A handbook for MFL teachers

I posted some time ago on frenchteacher.net a handbook for language teachers. It is a kind of "best of" 68 page compendium of material I have written over recent years and which appears, in slightly different form, either on frenchteacher.net or this blog. It can be found on frenchteacher.net at the top of the Free Samples page. It is a Word document which you could easily edit.

I believe it would be particularly useful for teachers relatively new to the job, but experienced teachers will no doubt find useful ideas in the various checklists of activities. Some departments may find it to a useful support for their departmental schemes of work.

It is far from exhaustive. For example I have not written about teaching primary French or teaching the least able as I have no experience in that field. I do have a section on teaching the most able and I have found sources to put together a page on teaching children with special needs.

Some teachers will also find things to disagree with, although I have tried to give a pretty balanced and pragmatic view of language teaching. Needless to say, my own methodological bias will come through at times. The latter is partly the result of my own training at London University in the late 1970s and my experience teaching generally more able students. I remain a strong supporter of structured "comprehensible input" target language teaching, underpinned with grammar.

There is some basic theory in the handbook, but most of the material is practical advice based on experience. There are plenty of activity types listed, with a few specific examples featuring my main language, French. The handbook is, however, aimed at teachers of all modern languages.

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What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought. ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

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La retraite à 60 ans

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Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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