Three years ago today, NCELP was founded with a mission to understand, improve, and promote foreign language learning.
Since the start of NCELP, one of our aims has been to identify and define the language content more clearly – to do this we focused on the core components of language knowledge: the relationship between sounds and writing; vocabulary; and the system to glue this together and make meaning – grammar! Our aim has been to suggest concrete ways in which that content can be sequenced, can be revisited so that pupils get a chance to practise it, and packaged in engaging lessons that do not abandon the core purposes of learning a language – to communicate, interact, to learn about other ways of being and seeing.
As we come to an end of the current phase of work, we would like to thank all the teachers and students in the NCELP Hub schools for joining us on this journey and for believing in what we are working so hard to achieve. There is a continued need to invest in MFL education and we now have a growing body of teachers who are open to research findings and have the expertise and knowledge to apply these to their own contexts.
To all the teachers and educators that have taken the time to contact us to share your successes and achievements over the last three years, thank you!
We appreciate your continued support and look forward to an exciting year ahead.
Below we have included some of our most memorable moments from the last three years.
Policy and practice
We are proud that NCELP continues to influence policy and practice, for example, in the recently published Ofsted Review of Research and in the proposed changes to the GCSE. Those changes define the language to be learnt in much clearer ways – emphasising the importance of selecting the most generalisable and useful language. The aim is that doing this leaves space in the curriculum to revisit that language in interesting and varied contexts. In sum, having a more reliable knowledge of the most useful language.
Resources
Our Resource Portal holds over 2,314 objects – lesson resources, CPD resources, schemes of work, homework activities, posters, speaking cards, language tests, powerpoints about the proposed changes to the GCSE. There has been over 243,477 downloads of files to date.
Lexical profiler
We have created the lexical profiler. This tool can help Awarding Organisations, publishers and teachers check the words that reading and listening texts have. If we want to motivate students that the language CAN be learnt, then taking care over and checking the language content using the MultiLing profiler is one of the first steps in building confidence and giving them a sense of progression.
Summaries of research
OASIS now has over 840 summaries of peer- reviewed research. This research used to sit behind paywalls and written in highly technical and long articles. OASIS has made this research more available.
Gaming Grammar
Gaming Grammar now provides a large suite of online listening and reading activities that give immediate feedback to students. It is becoming more and more widely used as more teachers sign-up. It has a new leader board and even more mini-games arriving, we hope that this will be a useful tool for homework or in class work.
Collaboration with Oak National Academy
A number of NCELP hub school teachers were involved in recording lessons for OAK – the online National Academy – and these videoed lessons have been been downloaded tens of thousands of times, helping with cover work, delivering lessons remotely, and for homework. There are over 450 Year 7 and Year 8 MFL lessons live on the platform.
Three languages!
We haven’t done this in just one subject – it is across THREE – these three languages all require different resources, different Schemes of Work, different pedagogical approaches and different assessments.
Coming up in our fourth year
As we move into a new year and a new phase of work, we are offering support and resources to a wider range of teachers in other locations, with the Specialist Teachers delivering short courses of CPD.
