What really matters for revision in MFL

When it comes to revision, it's essential to give your students as much time as possible to practice their skills repeatedly. I believe that you don't need to do activities that take a huge amount of time and effort to prepare; the most important thing is the opportunity to do lots of varied practice until students feel really successful and confident. 

Revision will likely still need some scaffolding, and how much will depend on the class in front of you, but ideally at this stage students are working mostly independently and revision should feel like a challenge. As teachers, we are the experts that help students to understand how revision works, and select activities that allow for the most practice - by either guiding them towards beneficial things to do at home or setting it in the classroom. We are also able to target the activities that highlight student misconceptions and areas of difficulty, as well as areas that are most important for achieving high marks. In my opinion, the most important thing generally speaking is to have accurate verbs with a variety of additional details, so all the practice activities I do rehearse this structure.

The aim of this blog is to give you some low-prep, high-impact ideas that you can use to help your students prepare. These are particularly geared towards the productive skills, ie. speaking and writing.

There are some specific important differences, but the skills of writing and speaking are interlinked and it is possible to practice both together effectively. Writing down an answer before saying it aloud can be really beneficial for thinking time, (giving planning time and therefore generally writing a better answer) and this also incidentally practises the reading aloud portion of the speaking exam directly. One of the ways I do this is with the 3-2-1 method - if I ask students to write a question I will give them firstly three minutes to write it down, then two minutes to say it to their partner with their notes, then one minute to say it to the partner without their notes. The timings here aren't particularly strict, as it will depend on the style of tasks that you are doing, however the three stage structure is what’s important. I made a reel talking about this in more detail along with some variations - you can watch it here.

Another way you can scaffold revision is to try to jog students' memories about all the things that they already know. You can read my previous blog about this here. There are two main ways that I like to do this: images and dice. Images are helpful because instead of asking students to just answer a question, it helps them to visualise the things that they know how to say. A common issue I see is students who can translate a range of different words for hobbies, for example, but draw a blank when you ask them to tell you about what they do in their free time. You can use images in a wide range of activity types, and my favourite way is probably to put them into a grid, leading to tasks like saying a sentence about a particular square, or talking about as many squares as you can within a time limit. 

Secondly, using dice is a good way to remind students of all the types of things they already know, particularly when it comes to the extended details that they should add. I like to assign a detailed category to each number on a dice, for example 1 equals ‘time phrase’, 2 equals ‘where’ 3 equals ‘opinion’ etc. While students are practising the speaking tasks, they roll a dice which jogs their memory to include some detail within this particular category. This is great for when the structure of answers needs more work, such as when students can list or translate lots of different time phrases, for example, but they just aren’t quite making their way into their answers.

Another important element of revision is gamification. I do think it's important to be careful about this, and not overly gamify everything: this can be used well when the game has a clear purpose and clear student roles. It is a simple and beneficial way to vary the activities and keep it a little bit more interesting for students, since even the more motivated students could easily ‘switch-off’ if every task is exactly the same. Answering questions in a few similar yet slightly different contexts can even be helpful for getting it to stick! 

In terms of planning, the main element of this type of revision activity would be a list of questions that you want students to practise over and over. The actual game part is less important, so you could choose whatever your students enjoy the most - for example Noughts and Crosses (use a bingo grid with questions on it already, or even just a blank grid), Connect Four, Jenga, or something similar - every time they answer a question correctly or with a good amount of detail, then they can take a turn in these games place a counter, remove a block etc. The EPI/Conti game No Snakes No Ladders is another good format for this, and I’ve created a download with 8 different versions of this game you can use.

Another one of these is the Unfair Game. I use this often particularly with younger or smaller classes, and it requires a slide template. If students can answer the question on the box, then the box is removed and they earn the number of points behind the box - this could be 1 point, 2 points, steal all of the other teams points etc. The twist is that they have no idea how many points they will get, until after they've already answered the question and chosen the box. I like this one because any student can succeed, and can make an excellent comeback even, because the points are completely random. 

Some revision tasks need to be highly specific, particularly for scenarios that can be a little bizarre, so that students know exactly what to expect. For example, if you are revising role plays it's a good idea for this to feel as close to the real thing as possible, in order to reduce the cognitive load of the actual task structure, and allow students to focus on their language. I remember my first group of year 11 really struggling in their mocks, with the idea that they had to wait for me to ask them the teacher prompt rather than just reading out their own lovely notes, and some would get quite confused about where they were up to - this just leads to overload, and even students who would normally understand the prompts can get easily mixed up. I have made a toblerone-style role play template available on my TES shop to help simulate role play practice. This works because there is a student side and a teacher side - they can practise it together (which means many more goes through than would be possible with just one teacher to a whole class), and they feel more familiar with the entire structure of it.

This last revision activity idea is a good one for higher ability students, or students who have a lot of vocabulary but aren't perhaps including as much variety as they should in their answers. This is the taboo game: students have a card, with a question on it and three words that are related to the topic of the question. However, they aren't allowed to use any of those three words in their answer to the question. For example, the question is ‘what sport do you do’ and the three words are ‘football’, ‘fun’, and ‘park’, and the student needs to answer the question without using these words. They couldn’t say ‘I play football in the park with my brother because it’s fun’, but they could say ‘normally I play basketball on the pitch at school with my friends because it's exciting but a bit tiring’. Obviously the latter answer is a little bit more detailed and has more variety of vocabulary because the student has been guided to think outside the box a little bit more. This is a great way to stretch able students, and depending on the cards you choose may also be a helpful reminder for foundation students too. 

For weaker students you could possibly play this in reverse, where students have to try and include as many words on the card as possible in the answer. The purposes here are quite different though, so I would recommend you to use different cards - the traditional version would need fairly obvious, ‘boring’ vocab, while if the card is simply a prompt card or scaffold card, it would probably need some more challenging options.

I think it can be easy to overcomplicate revision, and feel a need to create lots of new tasks. This isn’t necessary - it’s about the opportunities you can create for specific practice of the elements that really matter, and are most difficult/important for the exam. I hope some of the ideas discussed here help you!