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It occurred to me today that I've been blogging for nearly eleven years. In that time I've written over 1500 posts and had over 2.2 million blog views. In 2019 I wrote 88 posts, rather fewer than usual. Either I am running out of things to write about (less probable), or (more likely) I have less time to write, what with travels to France and around the world with my wife, and other commitments, such as writing Breaking the Sound Barrier and keeping frenchteacher.net fresh with new resources.
So here are my ten most read blog posts of 2019, starting with 10th position and working up to the most read. By the way, my most read post ever with around 30,000 views, according to the stats on Blogger, was written in May 2016 and was titled New GCSE Resources on frenchteacher. (Not the most interesting post by any means, but in England if you use the four letter G C S and E, you often get plenty of reads.)
10. Informed Language Teacher
This was just to let teachers know about my new links site for language teachers interested in some readings and videos about research into second language learning. Since writing the post I have added quite a lot of links.
9. Filling the gaps
I wrote this one quite recently and it's simply a list of ways you could do gap-filling tasks, apart from just blanking out individual whole words. Gap-filling sounds unimaginative, but I do think it's a very valuable activity, especially for listening, when you want pupils to build up their phonics knowledge, transcription skill and intensive listening competence. On the whole I prefer it to comprehension tasks which risk encouraging superficial listening and guesswork, if not suitably scaffolded.
8. The Rosenshine principles applied to MFL
Blogger, consultant and former head teacher Tom Sherrington, whom I have followed for a long time on Twitter, wrote a popular little book about the Barak Rosenshine Principles of Instruction. I wanted to show how they might apply to our subject area.
7. Paired listening gap-fill
This is effectively a variation of what we call in Breaking the Sound Barrier the "algo" game. I often find that a description of a simple language learning task generates a lot of reads. If I post a blog like this it's because I think that an activity is something I would have used myself.
6. The curse of single word vocab learning
When I run training sessions for teachers I rarely "rant" about anything, but I must say that I am not a lover of learning single words from vocabulary lists. I'm not saying it's a useless activity, it's just that I believe it's boring and time can be better spent doing other things. There is a danger that teachers and pupils might believe that learning from a written list is enough, when we know that "knowing a word" is much more than knowing what it looks like. But you knew that, didn't you?
5. Ask and Move
This is a lesson idea which originally comes from Nation and Newton, though who knows if they invented it. It's pretty obvious really. I was attracted to it because it provides a way of making dry, factual A-level texts a source of communicative work. You could use it in a simpler from with younger learners.
4. Curriculum planning
I wrote a few blogs about curriculum this year, but this first one has had the most reads so far. Schools all over England are focusing on curriculum simply because the inspection regime Ofsted have it as their new focus. Probably a good thing overall.
3. Have a repertoire, lighten your workload (1)
This was the first in a series of blogs which aimed to bring together a few techniques which could form part of a teacher's repertoire of go-to tasks. With some solid questioning techniques for texts, sentence builder frames, picture use, a few productive games, etc, you can get lessons prepared more quickly and reduce your workload.
2. Sentence Stealers with a twist
The reading aloud game Sentence Stealers, invented, I believe, by Gianfranco Conti, has found a lot of favour with teachers around England and elsewhere. In this blog I tried to come up with a variation or two to make it more than just reading aloud.
1. Delayed dictation
This is another task we described in Breaking the Sound Barrier. So simple really. Just leave a gap of ten seconds after you read a phrase to allow students to rehearse it in their heads, thus keeping short-term memory active and leaving more memory traces. Teachers tell me this works really well and is liked by classes. some teachers provided more challenge by playing background noise during the silent thinking stage.
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