Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This is another post in my mini series about teaching aspects of French grammar. In this post I’m going to look at the futur proche , which goes under different names in English, for example near future or immediate future. Neither of those terms are great, to be honest, since the ‘aller + infinitive’ construction does not have to apply to near future events. For example, you could say ‘Dans deux ans je vais partir en Australie’. Also, interestingly,  ‘aller + infinitive’ is also used quite commonly to describe things in the present. For instance, a restaurant waiter describing the menu might say “on va avoir deux tranches de jambon avec…”, meaning ‘there are two slices…’. You hear this use of the futur proche a lot. (I’ve heard the same usage in English, by the way: “You’re gonna have…”. I have a feeling that this is more the case in American English.) Chat GPT describes this usage thus: The speaker is walking you through what is in front of you. It’s similar to how people narrat...

The title of this post feels a bit odd to me, since I never really ‘taught adjectives’ to a huge extent during my career. Sure, we did some practice with agreements, I told classes a bit about word order and how adjectives could change meaning and we did work on comparatives and superlatives (see below). Overall, however, adjectives just come up a lot in input language and get picked up over time, implicitly, as the research calls it. That said, when it comes to getting students to understand and use adjectives successfully, it seems to me that we could consider the following aspects, in rough order of importance: 1. Which adjectives to teach. 2. The meaning of the adjectives 3. What they sound and look like 4. The order they appear in relation to nouns 5. Agreement Let’s consider each of the above in turn. 1. Which adjectives to teach Your school’s syllabus may dictate adjectives you need students to know. Keeping in mind the need to prioritise high-frequency vocabulary (words and chu...

I’ve previously blogged advice about teaching questions and the perfect tense in French. This time I thought I would look at negatives: the use of ‘ne’ with ‘pas’, ‘jamais’, ‘rien’, ‘plus’, ‘personne’, etc.  A first point to make is that negatives may be tricky for English language L1 speakers because we do them quite differently with our ‘don’t’, ‘doesn’t’, ‘didn’t’, anything versus nothing, and variable syntactic use of no one, never, nowhere etc. Negatives are much harder in English than in French. This is worth mentioning to classes. Negatives in French are easy, notwithstanding awkward issues such as the fact that 'personne' may be understood as 'person' and 'plus' may be perceived as either 'more' or 'no more/no longer.' A second thing to say here is that I suspect we often see negatives as a grammatical (syntactic/word order) topic, and to some extent it is, but I would see negatives as mainly a lexical issue . The key thing for student...

Inexperienced teachers (and sometimes experienced ones) occasionally encounter that situation where a piece of written work has been set for classwork or homework  — free writing/composition-style — and students turn in very inaccurate work, heavily influenced by the first language. Or they don't get the work done at all. Or they copy it. Or they use AI.  If the work is really inaccurate, you then have to decide how much you are going to correct. If you correct everything it takes ages and students are discouraged by the number of corrections. A sensible solution is to do selective correction of key errors which affect meaning. Or you can just hand the work back and admit that you made a mistake setting a task that was too hard. Maybe show them a model version. My approach to this sort of issue would be to ensure that the written homework was set up in order to guarantee success. Much depends on the class here. With high-achievers you could let them loose with relatively littl...

The topic of healthy living is a popular one in syllabuses, for example the GCSE and IB Diploma. And why not? It's important, we like talking about health and food, and it's a vital issue to cover wth young people's well-being in mind. It's also an easy topic to find and generate resources on, including communicative ones. On frenchteacher.net I have a wide range of materials at various levels. Here's the list. Year 9 Health - a mosaic translation Narrow listening Narrow reading Full lesson plan A text with exercises about healthy eating Y10-11 (GCSE) An easy sentence builder Texts with exercises Lucas and Clara describe their lifestyle 10 priorities for a healthy lifestyle France's 2026 policy on eating meat  Sleep   How well do you sleep? - Narrow reading Protection from UV rays The risks of vaping Tattoos Stress in teenagers Alcohol and health in France French people eating less meat Healthy eating - sugar Locavores - people who like local food  Eating meat a...

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 ...