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Why is listening in a new language so hard?

Gianfranco Conti and I are embraking on a second edition of our best-selling handbook called Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (2019). We wrote the book to help address how we should go beyond just teaching listening through traditional comprehension exercises. In so doing, we were strongly influenced by the work of John Field whose 2008 book Listening in the Language Classroom questioned the so-called comprehension model (a product -based model, sometimes called teaching by testing), and proposed his process model , known by Gianfranco Conti as listening-as-modelling .  Catching up with studies over the last six years is a reminder to me that research on how to teach listening is out there, but it has remained a relatively neglected area. What research there has been has tended to focus on metacognition - strategies for helping learners be better listeners. Field's process model, focused more on decoding skills, has not been followed up to a ...
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Why GCSE MFL is not fit for purpose

(I have fixed some typos in the original draft) Introduction In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the current GCSE in modern foreign languages (MFL) is an improvement on the old O-Level in some important ways. In 1987 it moved beyond the elitist, grammar-translation-heavy approach that once dominated language teaching, placing greater emphasis on communication and offering an exam that was, in theory, accessible to a broader range of students. But despite that step change, the GCSE is still failing to meet the needs of many learners. It is no longer fit for purpose — and the model could do with a major rethink. Just don't expect it any time soon. A System That Bakes in Failure Now, first of all, the system works pretty well for higher-achieving students, the ones I often taught over the years. It allows the teacher enough freedom to work in communicative ways, certain in the knowledge that pupils will be well-prepared for the assessment and achieve high grades. In my own contexts...

A rationale for 'correct the transcript' tasks

Introduction 'Correct the transcript' tasks (aka 'faulty transcript') are a favourite of mine and I have a collection of them on my site, for both intermediate (GCSE) and advanced level. I first came across the idea many years ago when one of the English exam boards (Oxford and Cambridge, as they were then) used the task in their listening papers. If you need a reminder, students are given a transcript of a text to be read aloud by the teacher or played on a recording. But the version they hear has a number of linguistic differences which the students must identify and correct in their version. I like to put the emphasis on linguistic differences, but you could use factual differences. (The latter would put the emphasis on building intercultural knowledge rather than linguistic).  A good by-product for A-level learners is that the task helps them learn the skill of paraphrasing which is needed, for example, in the AQA A-level exam. What is going in the student's he...

Trying out ScribeTube

Larry Ferlazzo on BlueSky often shares AI tools he has come across. ScribeTube is one such tool. The idea is very simple. You go to the ScribeTube site, enter the URL of the YouTube video, select the language from a comprehensive list and it instantly creates a transcript of the video. I tried it out with four videos in French to test its effectiveness. The first video is this one - a female speaker describing her weekend at level A2 in pretty clear and slowly delivered French. Here is an extract of the transcript: Bonjour à tous ! Aujourd'hui je vais vous parler de mon week-end à deux vitesses différentes. Je vais commencer par parler lentement pour que vous compreniez bien tous les mots comme d'habitude, mais dans la deuxième partie de la vidéo, je vais accélérer et parler de façon un peu plus naturelle, comme je le ferais avec un autre français natif.  C'est parti ! Alors, j'ai passé un très bon week-end, le samedi je suis restée tranquille à la m...

A travel plans info gap lesson

I do like a good infor gap task! This post is to share a lesson plan I made with the help of Chat GPT. The details are given below. Chat GPT saved me a lot of time by producing the travel itineraries and questions for students to ask. Feel free to copy or adapt it. The original is on frenchteacher.net where I have many ready-made lesson plans. This was the precise prompt I used: Please create for me in French, level A2, three travel itineraries for a trip to France. Inlcude timings and days, means of transport, three main destinations, accommodation and things to do. maximum 400 words per itinerary. This is for an informaion gap lesson in groups of three. After the itineraries were produced in a few seconds, I then gave the following prompt: Thanks. Now give me a set of questions in the present tense, 'tu' form, which could elicit answers based on the itineraries. I would expect one question per bullet point, plus questions about length of stay, transport and accommodation.  I ...

What factors affect whether a student chooses to take a GCSE in a language?

 Every so often I receive a digest from the Oasis collection of research summaries. If you are unaware of Oasis, they are based at the University of York and they invite researchers to summarise academic papers ina format accesible to teachers and those unable to access academic journals. It's a great idea. If you subscribe to their service (free), you can also choose which type of research areas interest you. This week a couple of recent papers caught my eye, the first about skill acquisition (which I may return to) and the second a study what factors influence pupils in their decision to take, or not take, a GCSE in MFL. The study was based on 971 pupils from 20 secondary schools in Northern Ireland - a reasonably sized sample, I would have thought.. If you just want to read the Oasis summary it is here . The original paper is   Caruthers, J. & Henderson, L.’Language  learning trajectories: pupils’ perspectives, structural factors and demographics at GCSE.’   J...