5 easy ways to help students learn vocab for MFL GCSE listening exams

In last week's blog post, I talked about MFL GCSE listening exam technique, and this week as promised, I’m sharing my thoughts on how to prepare students for the listening exams in terms of vocabulary.

I just wanted to quickly preface my 5 tips by saying that with the prescribed vocabulary lists of 1200 words for foundation and 1700 words for higher, you’d think it would be pretty straightforward for GCSE students to learn the vocab and apply it in their exams… but you can’t just hand them a list of words and say “off you go, learn these”!

There needs to be a systematic approach, ideally starting in Key Stage 3, of thoroughly learning vocabulary items and being able to apply them in a number of different situations and for different skills.

As we’re focusing on the listening in this blog post, here are the 5 things I think MFL teachers need to be doing, to make sure students can understand and apply the vocabulary successfully:

1. Students need to know the exact translation of the vocabulary, as determined by the exam boards’ prescribed vocabulary lists. This seems like an obvious one, but one of the key areas where students lose marks is when they don’t give precise information in the open response questions. Knowing exactly how the words are translated from the target language (TL) into English will help with this. To help students to learn this way, I’m afraid you might need to go back to old-fashioned drilling and vocabulary tests. Yes, you need to show them the words in a sentence, but they need to know the precise translation of every single word in the sentence, rather than just the general meaning of the whole phrase.
2. Students need to know if there are multiple meanings of a vocabulary item, and which one applies in the context of the exam passage. A great example of this is the French word “vol”, which can mean ‘flight’ or ‘theft’. These are clearly very different meanings, so students need to know both of them and look for context in the rest of the passage. A great way of doing this is to spend time specifically looking at these vocab items from the list, and doing exercises where they have two sentences using the key word, and the students have to pick out which context is meant in each sentence. AI buddies like Claude and ChatGPT are great for creating this kind of exercise quickly.
3. Students need to know what the words sound like, not just see them written down. Again, this may sound obvious for a listening exam, but be honest - how often do you present and practise vocab orally, without letting the students see how they're written? Presenting vocab through choral repetition and practising with games like 'tap the board' and 'beat the teacher' before you even show them what the words look like, is a great way of ensuring the students are secure with the sound of the words, as well as the spelling. And, yes, in my experience, KS4 students do actually enjoy these games! They’re not just for younger students!
4. Think about the sound symbol correspondences of the vocabulary.Focus on the relationship between what the words sound like and how they’re spelt. This will help students in Part B, the dictation section of the exam. You can do this in a number of ways: the simplest way would be to do “spelling tests” where you read out a word and students have to write it down in the TL (not translate it into English as they would in a traditional vocab test). Alternately, put the words in a sentence and do the spelling test as a gap-fill to make it closer to the dictation (if you’re doing Edexcel) and/or read out a whole sentence featuring the key word and students write out the whole sentence. 
5. When you’re teaching grammar points, focus on how words sound.Ensure that students know what different verb endings sound like, or how pronunciation changes with different adjectival endings. Don’t just focus on the meanings and spellings of the words - students need to hear the differences as well, be able to understand them in sentences and interpret them to answer a range of listening questions.

As I’ve been thinking about these points and how to advise you to teach them effectively, I keep thinking about my online course “Structuring an Outstanding MFL Lesson”. In the course, I walk you through how to take one text and exploit it in a number of ways to ensure students deeply understand all of the vocabulary, grammar, phonics, etc in the text. We start with vocab presentation and practice, then move onto listening, dictations and phonics, as part of every single lesson sequence, and then we go into reading comprehension, translation and then active skills like writing and speaking. There are about 54 different games and activities outlined in the course, and lots of great advice for how to really prepare your students for the GCSEs. Nearly 300 people have done the course already, and they always tell me how good it is… but I always forget to talk about it! 

So here we go, I’m talking about it and reminding you to go and sign up to it, if you haven’t already got it!

Do you agree with these points about the listening exams? Do you do these things already? Are you going to take one of them and really focus on that over the coming weeks?