10 Quick & easy things to do every day that will help ensure ALL your students are making progress

[Jo Rhys-Jones]

SEN children have an equal entitlement to the full curriculum and often respond particularly well to modern language teaching methods. They are also able to achieve excellent results. Children can work from the same objectives as the rest of the class once barriers to their learning are removed & should NEVER be removed from a languages lesson for any reason as the whole point of modern language teaching reinforces the rest of the curriculum and particularly knowledge about English, using methods that are particularly beneficial to these children.
1. Fonts on whiteboards should always be large and sans serif - 'comic sans' and 'arial' are particularly good. Fonts on printed paper should be large and clearly spaced (but not 'justified'), never smaller than arial 12, ideally always a lot bigger. Make sure that when providing writing mats, templates, writing frames or vocabulary books that this is still adhered to as a few clear colour-coded rules/nouns stuck to the desk will be of far more use than long lists of words in tiny font in a dictionary.
2. Never use the standard plain white background on the IWB - set the screen default to always be a pale pastel colour. This will be far easier on the eyes and provide better contrast for all your students not just those with dyslexia.
3. Class seating - ensuring that left-handed students sit to the left of right-handed students will make a world of difference to your classroom. As of course, does ensuring clear sight lines to you, the board and the work. Have consistant, logical rules about the organisation of materials and seating within the classroom and extend this to cover the structure of lessons and learning. The rules will need to be regularly reinforced with visual and verbal reminders but will be a source of reassurance to students who may otherwise be struggling to cope with the chaos of daily life.
4. Use lots of visual clues such as icons but avoid overcrowding and 'busy' presentation. Simple colour hints such as always placing masculine nouns on a blue background will aid the creating of mind associations and thus memorising vocabulary. Similarly the judicious use of an animated piece of clipart rather than a static picture is far more likely to be memorable. Try to always use the same pictures/animations for specific vocabulary.
5. Teach the alphabet and phonemes/graphemes of your target language (French, German, Spanish, etc) in order to avoid scenarios where children try to impose their own English phoneme/grapheme understanding to the foreign language. For more information on how & why you can do this click on this link to pronounciation and phonics. You will quickly find that dyslexic children in particular respond extremely well to this and are relieved by the regularity and logic of foreign language spelling compared to English. Take it a step further and try creating a rainbow alphabet with your class (where letters are colour coded by sound or purpose) and make sure that how accents affect pronounciation is taught explicitly.
6. Keep presentation organised, with lines straight, pictures evenly spaced and clear demarkation. This helps children to make sense of what is being presented rather than being distracted by the presentation itself.
7. Use kinaesthetic and multi-sensory approaches. Help the brain make links between the language by speaking and making an action at the same time to practice new vocabulary and involve the children in choosing which action would be appropriate. Use objects not just flashcards whenever possible and pass them around the class. Instead of asking children to copy sentences, print them, slice them up and ask the children to physically rearrange the words and justify their solutions. Consider differentiating these tasks and avoid death by worksheet by making learning active.
8. Written work - you do not have to use a pen - here is an entire presentation about alternatives that practise all the skills needed to access written work without resorting to low-level copying from the board using a pen - a practice which is of dubious value at the best of times anyway!
9. Use ICT as a tool to facilitate learning and access. Speach recognition software works in numerous languages, keyboards can be simply set to include accents and foreign characters, spoken work can be recorded simply and inexpensively using free software such as audacity straight onto computers or mobile technology such as TTA excellent child-friendly and robust Easy-speak microphones, talking lids and even talking pens.
10. Self-esteem is inextricably linked to learning, so ensure you have created a 'safe' learning environment. Make sure there are opportunities to make guesses so that children are not always wrong. For example - hide a flashcard/object behind your bag - can the class guess in French what it might be? - in this way all children can make a guess and thus have an opportunity to practise the language, not only the 'good' ones who would get it right if you just held up the card and said 'what is this?'. Try to celebrate what the children remember and get right rather than rushing to correct minor errors.

Of course - most of these are common sense and probably most if not all may be already happening in your classroom, so do please add here any tips we can share. So many times, pracitice that helps support SEN children proves to be good practice all round.

[Lorraine]

Superb ideas as usual Jo. Have been looking at some resources for Pupils with special needs myself recently and like you evidence seems to be that they can make good progress with MFL- if the teacher believes they can and provide suitable materials /resources.