Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

You'll already be familiar with the idea of giving students a written text which differs in minor details from a text to be read aloud. This 'faulty transcript' idea is not at all new and I recall it being used as part of A-level exams back in the day.  Why is correcting transcripts useful?  It involves students listening while reading text, which scaffolds the listening process and reinforces sound-spelling relationships.  It also requires very careful, intensive listening which is involves more thorough processing of language and, one might assume, more input becoming intake. In addition, students tend to like this type of exercise since they enjoy correcting things which are wrong. In cognitive science terms, our brains take extra interest when we encounter items which are unexpected.  You can tailor this type of task to match closely what your class knows. It can work with beginners up to advanced level. It builds written skill. It builds depth of vocabulary know...

I've been working a lot on 'do-now' style starters for frenchteacher.net. One format I've chosen is sets of PowerPoint slides to get students to understand and manipulate language at their level. In the example below called ' Change one thing ' students see slides with four sentences each. Their job is to change one element of the sentence. This gets them to understand the sentences, then retrieve from memory an element to insert of their choice.  There are numerous ways you could exploit a set of slides like this as a starter to a lesson. Here are a few:  Just do the task 'as is', with students writing down their sentences on paper or on a mini whiteboard. Give a suitable time limit to add a sense of urgency and encourage quick, fluent retrieval.  To add some stretch, tell them in the time limit to do as many examples as possible. For each slide get students to suggest as many variations to each sentence in pairs. Just keep an eye on the pairs to check...

You'll be aware that there is much discussion in England about the role of phonics teaching in the languages classroom. NCELP, drawing on research and the TSC Review of 2016 have made it one of their three 'pillars', along with vocabulary and grammar. Of interest is the fact that, to my knowledge, phonics has not been a major focus in other countries. I have not seen articles, blogs or discussion in social media about phonics from American colleagues, for example.  How strong is the research support actually? Well, as Robert Woore explained in a recent article in the The Language Learning Journal, the research base for building a curriculum with a strong explicit focus on  phonics is so far thin. But there are reasons rooted in research for including phonics in your teaching and, of course, nearly all MFL/WL teachers have always included aspects of phonics teaching in their practice. It's not new. What is new is this greater priority and its inclusion as a major 'pi...