 14, what we call Key Stage 3, it's compulsory for students to learn the language. After that, after 14, they can choose. Some schools will decide that it's compulsory in that school. Some will give students the option, and some will encourage more than others. But it's compulsory up to the age of 14.
Eli-Marie Drange: So then every student in England between 11 and 14 will have to learn?
Karen Forbes: Yes, there will be some exceptions. So there'll be some cases when schools, what we refer to as disapplying students from languages. So, for example, if they're really struggling with English literacy or math’s, unfortunately, languages is the one subject that they will withdraw them from and say: “OK, don't do any French, you can do some extra English”. Also, maybe for new EAL students, so English as an additional language learners, they might say, okay, don't do French or Spanish, you can do more English. My personal view is that I don't agree with that approach, which is probably quite an obvious answer. Because I think language lessons or foreign language lessons are the one place that those students might be on a more equal footing, that could be their strength, they're already multilingual. But, yes, so in in theory yes all students will learn a language between 7 and 14, in practice most will.
Eli-Marie Drange: and which languages will they learn?
Karen Forbes: It's a good question, I think that we have we have a difference here, I suppose, to non-Anglophone countries, where I suppose in a lot of schools, the first language learned, the second language, is English. Whereas here, there isn't a really obvious language, so there is some variation. The most common language taught in schools is still French, followed by Spanish, followed by German, and you see a little bit of a change in trends. French is still, I think, the most common during that phase. Spanish has been increasing a bit actually, over the years German's been going down a bit so it's been a bit of shift in position between Spanish and German, but those three make up the majority of languages offered. But some schools will offer more than one, and some schools will offer other languages as well, but there'll be smaller numbers of schools, so there are some schools, for example, who will offer Russian or Mandarin, Urdu, but...that varies, it just depends on the school and there would be a much smaller number of schools overall. But there is some variation.
Eli-Marie Drange: So the three European languages, French, Spanish and German will then be the most…
Karen Forbes: Yeah, they still very much dominate. I think some of that is historical and some of it as well has to do with expertise and recruitment of teachers and courses, so there aren't as many teachers of, a school might want to offer Mandarin or Russian, but they might not be able to recruit the teachers to do it. So it just depends on the school. But there are lots of options, which is good. It just depends on the school and the expertise in the school.
Eli-Marie Drange: But then...Do you think the students are motivated to learn these languages?
Karen Forbes: I think like any subject, some will be more motivated than others. I think that's probably the case with all subjects. You'll get some kids who are really enthusiastic and want to learn lots of languages and some who are less so. I suppose the particular challenges that we maybe have here are to do with the global status of English. And when I was teaching in secondary schools, you would occasionally get kids saying, oh, “but Miss, why do I have to learn French, everybody speaks English, I'm not going to go to France.” They didn't necessarily see that immediate need to learn a language, because they might not encounter people who speak other languages or travel to other countries, or get that much exposure, even through the media, to languages other than English.
Eli-Marie Drange: Yeah, of course.
Karen Forbes: So it can be a bit more of a challenge there to make the case for why that might be useful. Political situations as well, Brexit. I had to mention Brexit on a podcast, but that has had some influence, I think, on attitudes towards languages or European languages in particular. But overall, I mean, there still is interest in languages. And actually, I've seen quite a lot of things recently where if a study's asking adults, oh, would you like to? Do you wish you had learned another language? And people almost exclusively say yes. So I think it's something that later in life people would like to be able to do that. It's just them thinking, how do we capture that when they're at school and actually capitalize on it when they have that time and that opportunity? I think some people as adults will regrets not maybe taking advantage of opportunities in school to learn these things, or will have had to learn different languages later in life, and the skills that they learned in school might be a different language, but it can still can still apply.
Eli-Marie Drange: yeah, so then it's important to have these language lessons in school in a way that the students feel that they learn something.
Karen Forbes: yeah, and I think, as well, you might get students who might not necessarily want to learn French specifically or German, for example, but they might actually be interested in, oh, but I'd really like to learn Mandarin. Maybe they want to go into business when they're older and see that actually as a really good asset, but that might not be an option in their school. But there are schools that will offer a choice, and I think where students have a choice between which language they learn, that's really useful, actually, because they feel like they've got a bit of agency and they've got choices there. So I think that's really nice. I think ideally it would be nice to offer a range of languages in schools.
Eli-Marie Drange: Yeah, because then you maybe learn the language that you really want to learn.
Karen Forbes: Yeah, that you've got an interest in for whatever reason.
Eli-Marie Drange: We are here talking about Multiwrite too, and in this Multiwrite-project we want to develop teacher collaboration across language subjects. And we know that you have written your doctoral thesis around this topic. Could you tell us a little bit about what you investigated in your project?
Karen Forbes: Yeah, so this came about, I mean, this was a number of years ago now, but it came about very much from my own experiences as a language learner and also as a language teacher.I taught French and Spanish in secondary schools in England for a while. And I think, I suppose going back to learning languages, I grew up in a monolingual English-speaking family and context, and my first encounter with learning languages was learning French at the age of 11, and I was just fascinated by languages in general but what I felt was that I learned so much about English through learning French. Things that I didn't, I hadn't really reflected, we didn't get much explicit language teaching really in English or grammar teaching, and I learned so much more about languages in general through learning French. And then this went through into when I was a languages teacher, thinking very much about connections between or potential connections between the different languages that students speak or that they learn in school. And that's kind of where I came from. So I thought, reflecting on this, I thought, right, a foreign language classroom is a really great context in which to really train and capture that explicit focus on language, and to develop metacognitive skills among students to get them thinking about what language is, how they work with language, how they develop different skills and strategies. The whole premise behind the project was to explore this, explore the extent to which students can make connections between these languages and transfer skills and strategies from one language to another. So what I did as part of that project was developed an intervention. This was with learners of year nine, so they were 13, 14 years old. And they were learning, they were predominantly first language English speakers. They were learning German and French in school, and quite beginner level, really, in both of those languages. And what we did at the start was, the first part of the project was teaching explicit strategies for writing. So, when I say strategies for writing, things like how do you approach a writing task? How do you think about it? How do you set your goals for that task? How do you think about what you need to include? That could be language goals, content goals. How do you monitor your writing and look for how you're using language, different tenses, accuracy? How do you then evaluate your work, self-assess your work and try to improve it? Those sorts of things. So we did for a couple of months quite a lot of explicit strategy instruction in German. And I wanted to see after that point whether the students were transferring any of that. Were they doing any of those things that they were really explicitly learning in German and using them in English or using them in French, their other foreign language? So I wanted to see that first of all. And in the second part was more explicit collaboration between the German and the English teacher. So the first language and the foreign language teacher to see, well, what's the effect when teachers actually really directly collaborate and try to develop these skills together?
Eli-Marie Drange: And then what were your main findings then?
Karen Forbes: What did I find? I suppose the first thing was that the strategy instruction in itself had a really positive effect actually on students developing strategies and improving their performance in writing. So that was nice. But the transfer band and the collaboration band, so after the first band, so they'd only been getting this explicit strategy instruction in German, they didn't really transfer very much to English. A little bit, not very much, but they did to French, and that was really interesting. I thought, oh, I didn't quite, I didn't really know what would happen there, but I didn't expect such strong transfer. Maybe because they were at similar levels in those languages, they were doing similar types of tasks, but without being encouraged at all to do so, they were actually taking some of the things they were doing in German and doing it in French. So that was quite nice. But then the second part, that explicit collaboration between English and German, that led to the most change and improvement actually across all of the languages. So the teachers worked together to actually think, they're doing very different things. They're doing different types of writing, different types of tasks at different levels. But there were some shared principles there. They were both interested in overall structure and accuracy and trying to convey your own voice, things like that. Checking over what you've written, trying to improve your work, write more complex sentences and focusing on those things together, using some shared terminology in terms of the strategies that they were using turned out to be effective, and you could really see in the interviews with the students they starting to make the connections like: “oh we're doing this thing here and I can use it here”. And that was really, I think that was the best bit for me, just seeing students start to join those dots and make connections between the languages, and stop seeing them in their very individual silos and start seeing language in a more coherent way.
Eli-Marie Drange: But did the teachers in English and German then mentioned that, as you did in the French class, or doing these connections helping them to see the connections?
Karen Forbes: yes the second part with the English and the German teachers were very explicitly using those shared terms and they were using similar kind of little checklists and some similar resources to help students for example plan writing tasks and self-assess their work. Because you look at different things, don't you? In foreign language classes, you're much more focused on the individual words and sentence level. Whereas in your stronger language or your first language, you are much more looking at a whole text, you know, paragraph and text level. But bringing those together and actually looking at both in both contexts, it encouraged that. And I think it helped them to think more, especially about what they were doing in English. Because I think in your first language, you don't think as, it's become so proceduralized. You don't think so much about actually specifically what you're doing or why you're doing it because it's become so automatic. So taking a step back and actually getting students to think, well, how do you approach this? How do you plan a task? Is that effective? That was really valuable.
Eli-Marie Drange: So then the students, they improved both in their first language and in their second language during this period
Karen Forbes: Yeah.
Eli-Marie Drange: And maybe some of the teachers listening to this podcast will be interested in trying to collaborate. Do you think it's important for teachers to collaborate across languages?
Karen Forbes: Yeah. I'm probably quite biased, but yes, I do. And I think it's important. I think it's really useful for students. And I mean, as teachers, we always want to do things that are going to benefit the students that we teach. And I think it can help them develop, as I said, that more cohesive conceptualization of language. And that in turn can influence attainment, and you know how they, the work that they produce in those languages. So I think it can be benefit collaboration can be beneficial for the students but i think for teachers as well i think it's a form of professional development we all get so stuck in our own little silos, don't we, I think particularly in secondary schools when departments are quite often separate so i mean in schools here quite often you've got the English department which might be over in one building and the modern languages teachers will be over in the other part of the building, and they don't really have much communication or they don't necessarily know much about what they do or how they approach tasks, so I think actually having that discussion the teacher saw as beneficial because they're learning more about: “Oh we do something similar, but you do this in a different way”, and it can just give that space for teachers to reflect more on how they approach certain tasks and what the opportunities are for getting points of intersection there.
Eli-Marie Drange: So with some of the teachers listening decides to try out some collaboration with other language teachers at their school, what kind of advice would you give them?
Karen Forbes: Okay, three things. First thing, I think is about raising awareness, I think it's important as a starting point to find out what teachers of other languages actually do. Maybe go and observe their lessons, look at their curricula, look at their schemes of work, look at examples of things that students are doing. But to get that sense, actually, of what they're doing, because we all, as I say, get so caught up in our own thing, we sometimes don't have that awareness. Having had that, get together and, second point, plan some activities. And I think start small. I think that's the key. Don't try to cover too many things too quickly. That pick a specific focus, I mean, for my project it was writing. I was looking specifically at, you know, narrative writing tasks essentially, and the collaboration was based around that. So I think pick a key area that maybe both teachers want to develop, it doesn't have to be writing, it could be even presentation skills, it could be comprehension skill, it could be anything. It could be particular themes or content, but choose a focus, and work on that first, because I think that's going to help develop a clear plan for collaboration. And the third thing is to be explicit about the collaboration, and actually make it clear to students what you're doing, and actually that is that you are trying to make connections, make reference to what your colleagues do in other languages and see if you can link that to what you're doing. And I think explaining that rationale can really help students as well to get them thinking about what they do in different languages and to help them to make those connections. And I think that really, what I find in this study anyway, was that those explicit connections really acted as a catalyst for students developing their own skills.
Eli-Marie Drange: So then when they are aware of the connections, then they can start thinking about new connections themselves, the students, when they continue working.
Karen Forbes: Exactly, I think it's making the thought process is more transparent and more explicit. I always use the analogy of learning to drive, which doesn't maybe work as well with secondary school students, but it will work with teachers. I remember when I started, just before I started learning to drive, just before I turned 17 and I was sitting in the car with my mum, and she was going to change lane or something and I said: “oh” I was getting very interested in what she was doing “oh what did you do you just moved over, what did you do with your feet? What did you do with your hands?” and she said: “oh I don't know”, and I was “how can you not know, you just, you just, you just did it, you just moved over” um but because she've been driving for so long and it becomes so proceduralized. When I started learning to drive I was so aware of what was happening, I remember my driving instructor, my first driving lesson it started to rain and my driving instructor said: “put the windscreen wipers on” “How do I do that? My hands are here. Where is it?” I have to think so much about each little step. And I think it's the same with language learning and how you approach things. You're thinking so much more explicitly in foreign language classes or in language classes where you're maybe more at a beginner level or you don't have the proficiency. And I think that explicit thinking can be so valuable. Can we bring some of that into how we do other things or how we think about even our first language or stronger languages?
Eli-Marie Drange: So then you become more conscious about how you write a good text and how you should organize the text and everything also in the first language.
Karen Forbes: Exactly. And I think making sure students are getting them aware of what works for them. None of this is to impose a particular way of doing things. It's not to say to students, right, you're going to write a text and you have to, first of all, you have to think about this, then this. It's by giving different options and getting them to see, to try and evaluate what works for them. Because what works for one student might not work for another. But if they're not aware of how they do things, then it's more difficult for them to be able to reflect on that and change. So it's actually raising that awareness is really important. That metacognition is really important. And it's only when they're able to get that awareness of what their own strategies are, how they do things, that they'll be able to think about changing approaches that aren't necessarily effective for them.
Eli-Marie Drange: So then to get this awareness it's important that teachers collaborate across the languages, to raise this awareness in the different languages?
Karen Forbes: yeah, and I think you could do it in one language classroom but i think it is even more powerful if you get that collaboration, because actually enables there's a lot of a lot of shared skills I think that you use across, whether it's your first language lesson or a foreign language lesson there's a lot of shared skills there so i think there's a lot of things that we can capitalize on, and actually if we can draw connections between things that students are learning in one language context that can, you can show how that can help them in other contexts as well. So just giving that little nudge.
Eli-Marie Drange: So then a teacher collaboration could give a more powerful language learning situation.
Karen Forbes: I think so. I think so. And I think it's interesting for teachers as well. As I say, we get caught up so much in what we're doing in our own classrooms that it can be really refreshing, I think, to take a step out of that and go and see how other colleagues are approaching things, how they're doing things, what the points are, where the potential is for drawing connections. I think it could be a really interesting journey for teachers as well.
Eli-Marie Drange: Thank you very much, Karen. That's a lot of good thoughts to take away and try to see if each one of us can do some new things in our classroom. So thank you very much for sharing your experience and your thoughts with us.
Karen Forbes: You're very welcome and good luck to everybody trying some collaborations.
Eli-Marie Drange: Thank you.
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