Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This post was prompted by an exchange on LinkedIn. Rachel Higginson, experienced education consultant and founder of Finding my Voice, posted this under the title: When cold calling is too cold . Let me quote an extract: There has been a concerning and consistent theme in pupil voice sessions that I have conducted over the last year. Cold calling is having a negative impact on learning. Pupils express how they spend the entire lesson anxious about their impending turn and they also explain how this impacts their ability to concentrate on the lesson itself. Interestingly this is also related to what happens when they don't get it right. They talk about lack of acknowledgement and shame and embarrassment. She goes on to write: At Finding My Voice we call cold calling, 'Inclusive Questioning'. This is a deeply inclusive strategy which is intentionally warm... 1) Classroom Culture is based on shared and established Social Norms: 'We are imperfect', 'We think alou...

I'm returning here to a topic I have posted on before. This time I gave Chat GPT some notes to work on, it provided the bones of the blog and then I edited and supplemented it.  We know that language input that students understand is at the heart of language acquisition. If students don’t understand the input, learning doesn’t happen  — it's mere exposire, not language that learners can process. The challenge for language teachers is to  model  input clearly, repeatedly, and meaningfully. Below are five commonly used ways to model input , with concrete ideas on how to exploit  each one , all classroom-tested and easy to adapt. AI makes creating these inputs faster than ever — but it’s how we use them that really matters. 1. Sentence builders Maximum clarity, zero ambiguity Originally known in audiolingual practice as substitition tables,  sentence builders makes the target language completely transparent. Students know exactly what language they will use,...

This is an example of an IB Diploma resource I have uploaded to frenchteacher.net. The resource also happens to be an excellent fit for A-level. The source is an article on the site infomigrants.fr which I got Chat GPT to shorten and rework. The text is in the third person.  I then added exercises: multi-choice questions (Chat GPT), lexical work  (synonyms to find — my choices), comprehension questions (Chat GPT) and an oral paired task where students must recount the story in the first person. All in all, it took around 30 minutes to make the resource. AI is saving me a lot of time. Needless to say, this type of resource is an eye-opener for students. I'd also add that perdonal stories of this type are easier to exploit and potentially more engaging than factual texts. The storytelling aspect is more personal and makes the text easier to exploit, e.g. you can change perspective, as I did, or you could do an activity such as an imaginary interview with a journalist. As is usua...

 I have been carrying out a feedback survey from subscribers to frenchteacher.net, as I do from time to time. This is to check what resources teachers are using and to get any other feedback. Because the feedback is anonymous, I cannot reply individually to respondents, but I have summarised the optional comments below and have added a response to each (in bold) les 400 coups de Truffaut and Un sac de billes (I leave film and lit resources to Steve Glover. For me it is a very large unvestment of time for just a few users of the site.) Reading aloud for GCSE, dictation exercises, more listening for GCSE (There are already LOTS of listening resources for GCSE level. I cannot do whole papers, since I do not have the tech to do it. There are dictation and reading aloud resources already. I have not added more since, it seems to me, these are super easy for any teacher to make and tailor for their own class) I would like to have end of unit tests on the Edexcel A Level topics. The ones...

Here are the slides from the talk I gave recently at the ALL London January Event at the British Film Institute, South Bank. The material is a small selection of ideas and practical classroom pedagogy drawn from Teaching A-level Modern Language s, the book I co-authored with Steve Glover. 

 French is hard to pronounce for English first language users. This is because the French phonological system is so different to that of English (whatever version of English you speak). The nasal vowels, uvular 'r', vowels in general (use of cardinal vowels and little use of diphthongs), subtle differences in consononant pronuciation (e.g. the lack of aspiration in plosives such as 't' and 'p'. Then of course there is the intonation system which, while less vital for intelligibility, is significantly different with its lack of word stress and its different pitch patterns. No wonder many pupils find it hard. I taught many higher-aptitude students who coped really well, largely just through input, reading aloud and communication, others who struggled more. I know of many adult learners who struggle a lot to produce individual sounds, especially that pesky 'r'. I know that I struggle myself with rolled/trilled 'r's, so I recognise the problem. So wh...