GLT: Creativity in the Languages Classroom

HPL

I love languages. When I look back at my life choices, the one thing that I can’t imagine is not being able to speak a different language. I wasn’t brought up bilingual, so all my skills and understanding started in the secondary school classroom in a comprehensive school in Wales and have blossomed from there. This is why I am so passionate about the skills that we teach the pupils sitting in front of us.

I have taught in and been responsible for language departments in a wide range of secondary schools, including mixed comprehensives, single-sex comprehensives, a boys’ grammar school and a British international school and what I love about HPL is that it gives me the vocabulary and the evidence to explain why I do things the way I do. HPL also provides us with a tool to guide our self-reflection and to expand the way in which we teach to enable the pupils sitting in front of us to fully develop their potential.

The principles for teaching and learning identified by HPL can become a real touchstone for us as curriculums and qualifications change – we have evidence of how best to provide our pupils with the skills they need to learn. Not just now, but as they move forward into a world of work that demands that workers change, adapt and learn.

HPL can help us to give pupils the skills they need to become successful language learners and give them access to something that they will have for the rest of their lives.

- Deanne Wiseman

« Modern Foreign Languages - Deanne Wiseman

Deanne Wiseman

Creativity in the Languages Classroom

Monday, 16 October 2023, 4:59 PM

Anna Craft (2005) talks about "little c" creativity. This means that knowledge can be new and "creative" as long as it is something new created by the individual learner, so learners are demonstrating little c creativity as soon as they start using grammar rules to create new language. We should be teaching for this type of creativity and independence from the very beginning by making our learners as independent as possible. We tend to start with sentence builders, teasing out the grammar they contain, before moving on to give learners the chance to create their own language using these rules with new vocabulary. Does anyone else teach like this?

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« Modern Foreign Languages - Deanne Wiseman

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