Three ways to prepare Key Stage 3 students for MFL GCSEs

Key Stage 3 isn’t just about preparing students for GCSE, but there are definitely a few things you can embed in your KS3 curriculum that are not only great from a pedagogical perspective, but will also sow the seeds for further study in KS4 (and maybe even beyond - we can dream, right?!)

So here are 3 things I think you need to start doing as early as possible in your French, German, and Spanish classes…

1. Phonics. Include explicit phonics teaching, practice and retrieval from day one. In my opinion, this is actually one of the best developments in foreign language teaching over the past few years, and I really believe that a strong foundation in understanding SSCs is essential for future success in language learning. Have a phonics focus every week or fortnight, and do it in a fun way - I’ve shared lots of fun dictations and reading aloud tasks on my profile - go to my “MFL games” highlight to have a look.
2. Describing photos and pictures. I know this is not everyone’s favourite part of the GCSE exam, but it’s here to stay, so you may as well get students used to describing photos as early as possible. You can do this in a fun way, such as with activities where you describe a picture and they have to draw it, or they describe pictures to each other and their partner draws it, or spot the difference between 2 pictures… The advantages of describing photos from a grammatical and pedagogical perspective are that A they will hopefully stop trying to use a made up continuous tense to say what people are doing (this only applies to French and German - in Spanish, photos are actually an amazing way of practising the present continuous) and B they learn prepositions of place, clothes and weather vocab really thoroughly.
3. Writing tasks with bullet points. I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t do the majority of your writing tasks using a GCSE-style format from the start. Again, you can make them more interesting, such as getting the students to write a nice postcard or something, but essentially, if you stick to the format of “these are the bullet points you need to cover in your writing”, it gives the students a great framework and they don’t end up just staring at a blank piece of paper with no idea what to write. Plus, you can “train” them really early on that they must include every single bullet point and explicitly refer to them, to actually complete the task properly. Oh, and if you use a model answer with my ‘exploiting one text’ method, then even better!