Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This is the first part of a summary of an excellent webinar about teaching listening by Beth Sheppard from the University of Oregon. She makes the central case that we tend to teach "listening for comprehension" (a product approach) rather than teaching the process of listening (the process approach). The contrast is neatly summed up as follows: Product approach: students listen to learn. The goal is to understand the message. Process approach: students learn how to listen. The goal is to get students to improve their listening technique, learn something about the language and to allow teachers to diagnose where students are having difficulty. Beth introduces her topic by summarising the importance of listening. Research shows that students spend up to 50% of their time listening in L2 lessons. Listening is hard, it's not passive and it causes anxiety when it's perceived by students as hard. For many years we neglected the teaching of listening, but in rec...

I've been watching this excellent presentation to English language teachers in Palestine from 2014 by Nick Bilbrough. It would be worth showing at a professional development meeting. If you don't have the time to watch it, here are some of the key points he makes. His main thesis is that listening need not be a passive test based on audio material, it can be two-way, interactive and really enjoyable. Here are two examples for intermediate to advanced level. 1.  "Physicalise" a story You tell a story while students stand and act out what is happening, e.g: “I was walking through a forest, I saw a box on the ground, I picked it up, I slowly opened the lid, (shriek) a bird flew out, and hit me in the face, I looked inside, wow!, it was full of treasure, I filled my pockets as fast as I could, oh no, someone was coming, I turned around and ran..." You first narrate the story slowly, the a second time much faster. Nick makes the points that we help sto...

Singing in barbershop choruses and quartets is my main hobby. We're lucky enough to have a remarkably talented musical director in our chorus Spirit of Harmony. She is a great example of an "outstanding" teacher in her field. In this morning's rehearsal for our big competition in Bournemouth next week she demonstrated some fabulous teacher skills which I thought would be worth recording here. It's tempting to forget, when discussing language teaching pedagogy, that generic teaching skills may well be more important than the particular approach you choose to adopt. Whether you are a TPRS teacher, keen driller, comprehensible input fan or communicative language teacher, you need to connect with the class. Our musical director Sally's skills include the following: - Showing total passion for her area of expertise. She bursts with enthusiasm for choral harmony music. - Having expert subject knowledge. Sally is a leader in her field so we have belief in her experie...

"The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language" is a quotation attributed to George Bernard Shaw. In the field of modern (foreign) language teaching (UK) or world/foreign language teaching (USA) this is certainly the case. US and UK teachers struggle with similar challenges, notably trying to motivate youngsters to learn a new language in countries where English is the world's language. In the USA geographical isolation makes the task even harder. Interestingly, despite a shared challenge, we go about teaching languages and talking about languages in somewhat different ways. As an example consider the ACTFL's (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Performance Descriptors for language learners: These are divided up by a number of different parameters, e.g. ranges of performance (levels)   are described as novice, intermediate and advanced (with sub-divisions of these, e.g. novice high); modes of communication...

When Michael Gove was Minister of Education the coalition government decided that it wanted all, or nearly all, pupils to take the EBacc "suite" of subjects, namely maths, English, science, history or geography, and a modern language. The thinking behind this was broadly that high-performing jurisdictions in the OECD PISA league tables have a broad academic curriculum for all up to the age of 16 and that such a curriculum gives children a  better start in life with improved job prospects.. The reason for the particular choice of subjects (history/geography as opposed to religious education or psychology, for example), was probably down to tradition and personal ministerial bias as much as anything else. No doubt it might also be argued that history and geography provide better examples of that "selection of the culture" which should be passed on from generation to generation in line with the Hirschian view of cultural literacy  as the main route to social mobility...

Many activities we typically consider to be about speaking involve, more importantly, large amounts of listening - listening with a purpose. Just think about when you run a teacher-led question-answer sequence based on pictures or a text. Most of the time students are listening to carefully scaffolded TL input. (Indeed this has been a frequent criticism of teacher-led QA - students don't get to speak enough.) The following purposeful game is an example of such an activity which may, on the surface, seem to be an oral game. It is, of course, but most of the time the students are actually listening. It is a game for intermediate to advanced level which provides lots of listening input, some speaking practice and a little reading, all in the target language. It's similar in principle to the Alibi game I've written about before and based on a familiar TV format. It's also a good way, more specifically, of practising question forms. Get two students to volunteer to be ...

Cours Illustré de Français 1 I have slightly edited this in April 2022. Henry Sweet*, an English philologist and phonetician, was one of the founders of what is now referred to as the Reform Movement , a new way of teaching modern languages early in the twentieth century, an era which would become littered with methodological alternatives to the grammar-translation approach. Sweet, like Gouin in France, believed that speech was more important than the written word and that languages should be taught primarily using the spoken word. This was unusual for the time. One approach which subsequently developed was not a "direct method" as such, but an adaptation of it - a "structured direct method", if you like. Jack Richards and Theodore Rodgers, in their book about approaches and methods**, label it the British oral-situational approach. H.E. Palmer, an influential EFL teacher and writer, is associated with the approach.  It was used by a good number of teachers in...

In this post I'm going to make the case for making occasional use of the lecture format for delivering listening lessons with a focus on cultural knowledge. I'll provide an example at the end. At A-level there is now a need to make sure that students have available a stock of cultural knowledge they can bring to bear in their speaking tests. Cultural knowledge is assessed within Assessment Objective AO3 and carries a significant number of marks. In addition, we want to improve students' listening skills as much as possible, especially given that students often say that listening is the aspect of learning they fear most. The lecture format allows you to efficiently deal with both of these priorities. I strongly suspect that teachers rarely make use of the set-piece lecture to provide listening practice and cultural knowledge. Nearly all classroom listening takes place either as part of two-way conversation with the teacher or a partner or "passively" while list...

Here is a piece you could do with your advanced level students. The subject is very topical and bears hammering home!! You could do the translation in either direction, but if you do it from French make sure you remove the alternative suggestions. Immigration is good for Europe English version According to most economists immigration is a good thing for Europe. This can essentially be explained by a very simple reason: without immigration the working population will fall by 100 million people over the coming 50 years, whilst the population as a whole is rising and ageing. Europe will therefore have to be open to immigration and diversity in society. Nor can we ask immigrants to leave their religion, culture and identity at the border. Better still, the arrival of new cultures can contribute to the creativity which Europe needs, today more than ever. However, it is difficult to get across such a message when we are faced with a populist narrative in parts of the media and...

View from here Just a note to frenchteacher subscribers to say that I've been going through all the subscriber pages of the site checking that all the resources are up to date and accurate. I've also been making some minor cosmetic changes to the appearance of the most of the worksheets. So far I have gone through the Y8, Y9 and Y10-11 pages. I am currently working through the A-level pages and bearing in mind the latest changes to exam specifications while doing so. Most of my resources have a good shelf-life, but some require updating with latest figures and a few need ditching completely. Changes in technology mean that some discussion questions go quickly out of date, notably with regard to the internet, music and TV. I have been updating these. In addition, as the old specs disappear this summer, you'll find that the A-level page in particular will be reorganised somewhat. I have renamed the "current" A-level, "legacy" and have moved so...

If any of you out there are French teachers who do not subscribe to frenchteacher.net, I'm posting this as an example of a typical A-level resource on the site. This is one of very many, based on the idea of taking a text and working on it quite intensively in various ways, to help develop vocabulary, grammar, fluency, accuracy, listening and reading. Apologies fort any formatting issues. Feel free to copy this into Word and use it as you wish. Pourquoi le « binge watching » devient-il acceptable ? Le «binge watching» devient de plus en plus habituel. Cela consiste à regarder plusieurs épisodes d'une série à la suite, voire une série entière d'affilée. Beaucoup de spectateurs attendent qu'une série soit diffusée entièrement avant de regarder un seul  épisode, afin de l'avaler d'un seul coup. D’autres regardent   de vieilles séries télévisées il y a longtemps. Selon une étude de Netflix  les spectateurs de séries finissent une série (jusqu’...

It may be tempting to think of "listening lessons" as playing an audio or video recording and doing a task related to that recording, e.g. answering comprehension questions, doing a true/false/not mentioned task, a gap-fill or matching starts and ends of sentences. You are familiar with the typical exercises we find in books and exams. Or else you might see listening lessons as opportunities to practise phonological awareness and decoding, e.g. transcribing, gap-filling with letters and syllables, repeating, using tongue twisters, playing phonics games etc. Gianfranco has recently blogged about some activities of this type. Both of the above general types of listening activities have their place. The first is necessary for students to hear different speakers talking, to practise exam technique and to hear lengthy samples of speech. The second, too neglected, is useful for developing students' bottom-up decoding ability - building up the micro-skills needed to underst...