Hi

according to Ofsted we need to be implementing Blooms Taxonomy into MFL to be outstanding teachers. Can you suggest ways in which to do this as i am completly lost, the language levels do not really correlate with the order of thinking

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Oh, dear, another bee in Ofsted’s bonnet. It looks like some senior inspector has finally got round to reading about Bloom and now thinks Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) is the greatest thing since sliced bread. EFL/ESOL teachers make more use of Bloom’s Taxonomy than MFL teachers. It might be fruitful to Google for “bloom taxonomy esol”. Bloom’s Taxonomy is essentially a hierarchy of levels that get more and more complex. The six levels are:

1. Knowledge, Remembering
2. Comprehension, Understanding
3. Application, Applying
4. Analysis, Analyzing
5. Synthesis, Evaluating
6. Evaluation, Creating

Level 1 (Knowledge) involves checking that students remember facts that they have been taught, e.g. vocabulary, verb conjugations, points of grammar, etc – i.e. answering questions to which there is only one right answer. Here we are talking mainly about students’ abilities to recall information.

Question answering is one of the ways to check for Comprehension (Level 2), e.g. relating to a text that the students have read or a recording that they have listened to. Open-ended questions are preferable to questions requiring a yes/no answer. Comprehension might also involve translation.

Level 3 (Application) involves using a learned skill in a new situation. This might include role-playing activities, e.g. ordering a meal, asking and giving directions, etc.

At Level 4 (Analysis) students might be called upon to explain some of the differences between the English language and the target language, e.g. the placement of adjectives in French and subordinate clause word order in German. This could also relate to showing understanding of the similarities between and differences in the cultures of the UK and the country(ies) in which the target language is spoken.

At Level 5 (Synthesis) students might be asked to talk about or write an essay on a topic that calls upon their knowledge of specific areas of vocabulary, grammatical rules, and understanding of cultural differences between the UK and the country(ies) in which the target language is spoken.

Level 6 (Evaluation) is mainly for advanced students. This might include discussing  and writing about controversial issues in the countr(ies) where the target language is spoken,, e.g. the wearing of the hajib in France, the attitude of West Germans and East Germans to reunification, etc.

Graham

The reworked Tax - emphasis on verbs rather than nouns  ie thinking is doing has 'creating 'at the top and 'evaluating' second from top  but the Ped Pack on Questioning still has the ' old model ' in it .

Bear in mind that Bloom's Taxonomy is a generalised set of categories, and it was not designed specifically for MFL teaching. If you scour the Web for information about the application of Bloom's Taxonomy to language teaching and learning you find that most language teachers emphasise the first three categories. Mere recall of facts (Knowledge) is often looked down upon in most subject areas, e.g. knowing dates is helpful for a historian, but it's not as important as extrapolating information from a sequence of events and coming to conclusions about why certain events took place.

We language teachers often get stuck at the Knowledge level - because a good linguist needs to have a head full of vocabulary, verb conjugations, noun declensions, etc. Without a mass of Knowledge and the facility for instant recall a linguist will not get very far. And no language teacher would dispute the importance of Comprehension and Application. But from this point on it gets a bit tricky, and very few students of foreign languages in secondary education will move further up the scale.

The top three levels of Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation imply the prior acquisition of a set of skills that equip students with the ability to engage in discussion and write in the foreign language at a fairly sophisticated level, but at GCSE level most teachers are still struggling to get students to put together a sequence of grammatically accurate sentences that use a reasonable range of vocabulary.

This website contains a simple explanation of Bloom’s Taxonomy:
http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learning/exams/blooms-taxonomy.html

Personally, I feel Bloom’s Taxonomy has limited relevance to MFL teaching. The Presentation, Practice, Production model (which dates back to the 1970s) makes more sense. In my ICT4LT blog I started a thread headed “Practice: the missing link?” (February 2010):

http://ictforlanguageteachers.blogspot.com/2010/02/practice-missing-link.html

Feedback is welcomed.

Graham Davies