Applying ICT appropriately to MFL: Case Studies
Case Study: Michelle — a Foreign Language Learner with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties
Michelle is a girl in your Year 7 MFL class. She has a statement of special educational needs. Her educational psychologist has diagnosed Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (EBD). Although her primary school excluded her for misconduct on several occasions, it also provided her with classroom support so far as resources allowed. Your secondary school intends following this inclusion route. Michelle is known to have good literacy and numeracy skills.
During the early stages of learning the MFL she appears to cope with her studies well enough. Indeed, some of her oral work shows a lot of promise. However, she fidgets, seeks attention and distracts other pupils in class. In the ICT room, nobody is prepared to share a machine with her and she has developed the habit of pressing the keys on other pupils' PCs, deleting their work. Her behaviour grows more troublesome and disrupts your lesson.
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Problem 1: You decide to locate examples of good practice in using ICT to accommodate Michelle's needs in MFL learning. |
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Problem-solving: The British Educational Communications and Technology agency (BECTa) has a page about a learner of French with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Read Darren's case study and consider the feasibility of the suggestion that his enthusiasm for Art could be channelled into his computer work in MFL. |
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Problem 2: Your Head of Department asks you to find out whether special schools for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties provide modern foreign language courses. |
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Problem-solving: For the proportion of EBD schools offering MFL to all pupils at key stage 3, see §237 of the Annual Report of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools Special education provision. Ratcliffe Special School in Dawlish, Devon, specialising in 8- to 16-year-olds with emotional and/or behavioural difficulties, offers MFL and has its own website. Visit the Site Navigation Page and take the school tour then inspect the exam results. A Ratcliffe School pupil has produced her own web pages recounting her experiences on a school trip to Paris at France 2000. |
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Problem 3: You decide to find out how schools in a target-language country define acceptable behaviour. |
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Problem-solving: Read the École Lacerte's Code de Vie. Consider whether there are lessons to be learnt from the authorship, content and management of this French-Canadian school's code of conduct. |
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© 2005 David R. Wilson |