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 langua...

Zaz - Si jamais j'oublie

My wife and I often listen to Radio Paradise, a listener-supported, ad-free radio station from California. They've been playing this song by Zaz recently. I like it and maybe your students would too. I shouldn't really reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but I am going to translate them (with the help of another video). You could copy and paste this translation and set it for classwork (not homework, I suggest, since students could just go and find the lyrics online). The song was released in 2015 and gotr to number 11 in the French charts - only number 11! Here we go: Remind me of the day and the year Remind me of the weather And if I've forgotten, you can shake me And if I want to take myself away Lock me up and throw away the key With pricks of memory Tell me what my name is If I ever forget the nights I spent, the guitars, the cries Remind me who I am, why I am alive If I ever forget, if I ever take to my heels If one day I run away Remind me who I am, wha...

Longman's Audio-Visual French

I'm sitting here with my copies of Cours Illustré de Français Book 1 and Longman's Audio-Visual French Stage A1 . I have previously mentioned the former, published in 1966, with its use of pictures to exemplify grammar and vocabulary. In his preface Mark Gilbert says: "The pictures are not... a mere decoration but provide further foundation for the language work at this early stage." He talks of "fluency" and "flexibility": "In oral work it is advisable to persist with the practice of a particular pattern until the pupils can use it fluently and flexibly. Flexibility means, for example, the ability to switch from one person of the verb to another..." Ah! Now, the Longman offering, written by S. Moore and A.L. Antrobus, published in 1973, just seven years later, has a great deal in common with Gilbert's course. We now have three colours (green, black and white) rather than mere black and white. The layout is arguably more attrac...

Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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