Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Image: pixabay.com I love a nice information gap task. Recall that these are designed to give students a reason to communicate while using language in a more or less structured way. Each student has different information which must be shared to complete the task. The less proficient the learner, the more structured the task needs to be. Students get to do a lot of listening and speaking, as well as, in many cases, some rteading and writing. A meaningful, multi-skill task which is often quite fun. The one below, Timeline, can be used at internediate and advanced level. I have peviously posted an example of an advanced one focused on the events of World War Two. The one below would suit a GCSE class (CEFR A2) or even a very good Year 9 class (two to three years of learning). The example is from my site. Feel free to copy and use or adapt. Instructions – scroll down for the student sheets. Students work in pairs. Each partner has a list of six things Astrid did during a week on holid...

In our new handbook for A-level language teachers we included a chapter, early in the book, focused on our chosen principles underlying A-level teaching. There is a very good question we should ask when formulating a syllabus or teaching approach: why do we do what we do? In the adapted extract below you'll find key notions that underly the whole book - sound principles of language teaching at A-level, and language teaching in general. 1. The role of comprehensible input This term from second language learning research refers simply to language, oral or written, which students understand. Common sense and research tell us that the main driver of progress in a language is exposure to comprehensible input. The mechanisms we use to acquire our first language(s) through input (and communication) are still active when we learn a language as teenagers or adults. This is why language teachers are so often urged to use the target language as much as possible, and to encourage contact wi...

Each year I do a round up of the most viewed blog posts (not including older posts prior to 2024, since many of these are also looked at). I don’t blog as prolifically as I used to, but even so I generally put out roughly five posts a month. When I post, the readership I have in mind is both teachers in training and experienced teachers who may be interested in issues around research, book reviews, classroom pedagogy and classroom materials. I also use the blog as a marketing tool, notably when I post adapted extracts of published books. Incidentally, apart from blogging, I’ve been busy working on three publications this year: the two GCSE workbooks with Gianfranco Conti and the A-level handbook with Steve Glover. I addition I wrote a chapter for the latest edition of the Pachler and Redondo (eds) book for trainees, and did some work reviewing NCLE hub training materials. Needless to say, I’ve spent a good deal of time writing resources for frenchteacher.net. Chat GPT has enabled me to...

Chapter 7 of our book Teaching A-Level Modern Languages is about how to help students become effective essay writers on a film they have studied. One of the aspects we emphasise is the need to carefully scaffold the process of essay writing, turning knowledge of themes, character and film techniques into appropriately formed sentences, paragraphs and full essays. To satisfy the grading criteria (AO3 and AO4) essays need to be written in complex, accurate language, and to demonstrate close knowledge and critical analysis of the film. Few students can do this without close guidance and feedback. In the following section of the book we show, for three popular films, how this process can be modelled and practised. Analytical/Complex sentences As students work through the film, they are introduced to lexical and grammatical constructions, creating complex sentences which demonstrate critical analysis. If a colleague is teaching other parts of the course at the same time, it is possibl...

This is a simple activity I enjoyed using with classes, notably from Y8 to Y10. The idea is to display a short text on the screen, work with it (e.g. read it aloud, translate it, do a 'find the French', do some question-answer), then in a series of subsequent slides, gradually remove words and phrases. For each of the following slides the class has to recall the missing words until they are able to recreate some or all of the text purely from memory. The task is almost all in the target language. Words and chunks are repeated many times over and hopefully some will be assimilated for later use. It's not a communicative task at all, but I found that my classes did enjoy the short-term memory challenge and they were seeing, hearing and using chunked language many times over. With a highly proficient class, they will be able to recreate virtually the whole text without any support after about 20 minutes. Below is an example I wrote for my site. It's a simple text in the pe...

For language learners, being able to converse fluently is a major goal and the one by which we often judge a person’s linguistic fluency. Students arrive in A-level classes with varying oral skills, so a clear priority is to help them achieve the best level of proficiency possible given their starting points.   In the A-level exam, spoken fluency is assessed notably in Assessment Objective 3 (AO3) where students must “manipulate the language accurately, in spoken and written forms, using a range of lexis and structure” (Ofqual, 2016).  In our new handbook we have a chapter devoted to developing students' oral skills. This post summarises what is in the chapter, then looks at an example fluency-building activity which we call 'Speedy Summary'. The sections in our chapter are as follows.         How spoken proficiency develops         Accuracy and fluency         Oral drills        ...