How do you get your students to stop using Google Translate? MFL teachers share their top 7 writing activities below.
Image credit: Markus Spiske
7. Miss Mullen MFL (@MflMullen)
In at number 7 is Miss Mullen MFL, who's created a writing activity inspired by E Mercier and Gianfranco Conti called "Cross or tick". This works especially nicely for remote learning, as it avoids the simple / wholesale use of Google Translate.
6. Elena Díaz (@TeacheryDiaz)
In at number 6 is Elena Díaz, the creator of the MFL "20 Keys". Her method helps students focus their MFL writing work, as she's distilled GCSE languages into the 20 most important elements. She's recently been thanking everyone in the online MFL community for their encouragement and support after speaking at a recent Linguascope webinar.
5. Meredith White (@PRHSSpanish)
In at number 5 is Meredith White, who enjoys using celebrity backstories as a way of introducing past tense and present tense comparisons. A great idea for research projects, regardless of the language or level that you teach!
4. Sophie Newnham (@MissNewnham)
In at number 4 is Sophie Newnham. She's shared a really simple and effective planning grid to help students with the 90-word writing paper questions. This easy-to-use grid helps students focus on increasing their content marks before their language marks!
3. Miss Muheim (@MissMuheim)
In at number 3 is Miss Muheim. Her blog post below ("Tasks to inhibit the use of Google Translate in MFL") is a really fab compendium of quick and easy translation tasks which render Google Translate fairly useless... something which is especially helpful now students have access to Google Translate all day long!
2. Madame Massé FCCT (@madamemasse)
In at number 2 is Madame Massé, who's created a really helpful template for making lots of writing-based activities - fast! All you have to do is change one vocabulary item for your students to then incorporate into a range of sentence-writing drills. This could be used as a regular starter for a whole class, or as an extension activity for early finishers!
1. G Campello (@campello_mfl)
And in at number 1 is G Campello, who's shared a top tip for doing translations. There will always be one student who tries to find shortcuts instead of doing translations manually, but this quick tip helps prevent that. It also kicked off a conversation thread with other teachers offering suggestions and recommendations to get around this problem!
So there we have it! If you found this round-up helpful, sign up to receive the MFLDataBlog email below (or click here)!
Thank you as always to all the wonderful teachers for sharing their ideas, and good luck implementing these ideas with your students!
Blaine
You're reading MFLDataBlog - the blog that uses data and technology to save GCSE MFL teachers time.
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