Curriculum research review series: languages

Summary

This section highlights some of the important concepts that help our understanding of curriculum progression, as highlighted in the ‘Education inspection framework: overview of research’. It goes on to introduce the idea that the building blocks of a language system are sounds, words and rules about how these connect to create sentences and meanings (phonics, vocabulary, grammar). These are then discussed in greater depth to help curriculum planners identify key components in language and help pupils develop their linguistic ability step by step. It concludes by describing the competencies of novice and expert language learners as they bring these building blocks together to produce and understand ever more complex language. This journey leads to pupils becoming confident language learners with the ability to immerse themselves in the culture and traditions of the countries in scope.

Guiding principles

Research on how we learn, and in particular cognitive science, has informed the thinking behind the EIF. In our research reviews, we are not aiming to summarise the totality of research in education. Our work is based on a range of research findings in line with the EIF. These findings include:

• an understanding that curriculum is different to pedagogy. Progress in curricular terms means knowing more and remembering more, so a curriculum needs to carefully plan for that progress by considering the building blocks and sequence in each subject

• an understanding that there is limited capacity in short-term memory to process information and that overloading it with too much information at once will result in limited learning. Information is stored in long-term memory, which consists of structures (schemata) where knowledge is linked or embedded with what is already known. These are built over time, meaning that proficient learners have more detailed schemata than novice learners

• using spaced or distributed practice, where knowledge is rehearsed for short periods over a longer period of time, is more effective than so-called massed practice

• retrieval practice for effective retention of knowledge in the long-term memory. Retrieval practice involves recalling something you have learned in the past and bringing it back to mind

• the expertise reversal effect shows that explicit teaching works best with novice learners, whereas among expert learners in a particular subject, enquiry-based approaches can be successful