Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Good books about modern/world language teaching don't come along that often, so I'm always interested to read anything new. Having followed Dr Florencia Henshaw's "Unpacking..." screencasts on YouTube I was also interested to see a more classroom-oriented book. So this book is by Florencia Henshaw, a teacher educator and classroom teacher and Maris Hawkins, a classroom teacher. It is published by Hackett Publishing at a very low price of under £10 in the UK, if you get the Kindle version, as I did. This is extremely good value given the considerable amount of content. The book is therefore in the 'for teachers, by teachers' tradition, but, as the title suggests, the prime objective is to take research findings and apply them to everyday classroom practice. The book is a very clear and readable introduction to some key aspects of second language acquisition (SLA) research, such as input, output, interaction, communication, corrective feedback, assessment, i

There’s every chance that you, like me, were taught a language using some sort of grammatical syllabus. There was a large degree of explanation and practice of grammatical structures - tense formation, adjective agreement, cases, inflections, conjugations and the like. You may have done well on it. You understood the rules and were able to apply them pretty quickly. I did, partly because I had pretty progressive teachers for the time, who taught grammar through the British Oral Approach, a type of direct method. Maybe, and many believe this to be the case, the foundation of knowledge the grammatical syllabus gave you, stood you in good stead when you travelled and began to use the new language for real. You reaped the benefits later, as it were. But of course, chances are you had a particular aptitude for language learning and that from somewhere or other you had an unusual degree of motivation. Many of the students we teach in high schools, who have mixed aptitude and are not their th

 As I write this post (February 2022), AQA are doing a survey of MFL teachers in England to find out what sort of thematic material they would like to see included in the new GCSE specification (first exam 2026). The survey is here: https://eu.surveymonkey.com/r/L2GM9JC First, it’s welcome that the DfE accepted the desirability to have some thematic basis for the course (‘topics’, if you prefer). It’s also welcome that the most popular awarding body are sounding out teachers.   So what topics would you like to see? And what factors might drive the choice? When I think about this, I come up with the following criteria for choosing themes: 1. Is the subject matter interesting to students.. 2. Is the subject matter relevant to students’ lives? 3. Can the subject matter be rooted in the TL culture? (This is a requirement.) 4. Is the subject matter important? By this, I mean: is it worthy of consideration in the contemporary world? This might include issues such as climate breakdown, divers

The summary task at A-level is a good challenge for students and needs practice. I think there are specific exercises you can do to help students do their best. Below is a sheet I recently uploaded to frenchteacher.net I picked out some specific tricks students can apply to the process of paraphrasing sentences. Following this are examples to try out, with model answers given at the end.  The subject matter is largely based on a report about how children of immigrants are succeeding in France. This is what the students get: When you  have to  put a text or sentences into different words, you can ask these questions: 1.  Are  there synonyms or near-synonym s  I could use?   Example:   Le chômage  a été  provoqué  par  la situation  économique . ➢  La perte d’emplois  a été  engendrée par    la conjoncture  économiqu e.   2.  Could I change a sentence in active voice to passive voice? Example:   Les forces de l’ordre  ont interpellé  un suspect connu. ➢  Un suspect connu  a été interpell