Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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        ...

Chapter 8 of our new book for A-level teachers, both trainees and existing practitioners, is titled Teaching the literature essay . In this chapter we go into considerable detail about how to develop students' knowledge, powers of critical analysis and essay writing skill, using six popular texts as samples. The texts chosen are No et moi, L’Étranger, Der Vorleser, Der Besuch des alten Dame, La casa de Bernada Alba and  Como agua para chocolate.  The idea is, however, that these serve as examples for any text from the exam board specifications. In the chapter we look at how to plan the teaching, classrooom activities and how to write about character, thematic content and style. We put forward ways to help students write complex critical and anlaytical sentences and paragraphs, leading up to examples of whole essays. The key is to structure and scaffold the process, rather than dive into essay writing from the outset. To answer the question "What can I do in class when t...

Phew! After nearly six months of work, our book for A-level language teachers, both aspiring and practising, is published. Called Teaching A-Level Modern Languages , priced at £25, you can find it on Amazon here:  https://amzn.eu/d/cyya0pY . Teaching languages at A-level is a both a joy and a challenge and we hope to have shared how students (and teachers) can get the most out of the process. So what's the background here? Steve Glover and I are old friends. He is now based in Paris, while my wife and I moved to London in July. Years ago, the other Steve taught French in East Lancashire before moving on to other projects, including establishing an early website for French teachers (The Really Useful French Site), working with Digitalbrain, writing the Attitudes course for A-level and authoring the site dolanguages.com, formerly known by different names depending on the language. Steve also runs webinars on A-level literature and film, specialisng in how to produce effective essays...

I've set up a new section on the A-level page of my site. It's called Dialogues. Although I have masses of texts and listening material on that page, there have been, hitherto, no dialogues. So I used Chat GPT to create a dialogue in French on the topic of marriage. My prompt was: "Write a dialogue in French between two young French people talking about the pros and cons of getting married. About 500 words." The result is below, along with the tasks I thought would go well with the dialogue. This would work well with a Y13 class or maybe a high-flying Y12 group, later in the year. In terms of the Speaking assessment, this would help students prepare for the sorts of conversation they might have when doing the Stimulus card, though they would need to add a few facts and figures for the relating to a francophone country or community to get the best marks. So far there are two dialogues on the page, the one below and one on immigration. More will follow. Dialogue sur le ...

Some traditions in language teaching are very hard to shift. Two key ones, as I see it, are teaching with a grammatical syllabus and setting vocabulary to learn. I want to look at the second and suggest five reasons why vocab learning (and tests) are a bad idea. 1. What does knowing a word mean? Paul Nation has for many years reminded us that knowing a word is much more than about knowing what it means or how it translates. A bilingual translation of an isolated word is a starting point (and is of course useful), but there is much more to it than this. As well as meaning, we need to know about FORM and USE of words. Form refers to aspects such as spelling, morphological form (is it a noun, a conjugated verb, an adverb based on an adjective?), what it sounds like (phonology) and how its sound relates to its spelling (phonics). USE refers, for example, to other words which commonly go alongside a word, namely collocations (think of what appears when you start a Google search) and, at a m...

This is the fourth and final part of this mini-series of posts based on Charles Dodson's 1967 book. Each post has been based on a chapter but this one, though I will refer to elements of Chapter 4, is mainly a reflection on what we have seen so far. Chapter 4, which is brief, considers the role of the technology being used in the late 1960s, namely the reel-to-reel tape recorder and language laboratory. He does not have an awful lot to say about these, but essentially sees the role of these as replicating what a teacher would do using his method. One value he sees with the language lab is that the students can work at their own pace. He suggests how exercises might be designed to maximise the number of 'listening and speaking contacts', as he likes to call them. He quickly returns to his main arguments, however, notably that second language learning is unlike first, except for infant learners. (At this point the notion that only young learners had access to natural language...