Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Image: wikipedia.org Here is an example of a lesson from frenchteacher.net, following the 'Ask the experts' format, based on an activity called 'Ask and move' which Paul Nation has written about. The level here is CEFR A2, so about right for a good Y10-11 class in England. It has a cultural knowledge component, being about the rising star of French Formula 1, Charles Leclerc. Find out about F1 driver Charles Leclerc Time : 30 minutes. Preparation : print off the 4 short paragraphs on Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc (below). You can adapt this for any topic. Together these four paragraphs form a general description of Charles Leclerc. Secondly, write and print off the 12 questions about the topic. Task: 1.     Explain the activity in L1. Four volunteers are ‘experts’ on Charles Leclerc. Each expert has one of the four paragraphs you printed off. The remainder of the class works in pairs, with each pair having a set of questions. One partner is a scribe, the o...

Hi all. I often do an end-of-year round up of posts from my blog. It's useful for me to see what interests MFL teachers and which blogs attract most views. I'm also vain enough to be pleased when I get lots of readers! That said, I've actually been writing fewer posts this year. Maybe I'm running out of stuff to write about! Anyway, if you are looking at this, thanks. Below are the five posts which attracted most views this year, with the most viewed first. 1.  The new MFL GCSE consultation In this post I summarised and commented on the ideas put forward by a panel for a revised GCSE, to make the syllabus more attractive and accessible to students. It's fair to say that there were a lot of objections to the proposals and my take at the time was more generous than most. Since the consultation, a couple of key areas have attracted most attention. First, the vocabulary lists which are feared to be too short and based on corpora which may be not ideally suited to teenag...

This is taken from the Y8 page of frenchteacher.net. You might find it a useful alternative to the Sentence Stealer game, if you are familiar with that. This game requires some serious memory work and repetition. Before playing it you'll need to ensure the class has good reading aloud/phonics skills. There's no point in doing games like this badly. I nstructions Hand out a slip of paper, each one with a sentence on. See below. Students move around the class. On approaching a partner they swap sentences, practise saying their partner’s sentence aloud several times, trying to memorise them. They move on to another person and repeat the process. Allow about 10-15 minutes of this, then pupils sit down and try to write out as many sentences as they can from memory. A good amount may be 5, but it depends on the class. Alternatively, write up about 15 sentences on the board from which pupils select one each to write on their own piece of paper. Once they have done so, remove the...

In this post I want to summarise what I believe MFL teachers in England should learn about during their initial teacher training (ITT). As a starting point, I'm going to use the points suggested in the TSC Pedagogy Review (Bauckham, 2016). This can be found here . If you are not familiar with the review, I recommend reading it, since it remains the starting-point for the work of NCELP (ncelp.org) and the changes to GCSE which are coming soon. Among the key recommendations of the TSC Review is the following: Mentors should focus on the systematic development of trainees’ subject-specific knowledge and expertise in language teaching. Where schools have complete or shared responsibility for the initial training of modern language teachers, they should ensure that a clearly worked out curriculum is in place, which should include areas covered by this report, in particular the specific pedagogical knowledge and expertise required by language teachers  (p.3-4). In detail, according to th...