St. Brendans Sixth Form College

Improving Performance with SANAKO Study 1200
I recently asked a student ‘How did your oral exam go?’ to which he replied ‘Well, the examiner’s accent was mostly understandable and her questions made sense unlike last year’ in fact what I meant was ‘how did you do?’ and he replied, ‘Me? No problems!’

Indeed, problems at St Brendan’s 6th Form College this year were few and far between in the oral exam.  As our latest set of statistics suggest, speaking has even become our best skill at the exam. 

The reasons for this success are of course numerous.  Trips abroad have enhanced the students’ confidence significantly.  Teachers are refining their practice all the time.  However, the biggest factor behind our success with our oral results is no doubt the fact that, nowadays, speaking is no big deal.  Not so long ago, in one class, most of the students managed to interact in French some of the time, never enough for it to become ‘second nature’ though.  The oral exam meant doing something you hardly ever did with someone you hardly knew.  Whilst reading, writing and listening are part of normal day to day lessons, oral work is still rare enough to stress students as they are put into a situation they still rarely experience.

Speaking Practice
Nowadays, thanks to a judicious use of technology, all the students speak all of the time.  Not only this but every utterance is checked and reviewed so not only do they speak all the time, every single student has his/her spoken work monitored closely and speaking targets are the order of the day.  Having invested in SANAKO Study 1200, every PC in the room (and other MFL rooms) represents part of a digital language centre.  Through carousel work and pair work, all the conversations between students, students and assistants or students and teachers can be recorded at a click of a button.  Key conversations can be marked by teachers and, more importantly, can be corrected by simply recording comments on the student’s oral work.

Integration with Moodle
Linking SANAKO Study 1200 to a VLE platform such as Moodle, the modern VLE is enabling every single student to access the curriculum content anytime and anywhere and build a personal academic profile or Individual Learning Plan.  These plans are becoming a key tool to promote inclusion and have a place at all key stages (to ensure that the students in the lower sets still access the curriculum for example) and can also play a key role to provide school wide support for every student working on  projects linked to the Extended Project Qualification or the International baccalaureate (IB)

Using our Moodle VLE, students put forward written work which is ‘bounced’ forward and backward with the teacher to make sure that the work is of the best possible quality.  SANAKO Study 1200 enables us to do the same with oral work.  By using pair work and power point as a support for conversations, each student reads in turns the question displayed on the interactive board.  It is up to the other student to provide a good answer.  Not only are those answers recorded, but the teacher can ‘drop in’ into any conversation and provide 1 to 1 feedback.  By quickening the pace of questions on the board, the oral becomes a quick fire exercise and frankly, no examiner can be as tough as this so the students become more and more confident!

As a matter of fact, the students are so confident with their oral work that when asked about their oral exam, they are as likely to offer an appraisal of the examiner’s French as an appraisal of their work.

Daniel Esteve
MFL Curriculum Manager
St Brendan"s 6th Form College