Is It Effective to Begin a Lesson With a Review Question From Prior Lesson

Rosenshine's principles of instruction (2012) offer ten research-based strategies with suggestions for classroom practice. Here, I talk over how principles ane and 10, relating to the importance of regular review for long-term learning, can be used in practise in the modern foreign languages (MFL) classroom – but many of these ideas are applicable beyond unlike subject field areas, too.

Principle one: Begin each lesson with a short review of previous learning

When learning a modernistic language, there are a number of grammatical concepts that students need to grasp in guild to learn more complex grammatical structures. For instance, without a solid agreement of the conjugation of regular present tense verbs, students are unlikely to encompass the irregulars or other tenses.

A trouble is that methods that may seem to quickly increase pupil performance in the short term (i.eastward. in the space of one lesson) can fail to support retention of noesis in the long term (i.e. over a series of lessons, months or years)(Bjork and Kroll, 2015). It might seem equally if students are performing well in the lesson itself, so teachers may think what they are doing is constructive, but in reality, students are apace forgetting material one time they have left the classroom. That which students find like shooting fish in a barrel is not always what is best for their learning (Bjork, 1994).

A review of previous learning at the outset of each lesson is one way to strengthen students' retention of cognition. If you are educational activity, for example, the near future tense in Spanish/French, you may wish to utilise the review to remind students what they know near the nowadays tense of the verb ir/aller. There are a number of means in which to do this:

• Encephalon 'dump' – ask students to write everything they tin can remember about the verb ir/aller without looking at their notes.
• Match up – provide the target language and the English. Students demand to match up the two sides.
• Fill in the blanks – provide a table with the whole verb epitome for ir/aller in the present tense. Remove some of the content and ask students to fill information technology back in.
• Thinking quilt – an idea found on Twitter from @KKNTeachLearn and adapted for MFL by @morganMFL. Create a table like the ane in Table 1, with the whole present tense paradigm of the verb mixed with one or more other verbs. Students demand to highlight the verb aller in one colour and the others in another.
• A memory challenge task, where pupils are asked to, for example, recollect words, select the odd one out from a list of words, cohabit a verb, or translate a series of words, tin can be used to go students to not merely recognise the language they volition demand in the lesson simply also work on how to course it.
• Knowledge retrieval tasks, where students are asked to retrieve a mixture of key vocabulary from concluding lesson, last calendar week, terminal month or fifty-fifty last year, tin be used to combine the knowledge you need students to reactivate (aller/ir) with other useful vocabulary they have studied in the past.

Examples and templates of the above activities tin be downloaded from: http://learninglinguist.co.britain/ mfl-starters-incorporating-retrieval-exercise. Students may struggle with these kinds of activities at first, merely the benefits of this initial struggle will be realised over the longer term. Every bit well every bit improving retentivity of knowledge, these kinds of activities can also back up formative cess, providing the instructor with useful data about gaps and areas of forcefulness.

Principle 10: Engage students in weekly and monthly review

Reviewing previous learning isn't just well-nigh reviewing things from the previous lesson; Rosenshine besides reminds us of the importance of reviewing over time, engaging students in weekly and monthly review (Rosenshine, 2012) once they accept started to forget things – 'forgetting' is a really important step in the learning process, and recalling content after a gap helps to strengthen our ability to remember information technology in the longer term (Weinstein et al., 2019).

It is as well particularly of import that we continue to bring previous learning to heed so that students can use this knowledge to a new context. Take, for example, learning to use the words 'ya no'(no longer) and 'todavia' (nonetheless) in Spanish. In one of the major textbooks, these are taught to students in the context of sports and what they used to do in their free fourth dimension. Without encouraging students to utilize these structures to topics such as school, holidays, family unit, work, etc., these structures will only be associated with the original context in which they were learned. Frequent review allows us to encourage students to link these structures to a range of contexts.

I manner of doing this might be to begin each lesson with a task that requires students to relate their cognition of these grammatical structures to different topics, every bit well every bit the one they take just been learning. We tin encourage this weekly and monthly review either through starter activities in lessons or through homework. We could also consider how we are structuring assessments and whether we are requiring students to recall knowledge from modules other than those almost recently studied.

Some ideas from a blog post by Marker Enser (HCC Ped Team, 2018) are:

• taking some one-to-1 time with students to wait over their work from the concluding few weeks and discuss what they have learned and the progress they have made
• making use of checklists and knowledge organisers to see how each element of learning fits into the bigger film
• making certain that regular lesson-starter quizzes likewise include questions that test previous learning.

Homework policies will vary from school to school but, where possible, you could consider structuring homework so that information technology incorporates plenty of reviewing. This could be through employ of tools such as Quizlet to review vocabulary and conjuguemos.com for reviewing grammer, or simply through worksheets. Structuring in this style could have some fourth dimension. Only in the long term information technology should pay off, as students will be more than prepared to work with previously learned language and structures.

We must acknowledge that a lot of regular reviewing happens as a natural part of language learning. There are fundamental parts of language that we constantly come dorsum to and await students to practise time and time again. However, we do need to schedule opportunities for purposeful review when it comes to topic-specific vocabulary or lesser-used structures that don't often come up.

Information technology is important to consider what it is that you demand students to remember in the long term and brand sure that they are frequently being asked to think about exactly that across dissimilar contexts, in different types of tasks, and in both the product and comprehension of language. This will support students in developing well-connected and automatic noesis.

References

Bjork R (1994) Memory and meta-retentiveness considerations in the grooming of human beings. In: Metcalfe J and Shimamura AP (eds) Metacognition: Knowing nigh Knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 185–205.

Bjork RA and Kroll JF (2015) Desirable difficulties in vocabulary learning. The American Journal of Psychology 128(ii): 241–252. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/ten.5406/amerjpsyc.128.2.0241 (accessed 12 April 2019).

HCC Ped Team (2018) Putting theory into practice. In: Heathfield Teach Share Web log. Available at: https://heathfieldteachshare.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/putting-theory-into-practice (accessed 7 July 2019).

Rosenshine B (2012) Principles of instruction: Inquiry-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator 36(1). Available at: www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Rosenshine.pdf (accessed 12 April 2019).

Weinstein Y, Sumeracki M and Caviglioli O (2019) Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide. London: Routledge.

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