Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This post is a short extract from the book I am researching and writing with Gianfranco Conti. It's about metamemory. I'd never heard of this term until I began to read more extensively about memory. Metamemory is a branch of metacognition. If metacognition is "thinking about thinking", then metamemory is "thinking about memory". It's about our beliefs about memory. For example, famously, many students think that cramming revision into one long session will help them remember better than doing little bits of revision, spaced out over time. In this case, their metamemory has let them down, since they are wrong, as much research clearly shows. What else is useful to know about metamemory? Read more by selecting the link below: Follow this link to the post

I have been much quieter on the blog of late. During the lockdown period I was working on two projects: the set of CPD screencasts I recorded for my new YouTube channel and my book 50 Lesson Plans for French Teachers: Step by Step. I may add more screencasts in due course, but the book is now published and selling well, I am pleased to say. I have recently returned to a project I had begun with Gianfranco Conti a few months ago, namely a book about cognitive science for language teachers. To keep the text to a manageable size we decided to keep the focus of this book on memory rather than to carry out our original plan of a two part book on memory and skill acquisition. I am leading the writing on this while Gianfranco intends to be lead writer on the second book focused on skill acquisition. The way we work is to have a broad, planned structure to the book with clear objectives. In practice, this structure alters as we research the topic. In this instance, the brief is to write someth...