REFLECTIONS ON CHANGES DURING THE LAST TWENTY YEARS OF MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING AT TRANBY

I clearly remember the day I came to Tranby for interview. Arriving at main reception I was met by my predecessor and led through the door with glinting stained glass into the main entrance hall. The magnificence of this beautiful room struck me; it had been almost thirty years since I had seen it for the last time as a pupil and it all came back in a woosh. This was early 2000, and I was interviewed and later offered the position of Head of Languages, starting in September of that year. I readily accepted. I often reflect on the changes and challenges language teaching has undergone in the twenty-plus years since then. At the time my classroom, today the Senior staff room, had moved on from a chalk board with coloured chalk to a shiny write-on white board and felt pens. It was always essential to check if the pen was a permanent or non-permanent marker; using the former could easily incur the cost of board replacement. I used flashcards and items of realia (authentic material) brought back in my suitcase from Spain to introduce key vocabulary. I used photocopies from books and my own handwriting and drawings on worksheets. It was therefore difficult to update resources which generally had to be re-written. I certainly got through a lot of tippex in the day. Listening activities were played on C90 audio tapes from a tape deck at the front of the room. It was not unknown for these to mangle in the machine. If the tape broke rather than twisted it could generally be fixed with Sellotape, though on playing again the sound would, of course, not be heard over the repaired section. It was also essential to check the audio recording on tapes before external listening exams by playing and pausing, playing and pausing throughout the whole tape. One of my greatest fears was a tape snapping during an external speaking examination, or the tape not recording. We were always advised to play back the previous candidate’s test to ensure the recording was there. Fortunately, I never had any mishaps. Videos were played on large televisions and VHS video recorders which had to be booked and wheeled into the classroom in advance of the lesson. The quality of recordings varied enormously. Sixth Form pupils had a small study room next to my classroom and could sit with a small tape player and pilot-sized headphones to further practice the language. After a few years I persuaded the Head Mistress to pay for a satellite system and this opened up satellite television to pupils, though the range of channels was limited, available only at certain times of the day and the programmes were aimed at native speakers. Sixth Formers were fortunate to receive one-to-one speaking sessions with a Foreign Language Assistant through the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges. Gradually the costs involved became too onerous and we ended up paying for native-speaking Student Ambassadors from the University of Hull to offer conversation across our three languages, with variable success. When I became involved in video conferencing and live on-line chats with a school in Buenos Aires and on an Argentinian research base on the Antarctic ice cap this was considered quite revolutionary! Technology started to move at a fast pace. Audio tapes were replaced by CDs, and pupils soon started to use mp3 players and ipods. My classroom had been one of the first to gain an interactive whiteboard, just before the merger, and lessons became more interactive. Gradually I learnt how to download video clips from the internet and embed them in a flipchart, and how to master the movement of text around the screen.

We adapted methodology when we moved from single sex to co-ed teaching with the merger in 2005/06 but all pupils still took a foreign language to GCSE, and this policy continued at Tranby for another decade despite the Secretary of State for Education having announced that it was no longer a requirement to study a MFL after Key Stage 3 in 2004.

Language teaching under the National Curriculum meant teaching to a framework of ‘Attainment Targets’ which specified what pupils should achieve at each ‘Key Stage’ in the curriculum. In 2013 it was announced that these would be dropped which meant there was no commonly accepted means of recording and reporting progress. There was, however, an increased awareness of the need to teach grammar and references to ‘translation’ and ‘literature’ were introduced. We continued to use them as guidance in the meantime.

Today we have a multitude of websites from which to download audio-visual material. You Tube, BBC foreign language channels, on-line newspapers with today’s news from all over the world, are all available at the click of a button. Pupils are no longer dependent on the old tape decks or Coomber CD players which now gather dust in the storeroom but can download material easily via their mobile phones, listening on AirPods which are barely noticeable in the ear. Pupils can be taught remotely, as shown during the pandemic, via Teams, in which teacher and pupil can see each other via video and voice-over power point presentations and flipcharts can be displayed. Feedback to work placed in the Notebook section can be given by the teacher, and materials placed in the files section for pupil access. External listening examinations are now downloaded as sound files over the computer and speaking tests are recorded on digital hand-held recorders and uploaded directly to the Examination Board’s secure website. No longer is trudging to the computer room a necessity as pupils can bring their own devices to the classroom and class sets of ipads are available as back-up. A wide variety of stimulating language games, some with immediate feedback, are regularly played by colleagues on the internet and coursebooks are delivered electronically via the interactive whiteboard, with built-in audio and zooming-in features. With a native-speaking Spanish colleague on the staff conversation sessions with the Sixth Form studying this language are given a real focussed boost.

Such changes represent huge progress and enable my colleagues today to deliver consistently stimulating and engaging lessons in a truly interactive way, using state-of-the-art technology to serve every pupil’s needs.

Mr G Stephenson