Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This is actually just an lightly edited update of an old post from 2015. Things can sometimes go wrong at school. The computer doesn't work, you have to teach a lesson you weren't expecting, you didn't get time to plan that lesson you intended to, the photocopier broke down so you couldn't print those worksheets, you're covering for a colleague and no work was set, the computer room was double booked. I'm sure you can identify with some or all of those! That's when you might need standby activities you can call upon, lessons which you know will work and can be adapted to various levels. So here are ten I would recommend which you could include in your repertoire. With these you’ll never be short of a lesson! 1.   Jacques a dit This is Simon Says and it is a hit at all levels. You can use it to teach body parts from scratch or to revise them at any time. You can adjust the pace to suit the class, it encourages careful listening and it's good fun. 2.  Bing...

I've been uploading lots of starter activities to frenchteacher.net in recent weeks. Most involve working at sentence and chunk level and involve retrieving, recycling, adapting or correcting simple language. Most of the exercises also involve time limits, to encourage the development of cognitive fluency - quick recall and usage of high-frequency language. The activities I have made have all been aimed at Y7-9, which is CEFR A1 towards A2 in some cases.  A recent task I put on the site, and which you can view above, is focused on reading comprehension with an element of time pressure. I just called it 'Find five facts' and in this case the short texts students see on each slide contain some language students will not have encountered. The aim is to read quickly and pick out comprehension points of their own choosing. This task runs counter to the usual idea that language should be highly comprehensible (at least 95% if you accept Nation's figure, the one Gianfranc...

My previous post called 10 nifty starters for language lessons had a lot of views in a short time (thank you Twitter and Facebook), so I thought teachers might appreciate some ideas for plenaries - ends of lessons which round up or review language used during the lesson. You could add these to your current repertoire. To begin with, I don't think for one moment that every lesson needs a starter or a plenary. Hopefully the days are gone when three part, four part, or X part lessons seemed prescribed. But there is some sense in using the start of a lesson to review language used in the previous lesson(s) and there is some sense in giving a lesson plan some extra shape and clear purpose for students by including a plenary. In reality, by the time you get to the end of a lesson, both you and the students may have had enough and a plenary may seem superfluous. I certainly did more starters than plenaries. One old web page described the purpose of plenaries as follows: To help pupils re...

I've spent a good few hours in recent weeks working on starters and 'do-now' activities for beginners and pre-intermediate level students (A1 to A2 in CEFR terms). So I thought I'd put together a set of ten examples of starters I could recommend. What they have in common is use of the target language (some focus more on output, some on input), retrieval of exisiting language, repetition, simplicity ,  clarity and structure . The last three points are important. If you want to get the lesson off to that famous 'flying start' then students need to know precisely what they have to do. When they arrive with their heads full of stuff from the last lesson or just random stuff, then you need to get them switched on pretty rapidly. For other blogs about MFL/WL starters you could check out this one by Rebecca Nobes,  this one by Sabina or this one from MFL Classroom magic (the author is a former trainee of mine). Clare Seccombe has also curated examples here . Wort...

Well, well.  It only just occurred to me that frenchteacher.net has its 20th birthday this year. In 2002 I built a simple website using a guide from W H Smith and began to share worksheets I was making for my own classes. When I retired from the classroom in 2012 I decided to keep it going on a subscriber basis. This was partly for income, but mostly, I think, because I enjoy writing resources. To this day, my default daily activity is to write something new for the site. Anyway... Here are some reflections on writing A-level text-based resources with 20 of my favourite activity types. First, a principle or two. Key principle! Since I know that proficiency develops overwhelmingly through exposure to and interaction with meaningful language, I keep the main focus on aural and reading texts and their associated activities.  How I choose texts I begin by reworking a text usually written or spoken for L1 users, as exam boards do. The choice of text is mainly driven by the needs of...