Language Teacher Toolkit

In case you don't know my site (which is extraordinarily good value at £30 for around 1800 accurate resources!), here is a summary of what you can find for your Y10-11 pupils. Don't forget that all resources are in Word and therefore editable, e.g. you can add your own school logo or departmental identity as long as the original source is identified and not shared with other institutions. You'll also find that there plenty of resources on the Y8-9 pages which might work well with your Y10-11 classes, depending on their attainment.


1.  Exam preparation resources

These are divided by tier and include knowledge organisers, photo cards, role plays, translations, full reading papers, essay-writing guides, conversation booklets and conversation board games. Some resources are in booklet form (27 resources) .

2.  Sentence builder frames These cover GCSE themes, come with a suggested teaching sequence and scaffolded, gapped versions of each grid.  You could easily make these …

This is a brand new introduction to the findings of second language acquisition research and their implications for language teachers.

Alessandro Benati is a professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the American University of Sharjah, as well as a Visiting professor at the University of Portsmouth and University of York St. John.

He is known as an eminent scholar in his field, having worked in particular with American scholar Bill VanPatten.




What's in the book?

There are seven chapters covering roughly 200 pages. Chapters look at:
what we know about second language acquisition and the implications of this for teachers; how methodology has evolved over the years; the role of communication and interactive tasks; the role of listening and reading comprehension tasks; the role of grammar, vocabulary and corrective feedback; how research is carried out and, finally, an overall evaluation of the issues. 
Major issues in the field are discussed, e.g. the role of comprehensible inpu…

Some teachers have cottoned on to the fact that sentence builders (aka substitution tables) are a very useful tool for helping students prepare for their GCSE speaking and writing tests. My own hunch is that would help for students of all levels of proficiency, but may be particularly helpful for those likely to get lower grades, say between 3-6. Much depends, of course, on how complex you make the table.

To remind you, here is a typical sentence builder, as found on the frenchteacher site. The topic is talking about where you live. A word of warning - formatting blogs in Blogger is a nightmare when you start with Word documents, so apologies for any issues. It might have taken me another 30 minutes just to sort out the html code underlying the original document.