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Been again reflecting a little bit on how language teaching evolved away from the parroting of transactional phrases in the 90s and some of the people who have been on that same journey...
... Barry Jones and the graded objectives, which although I was frustrated by the parroting, had the idea of breaking down into small steps...
... James Burch and the virtuosic target language teaching, which was awe inspiring, although I only saw one off lessons, so I never knew how he would develop pupils' coherent systematisation of language...
... Ann Swarbrick with her focus on social justice, the meaning of the message, and pupils wanting to say things the syllabus didn't cover...
... Heather Rendall for the realisation that phonics was grammar and needed teaching and was the foundation of everything...
... Iain Mitchell and Anne Prentis where it all started to make sense to build a core of recombinable language. And to practise it with support that you slowly removed...
... And @RachelHawkes60 who saw that as well as taking language learning back down into important micro steps, you could use those steps to build it back up again into something exciting, creative and purposeful...
... Of course there were many others, and this was in the 90s and early 2000s so there was no social media, so the networks were perhaps smaller and it was harder to know what a wider range of people were doing...
... And I certainly remember disagreeing with several of these people. In particular every time I saw Heather Rendall speak, despite her Pathfinder on grammar (and phonics) being the biggest influence on my teaching...
... But there was a real sense of intellectual and moral purpose, in negotiating a way between communication, culture, grammar, systematically recombinable or manipulable(?) language and how to teach it in steps which broke it down and could then be put back together...
... And finally, of course, in the mid 2000s, David Buckland and the monumental KS3 Framework of Objectives for MFL which put everything into place for breaking down language learning into skills to be developed and out together to create a whole.
... (Not in the tick box, launch and reinforce mentality which people ended up focussing on, and which was a feature of the frameworks across subjects imposed on mfl) but in having a clear and ambitious breakdown of a vision of a language-learning process...
I was fortunate to train at a time where everything was in flux, so I never felt I had to teach in a certain dictated way. Wasyl Cajkler was another inspiration in the 90s, in understanding it as a practical and intellectual challenge.
Haven't suffered from the "You have to teach like this..." that people often report. Perhaps @ALL4language in the early days allowed me to be part of a wider exchange of ideas before social media came along.
Hard to remember what things were like before we had the #mfltwitterati and things like the Tilt webinars, although @HelenMyers and @joedale have been building supportive communities for ever!
