Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

 Having written about teaching the perfect tense, questions, negatives, adjectives and the near future, I'm turning my attention to the imperfect tense. I'm going to suggest some guidelines for teaching the imperfect to classes of varying aptitude and prior skill. As usual, this is just my take based on experience, but including a smattering of research to support my choices. Guideline 1 Adapt what you do the aptitude and prior attainment of the class . With a small minority of high-achieving classes, sometimes in selective and private schools, you could go all old-school: lay out some rules for usage and formation, then do practice activities before moving to some freer production. That's the PPP (Presentation - Practice - Production approach). I would not have done that myself, even with my smartest classes. It's a bit dull and uncommunicative, but it might work as long as there were lots of practice before freer production. A tiny minority of motivated students may a...

Back in 2013 I wrote a post which still gets a lot of views. I took some of Tommy Cooper's silly jokes, put them into French, so that students could translate them back into English and (maybe) smile a bit. (Although I suspect little kills a joke more than having to translate it.) Nick Bilbrough left a comment that you could do the same with well known song lyrics. By the way, if you've never heard of Tommy Cooper, do a YouTube search and prepare to giggle or look on with consternation. Well, 12 years later, here are some famous lyrics from English language songs which I have translated into French (or rather, Mistral AI did). Name the song and the artist. "Je t’aimerai toujours." "Imagine tous les gens vivant en paix." "Douce Caroline, les bons moments n’ont jamais semblé si bons." "Ne cesse pas d’y croire, garde cette sensation." "Je veux danser avec quelqu’un, je veux sentir la chaleur avec quelqu’un." "Chaque sou...

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...