Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

I have spent more than an average amount of time perousing material from different sources across the world and engaging on social media with teachers from different countries. I have also been lucky enough to do occasional events in Scotland, Ireland and Australia, as well as in my home country England. So I have seen that teachers come at pedagogy from different angles. I have always thought, however, that we can be rather parochial in our thinking about language teaching. By parochial, I mean that we tend to view language teaching through the lens of our own national curriculum, exam system, official guidance and professional debates. Each country, and sometimes each region within a country, develops its own language for talking about pedagogy, its own priorities and its own assumptions about what constitutes good teaching. I guess there's nothing particularly surprising about this. Teachers have to work within the systems in which they're employed. But I wonder whether this...

 Just to make you aware, whether your are already a subscriber, or a potential one (!), that I have been adding loads of new resources to my site, inlcuding, most recently, new 10-page GCSE (Higher) grammar booklets. These are made by ChatGPT, but edited and fine-tunedby me, because despite all my best prompts, I can't get quite what I want in terms of layout and level of challenge in the exercises. My aim was to create a set of grammar booklets in line with AQA topic areas. So each set of exercises is themed aropund topics like education and work, free time, healthy living and so on. I also requested certain types of exercise, for example transformation drills, gap-fills, translation both ways, and question-answer. This is all pretty old school stuff and won't suit every teacher, but I'm certain many will find these resources useful as handouts for revision, extra work or exam prep. They suit Higher GCSE students aiming for between grades 5 to 8, I would say. They would be...

 This is the third of three posts based on the findings of Rober Sakhrani's PhD thesis about why uptake in MFL has declined in schools in England. Major sections of his thesis centred on interviews carried out with pupils and teachers in four schools in Norfolk, a rural part of eastern England. Have a look at the previous two posts for concise summaries of his findings. Aftre putting those posts together with help from ChatGPT my next thought was: so what can schools and departments do about uptake where it is poor? Of course, in many schools, particularly independent schools, MFL is compusory up to GCSE — then the question is more about A-level uptake, which is also very problematic. Where MFL is optional, and uptake is perceived as too low, what can be done?  Below is a list of possible strategies: Firstly, the pupil and teacher interviews suggest that increasing take-up is not mainly about telling pupils that languages are useful . I agree with this, even if it may help at ...

 In my last post, I wrote that I would give you a summary of what Robert Sakhrani found out from his interviews with teachers in the four schools studied. I asked ChatGPT to do a bullet point summary for me of the relevant extract from the PhD. As a reminder the PhD thesis can be found here if you want to follow it up further. Recall that the title of the PhD thesis is: Exploring the decline in uptake of modern foreign languages at GCSE in England through Positoning Theory: reflecting on the perspectives of pupils and teachers in secondary schools.  See whether the findings accord your own thinking. I imagine perceptions will vary enormously depending on your school and background experience. In a third post I'll explore what practical steps departments and schools might take to encourage positive attitudes and uptake. Here is what teachers aid (via ChatGPT): Teachers frequently felt that MFL had been progressively deprioritised within the school curriculum , particularly ...

 An anonymous poster on Facebook recently shared a PhD thesis carried out by Robert Sakhrani. The title is "Exploring the decline in uptake of modern foreign languages at GCSE in England through Positoning Theory: reflecting on the perspectives of pupils and teachers in secondary schools." The thesis is publicly available here . I found this thesis very worthwhile and interesting, even if the findings were unsurprising. Policy-makers would do well to read it. For this post, I asked ChatGPT to summarise in about 500 words the findings of the chapter covering the results of the pupils voice interviews. For background, the thesis interviewed students and teachers from four schools in Norfolk (eastern England), there of which are state schools, one independent. Below you will find the AI bullet-point summary of pages 179 to 188 of the thesis. You'll see that, in discussing motivation, there is only brief mention, at the start, of methodology as an implied possible source o...

  This is an activity I included in my new book L et's Get Them Talking! 50 Communicative French Lessons . I've called it Fact Finders! You might call it Chasseurs d'infos in French. It works like running dictation. I'll simply copy in here the resource I uploaded to frenchteacher.net (available as a free sample). It contains 5 example texts. In the actual resource there are 10 texts which can be used or adapted. I used ChatGPT to generate the texts based on a prompt requiring GCSE-style topics, 170 words and A2-level language with high frequency vocabulary. Needless to say, this is a super activity for generating listening comprehension skill and written accuracy. The collaborative and comptetitive nature adds motivation. FACT FINDERS! Running dictation / information retrieval  Teacher instructions • Print or photocopy the texts. Cut one or more of them out and pin them around the classroom walls. • Put students into pairs. Student A is the Fact Finder; Student B is t...