Language Teacher Toolkit

Finding authentic listening material at the right level is a challenge for teachers. Text book listening material is studio-recorded, often well-matched to the teaching sequence, but is not, by most definitions, authentic and frequently not that interesting either. The trouble is, video material online is usually too difficult for beginners and intermediate learners.

One solution I have found for frenchteacher.net is to make use of short, relatively easy cartoon clips. My go-to's have been Peppa pig, Trotro and Petit ours brun. They have a number of advantages for classroom use:
They are short, usually under five minutes long.They are visually attractive so draw pupils' attention.The language they use is pared down to a good degree since they are written for very young children. In the jargon they are a good source of comprehensible input.The stories have a degree of humour in them. Pupils are sometimes already familiar with the characters so are predisposed to enjoying the co…

The Chartered College of Teaching has lots of teacher-led networks around the country. Dan MacPherson, a teacher in London, does great work organising a programme of events during the year, both live and by webinar. I've had the pleasure of presenting a couple of times for the CCT. This year I'll be doing a webinar on teaching reading. You can obtain the very low-cost tickets for these events here.

Here is the whole programme for the year:

Read many books and articles about listening and you’ll see it described as the forgotten skill. It certainly seems to be the one which causes anxiety for both teachers and students. The reasons are clear: you only get a very few chances to hear the material, exercises feel like tests and listening is, well, hard. Just think of the complex processes involved: segmenting the sound stream, knowing lots of words and phrases, using grammatical knowledge to make meaning, coping with a new sound system and more. Add to this the fact that in England they have recently decided to make listening tests harder (too hard) and many teachers are wondering what else they can do to help their classes.

For students to become good listeners takes lots of time and practice, so there are no quick fixes. However, I’m going to suggest, very concisely, what principles could be the basis of an overall plan of action. These could be the basis of a useful departmental discussion or day-to-day chats about meth…

After a long stay in our French house this summer when my work was limited to writing for the listening book Breaking the Sound Barrier we hope to publish by February (with Gianfranco Conti), I've turned my attention back to writing resources for frenchteacher.net. In the last week I've added eight new resources at all levels.

As always I'm very grateful to the hundreds of schools and teachers who subscribe and often resubscribe to the site. There are now well over 1400 resources on the site for a fee of £25. Do take a look at the many testimonial messages I have received over the years. Here are last week's new resources:

Beginner and near-beginner

Beginner alphabet fun. Two resources: (1) a list of games to practise the alphabet (2) an alphabet grid game in which you read out letter coordinates on a grid while pupils shade in boxes to create a picture. (Thanks to a teacher on the GILT Facebook group for that idea.)

Three Kim's Game PowerPoints. This is the classic…

This is a summary part of an interesting study carried out by Sara Liviero (a former MFL teacher, I believe) for The Language Learning Journal in January 2017. This journal is the organ of the Association for Language Learning, the leading UK professional association for MFL teachers. The study's full title is Grammar teaching in secondary school foreign language learning in England: teachers' reported beliefs and observed practices. It can be accessed here:

"How should I teach grammar?" is a question often asked by new teachers. The abstract of this article mentions that teachers may find themselves pulled in different directions in this regard, given that research supports that focus on grammatical form is useful in classrooms, whereas the GCSE exam (taken by 15/16 year-olds in England and Wales) is more focused on communicative, skill-focused criteria. (Note that this study was focused on the old, pre-2018 GCSE with Controlled Assessment.) The study looked at eig…

When I first began teaching back in 1485* I never taught the alphabet to classes. My thinking at the time was that memorising the letters of French in order was not much use when it came to developing proficiency. To start with it's not a skill you ever need, unless someone asks you to read out the letters of the alphabet in order. That doesn't happen too often. I changed my mind over the years and saw chanting the alphabet as a first, fun step towards learning the practical skill of spelling out words, for example one's own name. That's a useful real-life skill. What I failed to explicitly realise is that using the letters of the alphabet is a good way to help pupils develop phonological skill. (I think I probably realised it implicitly because I always hated it when I heard other classes pronouncing the letters poorly.)

So most teachers teach the alphabet early on to beginners since spelling out words is a useful real-life skill, but it also serves to practise the n…

Kim's Game is the language teacher classic where you show students a set of items, then remove one at a time as the students close their eyes. The class has to remember which item you removed. Beginners love this game and it's a decent vocabulary builder since it involves many repetitions of words or chunks. It works well with PowerPoint since the items are easily visible to the whole class and there is no need to close eyes.

Here is one I just made for frenchteacher.net. It teaches 12 items of fruit and veg which a hungry rabbit has its eyes on. The idea came to me when i thought back to something similar on Esther Mercier's excellent Atantôt site (which requires Flash). My presentation is more rudimentary but effective.

I've shared it using Slideshare here. It is better when viewed in PowerPoint. Y7kimsgame from Steve Smith

This information was sent to me. It may be of interest.

“The free Linguacuisine web app helps you learn a language while you’re cooking a meal! Choose a foreign language and a delicious recipe from that country. Then your own smartphone or tablet will speak to you in the foreign language and talk you through all of the stages of cooking the recipe in your own kitchen. If you can’t understand, just press a button to get a photo or video explaining what to do. When you’ve finished, eat the food you’ve cooked and learn something about the culture of the country. Linguacuisine has a range of recipes now available for language learning from around the world at https://linguacuisine.com/app/
We now have recipes available in: English, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Quechua, Chinese and Korean.

You can also use the free recipe builder app so that you can upload your own favourite recipe in your own language. That means that anyone anywhere in the world will be able to watch videos and …

Here is an exercise you could give Y10-11 pupils (intermediate) if they have been working on the theme of food and drink. Incidentally the research suggests that using vocabulary in context like this is likely to make it more memorable. In addition this type of exercise requires some processing of grammar too, so you can argue it’s more productive than just learning from a list. Put another way, making the brain work a bit harder can lead to deeper knowledge of words and better retention in long-term memory.

First letters are given to help, but you can add more support for weaker classes. You could make up similar sentences for other areas of vocabulary.


1.​ Au petit déjeuner je prends des c___________ avec du lait.

2.​ J’adore le b________ bourguignon ; c’est mon plat préféré.

3.​ J’aime tous les fruits, mais celui que je préfère, c’est le p_______________

4.​ Je suis comme un lapin, j’adore les c_____________.

5.​ Il faut tout consommer avec modération. Il faut avoir un régime é_____…