What a year it's been! It's hard to process the amount of suffering people have endured and are still enduring. Not a day goes by without my feeling some anger at how the government has failed to deal effectively with the pandemic, the spin and lying. Not to forget, of course, the hijacking of the nation by right-wing ideologues who have dragged us into this mindless Brexit - Boris Johnson in one breath saying it would be mad to leave the single market, in the next claiming we now have the best of both worlds. And then the worst Education Secretary in memory sowing confusion all over the place. Utter madness!
Okay... move on, Steve.
Forced confinement, which limited our travel opportunities following an amazing holiday in St Lucia and Martinique in January/February, meant I was able to devote relatively more time to three significant projects.
The first was the set of 27 screencasts about language teaching which I put together during the first lockdown for a YouTube channel. My idea was to take some existing presentations I use for in-school CPD and conferences, then adapt them to create short presentations for teachers, especially those new to the job. I ended up writing new material as well and ended covering all sorts of areas of language teaching, mixing up research with practical applications. Topics included listening, memory, question-answer, sentence builders, vocabulary, grammar, comprehensible input, audiolingual drilling, reading, writing and more. They are here.
The second was a book I had been thinking about while on holiday in January. It ended up being 50 Lesson Plans for French Teachers, which has proved to be a good seller, and is unlike anything else I have seen. In case you missed it, the book has step by step descriptions of 50 French lessons from beginner to advanced level. It is designed to provide ready-made lessons with photocopiable resources and linked presentations, as well as templates for similar lessons. the book should be a help to teachers learning how to plan. The lessons don't follow any particular methodology, but reflect a number of traditions ranging from oral-situational, lexicogrammatical and communicative. There's even a spot of old school grammar-translation and audiolingual drills.
When I train teachers I try to get across the idea that they need to be critical of all methods, choose classroom procedures which align with research, and use what works for them and their classes. It's all too easy to jump on bandwagons and seek easy solutions. Language learning is highly complex and context-sensitive and not amenable to easy answers.
The third main project this year, and the most time-consuming, has been the book on memory which is in final editing right now. The title is Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know and will run to around 280 pages, with an extensive bibliography. It's been fascinating to research this whole area, which is of course important for all learning, not just language learning. The book is pretty much entirely focused on how we help students remember (or, put another way, how we help them not to forget). The 16 chapters look at areas such as working memory, cognitive load, long-term memory, forgetting, remembering vocabulary, metamemory, learning from mistakes, phonological memory, visuo-spatial memory and more.
As always, when writing with my friend and associate Gianfranco Conti, we try to balance research with classroom practice. We hope this one, as well as helping teachers plan their curriculum and individual lessons, is just interesting in general. This book is the first of two about findings from cognitive science and second language acquisition research and I have been the lead writer. The second book, focused on acquiring skills and automaticity, will be led by Gianfranco. I have a title in mind which I rather like: Acquiring the Skills: From Comprehension to Fluency.
As for the coming year, well, I'll continue to add resources to frenchteacher.net, as always, while starting to do some reading for our next book. I'll no doubt do some professional development training either online or live, perhaps later in 2021. I continue to work three days a year with PGCE students at Buckingham University. I'll probably have some other bright ideas. It would be great to be able to travel more, as that's what my wife and I like doing the most.
Comments
Post a Comment