Introduction | Digital video in action | Projects 2006-7 | Extended Projects | Archived Projects
Projects 2006-07
The titles of Languages ICT Action Research projects undertaken during the current year are listed below for easy browsing, in alphabetical order a/c school name.
You can click the link beneath each project title to read a summary. Alternatively, go to Project summaries to browse all summary texts.
You can also visit the Extended Projects page to read about current project work of a longer-term nature.
All Saints RC High School, Sheffield. Ms Carolyn George
Using digital audio and common software to improve speaking skills.
Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, Sutton Coldfield. Ms Susan Merrall and Mr Michael Sadler
Using the adaptation of stimulus texts as a springboard for more creative and accurate use of French in independent writing.
Brookvale High School, Groby. Mr Ian King
Tailoring VLE feedback – focusing on individual needs.
Clifton College, Bristol. Mr Bobby Trivic
Using digital language laboratory software to improve speaking.
Gordano School, Bristol. Mr Peter Morris
Wikimania II: using wikis to encourage autonomous, creative and collaborative writing.
Holmfirth High School, Holmfirth. Ms Sarah Godbehere
Using ICT, in particular digital audio, to improve pronunciation and develop narrative skills.
King Harold School, Waltham Abbey. Mr Terry Curtis
Making it personal: Using an e-portfolio to identify progression.
Lincoln Christ’s Hospital School, Lincoln. Ms Catherine Ogereau and Ms Catherine Turner
Using authoring software and drop-down menus to improve language skills and engage pupils.
President Kennedy Community School, Coventry. Ms Neeru Dahar
Collaborative drafting on screen to develop essay-writing skills in Panjabi.
Saltley School and Specialist Science College, Birmingham. Mr Abdul Majid Afzal
Using interactive whiteboard software to enhance whole-class teaching, in particular text manipulation and colour-coded activities, to complement paper-based activities focused on tense formation in Urdu.
Shenley Court Specialist Arts College, Birmingham. Ms Anne Brookstein
Developing confidence with graduated activities.
Sir Bernard Lovell School, Bristol. Ms Ruth Cole and Ms Caroline Saunders
Working with podcasts to enable pupils to take more control of their own learning and to develop error recognition, confidence when speaking and creativity with language.
St Aidans RC School, Sunderland. Mr Arezki Aouane
Whose voice is it anyway? Engaging the imagination in developing speaking skills, using audio and video editing software.
St Julie’s High School for Girls (1), Liverpool. Ms Alex Heap
Using a protected online community for peer-to-peer communication and developing extended writing skills with a Year 7 group.
St Julie’s High School for Girls (2), Liverpool. Mr George Ray
Improving speaking skills using digital video, in collaboration with a partner school in Spain.
All Saints RC High School, Sheffield. Ms Carolyn George
The Languages Department wishes to explore the potential of ICT to improve pronunciation and develop speaking skills with a group of 16 Year 10 pupils who are enthusiastic learners but lack confidence in speaking in French. The topic of Leisure will be reviewed and special emphasis will be placed on the formation of the Future and Perfect tenses, including irregular verbs. A downloadable free sound editor, Audacity, will be used to make voice recordings: by the teacher for use on the interactive whiteboard and in word-processed electronic worksheets; and by pupils in completion of their worksheets and the final task, a contextualised presentation including voice recordings and images researched on the Internet.
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Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, Sutton Coldfield. Ms Susan Merrall and Mr Mike SadlerTeachers of French at the school wish to use drop-down menus with Year 12 students to develop creative and accurate independent writing. Year 12 students arrive from different schools with different levels of grammatical awareness and many find it difficult to work with and adapt source materials for their own use. A key element in this process is an adequate understanding of the grammar of the target language. In order to develop grammatical awareness and to enable students to exploit source materials successfully, a series of drop-down menu activities will be devised in Word to practise adapting sentences, at first to order and then freely. Students will be asked to focus on various grammatical elements. Model sentences for use in an essay will then be similarly adapted. The final essay content will be compared with previous written work.
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Brookvale High School, Groby. Mr Ian King
The school has invested in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and teachers of languages wish to explore its potential to produce tangible improvements in learning. This project looks at the effect of instant feedback, which will focus mostly on grammatical accuracy, given to pupils’ written work. Pupils are to read and take note of teacher comment before re-drafting their work. It is anticipated that having an electronic system which facilitates both a rapid response and easy re-drafting, pupils will be encouraged to make corrections and learn to look more critically at their work, as well as develop greater accuracy. It is also hoped that parents, being able to access the VLE from home to view comments on their child’s work, will become more involved with their child’s progress.
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Clifton College, Bristol, Mr Bobby Trivic
The Languages Department at the Upper School has recently enjoyed an investment in ICT, including new software for the digital language laboratory. The latter enables pupils to interact with the teacher and with peers, and record and save spoken presentations. This project aims to exploit these aspects of the laboratory to improve speaking skills.
Traditionally, the Department underperforms in the speaking elements of external exams. One GCSE class will take part in this project to improve their spoken performance in French. Pupils will record and save spoken answers relevant to routine preparation for the oral examination. They will save them as mp3 files and take them away to consider ways of improving their answers, using teacher and peer feedback as an aid. They will then revisit and improve each answer. Thus, it is hoped, pupils will improve the fluency and accuracy of their spoken French, have a record of their answers which they can revise from and continually improve, thereby increasing their self-awareness and self-evaluation skills in a form of assessment for learning.
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Gordano School, Bristol. Mr Peter Morris
The school is a large comprehensive in the town of Portishead. The MFL Department won the European Award for Languages in 2004 for the project “TALK so that pupils listen and listen so that pupils TALK”. The Department took part in Languages ICT Action Research in 2006 and wishes to develop the same theme further with Year 7 pupils. The project explores to what extent wikis (easily constructed, free, moderated web pages) can be used as a medium to encourage autonomous, creative and collaborative writing in MFL. Pupils will be given a password to their own wiki and will be responsible for writing, editing and correcting content over a period of four terms. The teacher will moderate contributions to ensure rules of netiquette are observed and that pupils are safe. The teacher will also provide comments on content and advice on how to improve accuracy.
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Holmfirth High School, Holmfirth. Ms Sarah Godbehere
The Languages Department wishes to investigate ways of using ICT to improve pronunciation and narrative skills. They also wish to use current resources to encourage pupils to approach learning more flexibly and with greater autonomy. Using the interactive whiteboard and a sound editor, a group of Year 9 pupils will explore the topic of Holidays with an emphasis on the use of audio to improve pronunciation. Electronic worksheets and authoring software will be used to develop narrative skills and attention to accuracy and range. Pupils will demonstrate their narrative skills using digital photos of their own holidays with digital audio in a presentation. Critical awareness will be developed in a peer assessment session at the end of the project.
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King Harold School, Waltham Abbey. Mr Terry Curtis
Numbers studying languages in this community-based comprehensive school in Essex have been affected by recent entitlement legislation and retention is a priority for the department. The project relates to the challenge of raising achievement, and allows the Languages Department to take a lead in exploring the e-portfolio, enhancing status for teachers and learners. The Department wishes to investigate ways of creating more challenging resources and approaches, specifically in relation to the handling of longer and more complex texts in the target language and will use word-processing software, the VTLE (Virtual Teaching and Learning Environment) and the e-portfolio as a vehicle for this work. The focus is on writing, through initial reading activity. Pupils will be asked to edit the texts they explore, using strategies they are taught, in order to raise their level of complexity, thus gaining insight into what constitutes a more effective (Higher Level) piece of writing.
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Lincoln Christ’s Hospital School, Lincoln. Ms Catherine Ogereau and Ms Catherine Turner
Teachers in the Languages Department wish to use authoring software, online exercises and drop-down menus to develop vocabulary skills in Year 8 pupils who have difficulty in learning French. They wish to stimulate pupils and improve their concentration span. Activities will be at word, sentence and text level, both in whole-class work on the interactive whiteboard and in individual work in the ICT room. The goal is that each pupil will write a short text on their daily routines. As a stimulus and to provide further evidence of progress, pupils will work in groups to create a presentation on the theme using their own digital photographs. Assessment worksheets will be completed at each stage and pupils will also be asked to evaluate their own progress in an end-of-project questionnaire.
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Saltley School and Specialist Science College, Birmingham. Mr Abdul Majid Afzal
With a high percentage of Pakistani pupils at this medium-sized mixed comprehensive school, the Urdu department has a key role to play alongside the French department. With pupils learning Urdu mainly as a third language (English and Mirpuri usually coming first), focused teaching is required to develop literacy and understanding of grammar in particular. This Year 9 project focused on the development of accurate, appropriate and confident use of tense, the key to accessing Level 5 of the National Curriculum, through the integrated use of ICT for whole-class teaching. The teacher used an illustrated PowerPoint presentation to introduce vocabulary written in Urdu script and to promote discussion about weather and seasons in the UK and Pakistan. Using colour-coded text to denote different tenses, the teacher then used interactive whiteboard software to highlight grammar points, leading onto text manipulation activities, such as matching sentence halves and sentence reconstruction. The pupils then worked independently on worksheet-based reading tasks, which required them to understand tense use and to complete sentences in handwritten Urdu. The Reveal and Highlight tools of the interactive whiteboard software then focused pupils during the worksheet self-correction activity. The teacher found that most pupils reacted enthusiastically to the lesson activities and noted a particular improvement in effort by those pupils struggling to move from Level 4 to Level 5. For one gifted and talented girl, the project was the turning point in grasping the differences between past tenses. The teacher commented that pupils responded ‘much more confidently and quickly, because they were engaged and supported by the visual elements.’ A brief evaluation of the project lessons showed that 90% of pupils could articulate what they had learned without guidance from the teacher. The teacher felt that the ICT had impacted positively on his teaching style and, urged also by the pupils, he aims to integrate use of the whiteboard further into his teaching.
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Shenley Court Specialist Arts College, Birmingham. Ms Anne Brookstein
The project at Shenley Court comprises a graduated series of ICT activities: whole-class teaching using the interactive whiteboard, pairwork in a computer room, and, finally, individual work in an ICT room. The aim is to use ICT to develop confidence, by retaining pupils’ attention more effectively, making learning easier and more solid and therefore improving learning and self-esteem in pupils. The topic 'Opinions and school subjects' has limited vocabulary with very many possibilities of expression. In order to engage the pupils in creating their own personal bank of statements, pupils are shown examples of adaptation within fixed sentence structures; they then use reservoirs of similar phrases, again in fixed sentence structures, to translate and then create sentences. Finally they create their own personal bank of statements for use in written and oral work.
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Sir Bernard Lovell, Bristol. Ms Ruth Cole and Ms Caroline Saunders
Sir Bernard Lovell School is an 11-18 comprehensive school with Specialist Language College Status on the outskirts of Bristol. The MFL department has already participated in action research projects to investigate how ICT could help improve the speaking skills of pupils. Using the software Garage Band and lPOD, the present project intends to research how the use of podcasts can motivate pupils to take control of their own learning, develop their ability to recognise their own mistakes, improve their own confidence in speaking and be creative. Over 3 ICT lessons, working in pairs and with the support of their teachers, pupils will create, evaluate and amend podcasts on a range of topics linked to education. At the end of the project, the podcasts will be posted on the Extranet of the local school partnership.
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St Aidan's RC School, Sunderland. Mr Arezki Aouane
St Aidan's is a boys’ school located in a residential area south of the city centre with a good social mixture. This project builds on previous work using Audacity (making raps, recording and editing presentations) and takes pupils forward in terms of speaking and writing skills. The aim is to establish how imaginative engagement with a video clip can produce more creative writing and speaking in the target language. The project aims to stimulate pupils’ imagination and creative writing skills and to extend their grammatical scope within an ICT context. In line with a whole-school objective it aims also to encourage independent learning and working. The project uses Audacity software, video editing software and Internet resources. Students will observe short video clips in the target language, then learn about generating, scripting, rehearsing and recording a new voiceover to change the impact of the clips.
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St Julie’s High School for Girls (1), Liverpool. Ms Alex Heap
Teachers of languages wish to use an online protected zone, Think.com, to develop extended writing skills and to maintain the enthusiasm for French which a Year 7 group has brought from learning the language at primary. They will use Think.com to communicate with pupils of the same age at school in Lens, Northern France, on the topic of school life. Using writing frames as a support, pupils will complete two pieces of extended writing over the course of the project. The second extended text will have no maximum word limit, which, it is hoped, will lead to differentiated outcomes across the group. Each set of pupils will write in the target language they are learning and each will suggest to their counterparts a limited number of areas for improvement in the texts they receive. The teachers will use these suggestions for general class work on the topic, focusing on accuracy, spelling and alternative or new expressions that emerge. It is hoped that pupils will use the site to engage in spontaneous communication beyond the set tasks.
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St Julie’s High School for Girls (2), Liverpool. Mr George Ray
The school is engaged in a partnership with a similar school in Salamanca, Spain. Teachers at St Julie’s are keen to maintain interest in Spanish with a Year 9 group and both partner schools wish to use digital video to enable peer-to-peer contact with native speakers. They wish to determine how video might help to improve spoken language skills and develop critical skills regarding pronunciation, accuracy and range of expression. Pupils will work through the topic of Free Time and Leisure before preparing, recording and sending a brief video on the topic. Pupils in each country will then reply, focusing on up to three suggested areas for improvement in the language used. Teachers will use the suggestions received for whole-class work and to develop in pupils an ability to self-review and improve their performance in the target language.
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