Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Irrespective of the recent oracy push in the English education system, I have long thought that not enough emphasis is placed on listening and speaking in GCSE modern language exams. Think about it - the current weightings are 25% for each of the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Apart from being suspiciously tidy, the system appears to show that reading and writing in the target language are just as important as speaking and listening. Because of the well-known backwash (washback) effect (the test affecting the teaching), the current weightings encourage teachers to spend a lot of time on written texts and written accuracy. Lessons at KS4 are often devoted to short essay writing, accuracy-focused grammatical exercises, past paper practice and reading comprehension. This is entirely understandable as teachers do their best to help pupils get the best grade. A spin-off is that reading and writing-focused tasks also play a major role at KS3, as the ripples of th...

Lucy Powell’s recent announcement on oracy in England has generated a lot of reaction on social media, largely positive, as far as I can tell. In general terms, the idea is that speaking (and listening)) should be given greater prominence across the curriculum, alongside reading and writing. Pupils should learn not just to express themselves clearly, but to listen attentively, respond thoughtfully, explain ideas and participate effectively in discussions.  For modern language teachers, the initial reaction might understandably be:  Haven’t we always done this? After all, speaking has been central to language teaching for decades. Think of all those question-and-answer exchanges, spoken drills, presentations, dialogues, role plays, information-gap tasks, surveys, interviews and discussions. Language teachers have a long tradition of modelling spoken language, providing scaffolding, encouraging hesitant pupils and gradually developing fluency through practice.  But we ought...

 Simone Conboy and Juliet Park, members of the Association for Language Learning kindly wrote reviews of two of my books for the Languages Today magazine. I have been given permission to share, with nods to Languages Today and the ALL which does so much to support language teachers in England. I'll just copy in the screenshots below.

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 ...