I have spent much of my career as a teacher of MFL trying to synthesise the complexity of the Spanish language into a simple toolkit that I could easily provide students in order to help them become more effective writers and speakers.
My theory is that If I can get my students to master the use of this toolkit, I can get them to create vast amount of complex language confidently.
The toolkit is made of 20 Keys, 20 types of complex language that I believe are the elements required to make a piece of writing or speaking worthy of a grade 9.
These are some of the reasons why I believe The 20 Keys are successful:
- I introduce them explicitly and always call them by their official name, i. e. idiom. They give students the ability to discuss complex language.
- They are backed by a wealth of resources that I make available for students.
- I practise them as often as I can, across all topics.
- I introduce 10 in years 7 and 8 and the rest in 9, 10 and 11, so it doesn’t feel like my curriculum is grammar centred.
- I use them to mark every piece of writing or speaking. See my previous blog post for details.
- Students use them to plan every piece of writing or speaking.
- Students are trained on how to spot them and are routinely asked to identify them in their own writing, the writing of others or the marking of wagolls and wabolls.
- I use them for my own planning and I constantly recycle them when devising language for lesson tasks.
- They feature in books, marksheets, planning sheets, revision booklets, quizlet lists… basically everywhere.
- There are only 20, which is an amount that many students can remember.
Supporting the 20 Keys: resources
Introducing the 20 Keys
Practising the 20 Keys
These are Powerpoint presentations that I use to drill the Keys as vocab. I use these regularly at the beginning of the lesson, as a speedy self-testing tool for students. I let the presentation run on the interactive whiteboard and time the slides (2 seconds each is ideal). Students try to guess what the word is (from the Spanish first, then from the English) and if they get it right, when the correct answer appears, they award themselves one mark. At the end of the presentation, they count the marks. I trust that students are in fact testing themselves and not just pretending, and they very rarely disappoint. It’s a great system.
I hope you find this blog and the ideas that I’ve shared useful. If you like the blog, please share it on Twitter so others can benefit from it too.
@TeacheryDiaz
ThinkingEd 