Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Nicolas Rochas sent me a link to this free service which looks very interesting indeed if you are interested in establishing links with other schools, teachers, classes or students. Your school leadership may be keen if they are interested in the global dimension or world citizenship. At its most basic level it may be an opportunity for pupils to communicate with other young people from a different background. They say:

Skolinks est unportail destiné aux jeunes de 8 à 21 ans et aux enseignants du monde entierqui souhaitent nouer des relations et développer des échanges dans unesprit amical et partenarial.
Skolinks is a project from Skolidarité, a non-profit organisation which supports schooling in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its stated aims are:

- promouvoir la fraternité et la solidarité entre les jeunes
- lutter contre le racisme et les discriminations- sensibiliser sur les Droits de l'Enfant
It began with correspondence in 1999 between a young French person and young Congo…

For me, listening is the number one language learning skill and should be at the heart of everything. I'm a bit of a "comprehensible input" fan and do believe that, in the longer term, for pupils studying a language over at least five years, a big diet of listening input is crucial. So I am always on the look-out for stimulating listening material for frenchteacher.net.

Finding advanced level material is easy, but sources of authentic near beginner and intermediate level French listening are harder to locate.

For intermediate listening, the Peppa Pig videos in French work well and I know that teachers out there have been using my worksheets on these.

Not all the Peppa Pig videos work, though. You have to be selective and choose ones where the range and speed of language are approachable. It helps that many students are already familiar with Peppa Pig, so they should be well disposed to tackling a listening task based on it.

The episodes I have designed worksheets for so …

One of the best things to come out of the communicative movement in language teaching was the notion of the "information gap". Give pupils a reason to communicate and they will, the theory goes. So if you design a task for pairs where one person has information the other needs to find out, you should get communication. The best books to exploit this idea in French were the Tu Parles and Tu Parles Encore by Vee Harris and Liz Roselman. Alas they are no longer in print, but should be slightly updated and reprinted.

A really simple way to set up minimal preparation information gap tasks is to do guessing games. We know how much children of all ages like these - just think how much mileage you can get out of "guess the flashcard" routines and "battleships". Here are five reinforcing/revision guessing games for pairs.

1.  Weekend dernier

For low intermediates. Get each partner to write down five invented activities they did over the last weekend. Each partner …

Here is an easy and familiar lesson plan for teaching school subjects, along with practising je préfère and some simple question variations (inversion and word order variations). There is a cross-curricular aspect in that the students may make easy use of Excel. You may have taught and practised school subjects in a similar way.

1.  Teach the school subjects using a simple powerpoint with pictures, flashcards or just an English-TL list on the board. Use group repetition. If you have a list on the board in two columns, at some point hide the TL words and test memory from the English words. Perhaps use the "I'm thinking of a subject - which one?" guessing game. (10 minutes)

2.  Write up these three variations of a simple question. In French:

Quelles matières préfères -tu?
     Tu préfères quelles matières?
     Quelles matières tu préfères?

If you are working in another language these variations may not apply and you could just skip this.
Do group repetition and explain how t…

Source: http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm A* A B C D E F G U A*-C A*-U French 2014 9.6 14.2 19.3 26.6 19.5 7.3 2.5 0.8 0.2 69.7 168042 2013 9.8 15.0 19.8 25.6 18.3 7.3 2.9 1.0 0.3 70.2 177288 2012 10.7 15.6 20.9 24.5 17.1 7.2 2.9 0.8 0.3 71.7 153436 2011 10.2 16.6 21.9 23.8 15.9 7.4 2.9 1.0 0.3 72.5 154221 2010 10.9 15.8 20.1 25.1 16.6 7.3 3.0 1.0 0.2 71.9 177618 2009 11.2 15.1 19.2 24.6 16.8 8.1 3.5 1.2 0.3 70.1 188688 2008 10.3 14.7 18.8 24.5 17.3 8.7 3.9 1.5 0.3 68.3 201940 2007 9.7 13.5 18.6 24.7 17.2 9.1 4.7 2.0 0.5 66.5 216718 2006 9.6 13.2 17.7 24.2 17.5 9.7 5.1 2.4 0.6 64.7 236189 2005 8.5 12.3 16.3 23.2 17.9 11.1 6.7 3.1 0.9 60.3 272140 2004 7.4 10.7 14.5 21.1 18.1 13.0 8.9 4.9 1.4 53.7 318095 2003 6.6 11.3 12.7 20.6 20.1 13.7 8.8 4.7 1.5 51.2 331089 2002 7…

I was reading a very politicised article by John Bald who is an experienced languages and literacy consultant who writes a blog, has advised the DfE and who writes for the Conservativehome website. He was arguing that the new national curriculum offers a fresh start and a chance to reject the "progressive" view of language teaching - what he also calls "left" language teaching. By progressive I take John to mean "communicative" or "naturalistic" i.e. the general approach wherby target language dominates and which, in his view, literacy is relegated to a secondary role. I hope I have not misrepresented John too much.

I must confess that I had not really made the link between the communicative approach and "progressivism" in language teaching. Perhaps I should have.

John wrote:

I’ve seen the results of the progressive approach at first hand and discussed them with pupils.
Almost all dislike it and many hate it. It involves equal confusion …