New cohort: Second half of academic Year 2013-2014

Unlike the other Elements course the ILC has not had a big change of students. 2 students left (the Korean and Polish language students) and several new students joined. Most students carried on studying the language of their choice.

There are now more students studying languages at a native level. We have new students studying Korean, German, French and Chinese following the online course. We should also have a new student starting soon studying Swedish.

I have now put all the tasks that Madoka and myself devised last term on an ISLE course called Independent Language Centre, and we continue to add tasks to the list. This gives the students a wide range of topics to choose from. Due to this I have allowed the students to pick and choose what order they do the topics in. The reason for this being that they can pursue things that interest them more, and they can choose to focus on topics that lead to a written outcome or that lead to a spoken outcome, depending on what they have identified as needing.

In the future I would like to identify the tasks we have devised and classify them according to the European Language Framework - so some tasks are definitely quite challenging and C2 level, others are more C1, and the ones that students have tended to pick to do first this term (animals and tongue twisters are probably even B2). It would be good to make this obvious to students. I think they presume at the moment that all tasks are the same difficulty level.

As ever I think one of the most difficult things about administering this course is finding native speakers who are willing to check the students' blogs and offer advice. Often this could be the parents, but in reality many of them are too busy and/or unfamiliar with the idea of posting comments on blogs and/or the students feel awkward about their parents checking their work.

A final observation: Year groups are stronger than language groups. There are now 3 Year 9s (a French and a German student have joined the 1 Year 9 Hebrew student) In term 1 there was just the 1 Year 9 Hebrew student. The Year 9s immediately formed a table of their own, which I felt was slightly odd as this splits the Hebrew group up. I am monitoring the situation.