Centrally-defined vocab list for MFL GCSE: for and against

The Department for Education has launched a consultation on a new GCSE for MFL. Various individuals worked on this new GCSE between November 2019 and March 2020. You may recognise that two panelists are the Co-Directors of NCELP.  The Chair Ian Bauckham has a number of other roles relevant to MFL – and he chaired the 2016 Pedagogy Review, a review which heavily influences these proposals

The new GCSE will:

1. No longer feature specific topics (holidays, daily routine, hobbies etc)
2. Have a specified vocabulary list – according to which all tasks in the exam will be set. Evidence suggests the vocab list will be 1500 ish words at Higher level and 1050 ish at Foundation. Note the official figures say 1700 and 1200 – but this includes the various irregular forms of verbs etc which will be separately listed. By convention, vocabulary size is measured in terms of the number of ‘headwords’ a student knows; a headword is a word as you would find it listed in the dictionary.
3. The list will be heavily informed by frequency – i.e. the vast majority (90%+) of these 2000 words will be from the “top 2000” most frequent words in each language, as published in ‘frequency dictionaries’, which in turn are based on a cross-section of written and spoken language.  On the current AQA vocab list, approximately 68% of words are drawn from the top 2000 word families, so there will be a far greater emphasis on frequency. Click here to see information on what those highly frequent words.
4. Require exam boards to use this vocabulary list when setting their questions; only a maximum of 2% of words in the exam will be from beyond this list, and those will be glossed.

As a point of reference, research shows that an average GCSE French student knows about 850 words by the end of year 11, and there is some research which suggests that this has declined further (see Milton 2006 and subsequent publications).

Pros

• It will be helpful to know what exactly students need to know if they want to do well in the exam
• Students know that any words they learn might come up in the exam
• Knowing what’s on the list allows us to take a text and replace less common words with more common ones
• We could in theory teach whatever topics we like, as long as we’re mindful of what’s on the list (but for a major caveat, see below)

Cons

Problems with the list per se. I want to first look at the issues with comprehensive specified lists in general

• In the real world, students will come across words they don’t know all the time. This also happens in their L1. When they read or hear the language, they need to be able to manage that unknown content. It’s also a highly valuable transferable skill which adds to the appeal of languages. If we’re not teaching students to manage unknown words, we’re arguably not teaching them to be linguists at all.
• Exams may well become much trickier: exam boards need to write exam papers that produce a range of marks – i.e. there has to be things which students will get wrong. If students generally know all the words in the exam because they have known what to expect all along, then the questions will need to find different ways to catch them out. This could essentially mean we test more of the bizarre logic, distractions or obscure grammar that students and teachers find so baffling in the current exams.
• Will we become slaves to the list? It’s nice to think we could and that we will go well beyond the list in our teaching, but the reality is that it’s a risk that will be hard to justify for many. SLTs won’t be happy if our students are getting poor grades while our schemes of work involve teaching lots of words which won’t be credited at all. Or, if SLTs note that our schemes of work go beyond the requirements of the exam, but Maths meanwhile is struggling to get a decent pass rate, I’d say that makes us vulnerable to losing timetable time.
• Timetable time is a key issue: as soon as you put a vocab size on a language exam, it becomes very countable and measurable, and there is global consensus on how much time is needed for students to learn certain numbers of words (4 words per hr ish). A curriculum of the size being proposed is very small and does not justify more than 80 mins per week or so – and that’s if you’re starting from scratch at year 7 (i.e. disregarding primary). Having a large vocab list would strengthen the case for timetable time; having a small one makes us vulnerable.
• Unplanned conversation is not possible if examiners are required to stick to an artificial word list. There are many people who are unhappy about the elimination of general conversation: you can’t have general conversation, though, if we’re required to stick to a list. It would not be examinable.
• I don’t think it’s Government’s role to be dictating to me as a teacher which words my students should learn. This is centralised control-freakery in its purest and most extreme form. Not only does that stifle my creativity, but it also it prevents me from teaching things which I feel are important, or which will inspire my students. Sure, I guess I could rework texts and topics to shoe-horn in the “correct” vocabulary from the lists. But in doing so they become contrived and not remotely realistic or authentic. Inevitably it limits what I can teach and what my students can learn. If I want to talk about the injustice of food poverty in modern France, I should be able to. If I want to talk about West African cuisine, I should be able to. If I want to teach a word because it is powerful or beautiful or expressive, I should be able to, regardless of whether it is on the Government-sanctioned list, and without feeling like I’m deviating from the “curriculum” and thereby taking risks at my students’ expense. And it sends a massive signal that the Government doesn’t trust MFL teachers, indeed wants to de-skill us. It’s also a kick in the teeth for any teacher interesting in diversity within the curriculum or in “decolonising”, too.

Problems with the particular list being proposed

• It is really, really, really small, and represents a “substantial reduction” in the curriculum. There is no two ways about it: if you know fewer words in a language, you are less proficient in it. There’s a suggestion that “less is more” – but it isn’t: less is less. I cannot and will not advocate for a decline in standards. Making exams more accessible is a different question entirely. You don’t have to cut half of the content out of a subject to make it viable. We have seen in the past what happens when we dumb down MFL, such as during the days of Controlled Assessment: the decline merely accelerates. See here for a comparison of this word list with other countries.
• Language in the real world doesn’t occur like this; real language doesn’t obey the frequency lists. Language is always about something and therefore always involves words beyond the top 2000 – even simple things like road signs and ticket machines. If we restrict largely learning to the top 2000, we are not equipping students to actually say anything or comprehend anything in the real world. It is argued by experts that it is a lack of content-specific (i.e. less frequent) vocabulary which hampers learners as well as a lack of high-frequency words.
• The approach is not supported by evidence – in fact the evidence (Milton 2010) contradicts it.  Successful learners of French in other countries benefit from a broad, rich and varied input of vocab from across the frequency bands, way beyond the top 2000. In his influential book on vocab learning, Milton (2009: 216) even argues that 50% of input should be made up of infrequent words.
• Although the size of the list looks ambitious, we know from research that students virtually never learn every word that they experience in the classroom, regardless of our pedagogy. Uptake is usually much less than 50% in British classrooms – so if we limit our teaching to this vocab list, our students will be even worse off in terms of vocab than they are now. There is no evidence at all to support the assertion that if we publish a vocab list, students will suddenly learn it.
• The published frequency lists themselves are problematic. Firstly, they are too static and based on a selective and questionable corpus (see this blog for a fuller discussion): ‘confinement’ and ‘vaccin’ aren’t in the top 2000, but they’re definitely common words this year. Secondly, they tend not to recognise the importance slang words (which by definition are common, especially for young people). Thirdly, they don’t reflect linguistic variation across nations (France vs Sénégal vs Suisse vs Québec), communities or indeed individuals (“église” is top 2000 but “mosquée” is not; “mariage” is but “pacs” and “homosexuel” are not; “marché” makes the list but “banque alimentaire” would not). The lists are likely to reflect existing unequal power structures within our world – and if we immortalise them in GCSE specs, all we are doing is maintaining those power imbalances.
• Most importantly, this is being proposed despite it not having been trialled anywhere in the world; this approach has no track record, no evidence of success. Yet it’s about to drive all language learning in England. It seems highly risky to me. Literally no other country has MFL exams driven by specified vocab lists. And pretty much every country in the world is more successful at language learning than we are. Perhaps we should learn from them, not do the opposite to what they do.

I’ve tried to be balanced here. To be honest, once upon a time, I was seduced by the idea of a set vocab list (I even suggest it in a blog from a few years ago). And it sounds appealing to many (see here). But the more I’ve read up on this, and the more thinking I’ve done, the more worried I am. And I think preceding with this could be the final nail in the coffin for MFL in England. Believe me, I’d love to be wrong, and I’d love for there to be a renaissance of language-learning by whatever means. But I really don’t think this approach will take us there, and it’s a MASSIVE risk.

So should the exam be a massive free-for-all and exam boards can use whichever words they want?

Definitely not. For as teachers, we still need to know what to teach. Currently that is done via lists of topics and a suggested vocab list. That may well be unsatisfactory. But if a 100% defined word list with an overwhelming emphasis on high frequency words is not the answer, then what is the answer? Here are some ideas…

• a much smaller “core list” of specified words – the words which generally really are high frequency (this is approx the top 700 words; beyond this, each word only counts for less than 0.01% coverage, so it really isn’t true that word number 1800 is much more frequent than word number 1200 – it’s all much of a muchness). This would mean no curriculum leaves any huge omissions.
• a series of thematic lists which enable students to communicate about things, ideally things which are interesting, culturally authentic useful and/or relevant. The richer and more varied these lists are, the more proficient they will be, and the more exam boards will be able to test students via what words they know, rather than whether they spotted the distractors. Remember, vocabulary size is by far the biggest predictor and arbiter of proficiency (Staehr 2008). Boards could publish 12 of these and we might choose 6 of them in each school, for example. This is a bit like the optionality included in English Lit and History.
• a healthy overall vocabulary size target of 2000+. This would
  • a) match the goals of the curriculum as stated in the proposals (communicating “for a range of audiences and purposes, in different genres and in formal and informal contexts which are relevant to their current and future needs and interests, having regard to the likely experiences of a wide social range“, paragraph 8)
  • b) put Higher Tier students of MFL on a par with Foundation Tier students of French/Spanish in Germany and
  • c) help departments secure healthy timetables of 2 hours per week minimum, across the secondary phases
• to preserve the teaching and value of inference skills, exam boards would be permitted to allocate a maximum percentage (5%? 10%) of marks in a reading and listening paper to words which are to be worked out from context, using reasonable and level-appropriate deduction strategies