Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

For over 25 years I have sung in choirs, mostly barbershop choruses and quartets. This has made me spend many, many hours memorising melodies and lyrics. I'm in that mode at the moment as our community choir in East Dulwich, Note-Orious, prepares for our 'disco extravaganza'. Yay!  So what does this process of song learning have to tell us about memory and, perhaps by extension, language learning? 1. Repetition +   Little and Often is best . This is in line with spacing theory from cognitive science. Hermann Ebbinghaus famously demonstrated how quickly we forget items from our short-term memory. The antidote to forgetting is to make yourself retrieve from memory, at spaced intervals, the information you first tried to remember. No one knows quite what the spacing should be, but one hypothesis is that after the first encounter with information, the intervals between retrieval should be shorter, then gradually increase over time. They call this 'expanding spacing'. I ...

I recently wrote a post with 5 suggested guidelines for teaching question forms in French. As with that post, here I'm going to suggest 10 guidelines for approaching the passé composé in French. Remember, these cannot be hard and fast rules, just suggestions based on my experience over many years and which may be justifiable with research in mind. My views on this are bound to be coloured by the fact I taught mainly higher aptitude, generally highly motivated pupils, but even in the settings I taught in there were plenty of pupils who struggled with languages.  Firstly, I've chosen the perfect tense since it us undoubtedly one of the hardest areas for students to both understand (declarative knowledge) and use fluently and accurately (procedural knowledge). Remember that it's procedural knowledge we are after. Understanding the rules is one thing, using them is another. In cognitive load theory terms the perfect tense is hard to grasp since it has many of what are called in...

Questions in French are a tricky area to teach for several reasons and it's tempting to just let students pick them up over time through input and repeated use. Some students will be able to do this, though few will figure out how to use the subject/verb inverted forms. They are formal and hard to learn..Most students will be able to use a limited range of high frequency questions hey have heard and used many times over ( Qu'est-ce que tu fais? Comment t'appelles-tu? Quel âge as-tu? Qu'est-ce que tu as visité? — that sort of thing.  In this post I'm going to share my tips for teaching questions to students of varying aptitude First, a quick reminder why questions are are a challenge. I think first of two types of questions: yes/no ( elle est grande? est-ce que'elle est grande? est elle grande? )  and open-ended question word questions ( qu'est-ce qu'elle fait. elle fait quoi, que fait-elle ). I then think of the structure of questions taking four form...

Multi-choice questions (MCQs) have long been a staple in language resources and exams, and with AI making them easier to produce than ever, I've been making growing use of them in my frenchteacher resources. In the past, I avoided them since they took so long to write. But while technology has simplified their creation, the art of designing  effective MCQs — whether for assessment or practice —still requires thought and precision. Here are some issues to consider when writing and using MCQs. Assessment 1. Objectivity One of the greatest strengths of MCQs is their objectivity . Unlike level-based mark schemes (or "rubrics" in the USA), where subjectivity can creep in, MCQs provide reliable scores, an important aspect of assessment. When designed well, they should offer a reliable snapshot of student listening and reading comprehension, or sometimes lexical and grammatical knowledge. 2. The three-option rule  Research and practice show that three options are statistically ...

 I'm not sure who first coined the terms fine-tuning and rough-tuning of input, but they have certainly become associated with the work of Stephen Krashen. In this post, I'll explain what the terms refer to and what they might mean for language teacher practice. We all know that a prequisite for first and additional language acquisition is input students can understand ( comprehensible input , to use Krashen's familar term). Krashen used the formula i + 1 to describe input which is at or just above the learner's current level. This would imply giving students aural and written texts, dialogues, etc, which contain a large majority of vocabulary students already know (Paul Nation and others write about 95-98% knowledge), using grammatical constructions which students are already familiar with. This is where the distinction between fine-tuning and rough-tuning of input comes in. There is no precise definition of this, but essentially if you finely tune the input you go out...

 I used the AI tools Deepseek and Le Chat (Mistral AI) to help me write this - a great example of cognitive offloading, as you'll see. So what is cognitive offloading and what implications are there for our work as language teachers and teacher educators? Cognitive offloading  is the process of using physical actions or external tools to reduce the immediate cognitive demand of a task. It's the act of shifting the burden of mental processing from your brain onto the environment to free up mental resources. A simple everyday example would be to use a calculator to do simple arithmetic. I've also come across the term auxiliary memory, to describe tools like phones and notebooks where we can store information so we don't hae to worry about holding it in memopry. Call it freeing up cognitive space, if you like, or "letting tools do the work for you". Everyday examples include: Writing a list:  Instead of trying to remember 10 grocery items, you write them down. Yo...