Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Here is an example of a video listening task for near beginners/low intermediate level. Enjoy. There are many other sheets like this on frenchteacher. Petit ours et le bébé   3m 00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLMICu97ZRs (copy and paste for video) The theme song! (Sing-along?) Oh, oh, Tiens voilà quelqu'un               Oh, look there’s someone ! Petit Ours Brun                                          Little brown bear Coucou ! C'est toi mon copain               Hey there ! It’s your friend Petit Ours Brun                                        ...

I am grateful to Kayleigh Meyrick, a teacher in Sheffield, for this game which she described in the Languages Today magazine (January, 2018). She called it “Swap It/Add It” and it’s dead simple! I’ve added my own little twist as well as a justification for the activity. You could use this at almost any level, even advanced level where the language could get a good deal more sophisticated. Put students into small groups or pairs. If in groups you can have them stand in circles to add a sense of occasion. One student utters a sentence, e.g. “J’aime jouer au foot avec mes copains parce que c’est amusant.” (You could provide the starter sentence or let groups make up their own.) The next student (or partner) has to change one element in the sentence, and so on, until you restart with a different sentence. You could give a time limit of, say, 2 minutes. The sentence could easily relate to the topic you are working on. At advanced level a suitable sentence starter might be: “Selon un article...

This is written in conjunction with Gianfranco Conti who provided the main idea from listening expert Larry Vandergrift (no longer with us). The main aim is to develop listening skills, but the lesson sequence suggested below also involves jigsaw reading and oral communicative activities. These are Vandergrift's (2003) instructions for the initial listening-focused activity: 1. The listening scripts should be taken from the course book of the learners or related to its themes. Then it is rewritten into sequential statements which are jumbled to be ordered afterwards by the students. 2. Students work individually and predict the correct order of the statements and write the correct order in the Before Listening: My Choice column (see below). 3. Students work in pairs and discuss any difference in their answers. Then they should agree on a final order and write it down in the Before Listening: Our Choice column. 4. Students listen for the first time and check their predicti...

I've been pretty busy in the new year adding new resources to the site. I've reached the point now, I think, when I need to weed some older, less used resources to avoid the site becoming too unwieldy and difficult to search. I am grateful to teachers and tutors who let me know if a link has gone dead, e.g. on my video listening worksheets. I also welcome fresh ideas or requests for particular resources. For example, one teacher recently asked if I could add more on the theme of the second world war, occupation and resistance in France. I have added a new text and exercises and a video listening task in response to that request. So, in summary, here are the new resources I have added in January so far. As they include a range of texts and activities with the emphasis on comprehensible input and language manipulation , both oral and written. A-level (advanced) Video listening. This is linked to a video in the 1jour1question series and is about why General de Gaulle...

Having students read aloud in class meets with varying reactions from teachers. Some have been trained to avoid it all together, based on the idea that it is embarrassing for students, is often done badly and does little to assist language acquisition. Others believe the activity has value, allowing students to practise pronunciation and intonation, providing an alternative to the teacher's voice and helping students embed knowledge of language through their "phonological memories". I was not at all averse to giving pupils the opportunity to do some reading aloud for the reasons given above. I would use it specifically to teach intonation patterns, get feedback on students' pronunciation and give them a chance to show off how well they could do it, building their sense of confidence in using the language, their "self-efficacy" if you like. For reading aloud to be successful it generally needs to be scaffolded, for example through choral repetition with...

This is a variation of the classic 20 Questions game (animal, vegetable, mineral - you remember the one?) Partner A thinks of a thing and partner B has to work it out by asking Yes/No questions. It's a really good oral fluency games for relatively advanced learners. My version here relates to job vocabulary. Assuming you have taught, say, 25 jobs using word lists, pictures, definitions, written and spoken texts and so on, let's say you want to embed this knowledge a week or two later, this is what you could do. Partner A chooses a job which has been learned. Partner B is given a list of 15 questions he or she can ask in any order. Partner B can guess the answer at any time. If partner B uses all 15 questions up they score 15 points. If they correctly guess the job in less than 15 questions they get a number of points equivalent to the number of questions they needed, i.e. 10 questions for a right answer gets 10 points. If they make an incorrect guess at any point they get a...

If you have an interest in research into second language acquisition but don't have the time, money or need to look at original journal articles, you may like this very good site which contains articles about notable research issues in the field. ELT Research Bites. In their own words: "The purpose of ELT Research Bites is to present interesting and relevant language and education research in an easily digestible format. Academic journal articles and research reports tend to be long, perhaps even long-winded. And rightfully so – there is a lot of theoretical and often statistical work that must be clearly explained and a journal article is the best place for that. We hope, with this new blog, to help all language teachers benefit from the insights gained through academic research, whilst not taking too much of their time away from where it is needed most – the classroom. ELT Research Bites serves you the substance and context of the full article at the length of an a...

Google Translate is a really useful tool, but some teachers say that they have stopped setting written work to be done at home because students are cheating by using it. On a number of occasions I have seen teachers asking what tasks can be set which make the use of Google Translate hard or impossible. Having given this some thought I have come up with one possible Google Translate-beating task type. It's a two way gapped translation exercise where students have to complete gaps in two parallel texts, one in French, one in English. There are no complete sentences which can be copied and pasted into Google. This is what one looks like. Remember to hand out both texts at the same time. English  _____. My name is David. _ __ 15 years old and I live in Ripon, a _____ ____ in the north of _______, near York. I have two _______ and one brother. My brother __ ______ David and my _______ are called Erika and Claire. We live in a _____ house in the centre of ____. In ___ ho...

When I retired from teaching in 2012 I never thought that I would remain so busy in the field of language teaching. Since that time I have authored or co-authored two books, written over 10 blogs a month about language teaching, written and frequently presented for the AQA exam board, taught PGCE students at York and latterly Buckingham University, produced hundreds of resources for frenchteacher.net and taken part in a number of MFL teacher conferences, including three for ISMLA, two for the Chartered College of Teaching, and one for ResearchEd. I can’t seem to take my mind off language teaching. So this year, although I shall try to limit what I do (I have other fish to fry), I hope to achieve some or all of the following: Continue to engage and share experience with teachers online via Twitter and Facebook. Keep refreshing frenchteacher.net and weeding out some of the old resources as new ones are written. (The site risks becoming unwieldy and hard to navigate.) Accept occa...