Skip to main content

A survey of MFL teachers’ classroom procedures and tools


NOTE Please see my Twitter profile to find the poll tweets. You can respond there. @spsmith45

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

 For my own interest, and perhaps that of MFL (World Language) teachers, I’m going to do some Twitter polls on what types of classroom procedures and tools teachers commonly use. Totally unscientific, of course, but with enough responses it should give some indication of what teachers are up to in their classrooms.

I want to find out how much MFL teachers are using the following:

Digital apps for vocab learning

Sentence builders (substitution tables)

Choral repetition

Pupils reading aloud

Language learning games

Teacher-led question and answer (‘circling’)

Translating sentences or paragraphs into L1 and L2

Dictation or transcription tasks

Narrow reading or listening tasks

Information gap tasks

Task-based activities (eg class surveys)

Choral reading aloud

Audiolingual-style (mechanical) drills (eg ‘change one element in my sentence’j

Group work

Story construction

‘Milling around’ activities

Carousel work

Copying out grammar notes

Traditional written vocab tests

Quiet reading (eg graded readers or free voluntary reading)

Knowledge Organiser booklets (with parallel texts)

Singing along

Verb chanting or singing

I may think of others in due course. When I have collated my findings, I’ll write a further post. Let’s see whether you are in the mainstream or not!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

The 2026 GCSE subject content is published!

Two DfE documents were published today. The first was the response to the consultation about the proposed new GCSE (originally due in October 2021) and the second is the subject content document which, ultimately, is of most interest to MFL teachers in England. Here is the link  to the document.  We are talking about an exam to be done from 2026 (current Y7s). There is always a tendency for sceptical teachers to think that consultations are a bit of a sham and that the DfE will just go ahead and do what they want when it comes to exam reform. In this case, the responses to the original proposals were mixed, and most certainly hostile as far as exam boards and professional associations representing the MFL community, universities, head teachers and awarding bodies are concerned. What has emerged does reveal some significant changes which take account of a number of criticisms levelled at the proposals. As I read it, the most important changes relate to vocabulary and the issue of topics