As we approach the end of the calendar year, I thought I'd share the five most viewed posts I have written this year. Actually, I blog less frequently than I used to, but still managed to upload 49 posts, with this the fiftieth.
Generally, speaking teachers click on posts which feature practical lesson ideas, more than reflections on or summaries of research. A curriculum change also gets teachers clicking and it was a post about the proposed curriculum change for GCSE which topped my chart for 2022. As it turned out, what the exam boards came up with later in the year was, predictably, more of an evolution than revolution. Yes, the oral will have reading aloud and less conversation, and the listening test includes a dictation task worth a few more marks than I would have liked. We'll see how basing listening and reading texts on a more tightly defined high-frequency vocabulary list changes things. I suspect not much, since existing texts already strongly featured high-frequency vocab anyway. And not forgetting, of course, that the needs of Ofqual require there to be a full range of grades, so plenty of students will have to get low scores. We'll also see how long the shelf life is for dictation and reading aloud.
The second most viewed post was my 10 nifty starters for language lessons. I like doing posts like this since they provide easy go-to lesson ideas which teachers may not have thought of or may just have forgotten. I always try to put the emphasis on clarity (from both the teacher's and student's perspective), ease of use and low prep. I was prompted to write that post after producing some PowerPoint-based starters for my site. I got on quite a roll with those while in our French house over the summer, when it was too hot to go out! If you have an emphasis on retrieval practice starters in your school, the starters I suggest fit the bill well.
The third most viewed post was called 10 nifty plenaries for language lessons. I shared that one just after the previous post. I think of plenaries as generally less necessary and useful than starters, but they can have a place. A plenary can also sometimes be used as a lesson filler or even a starter. But whereas a starter can be based on a previous lesson, it can also draw on material covered some time before. Starters are great for reactivating language you think students may risk forgetting, or are on the point of forgetting. To get technical, as psychologist Robert Bjork writes, you can create a bit of 'desirable difficulty' by forcing students to retrieve language items they may have to work harder to recall.
In fourth place was the post called 10 nifty standby lessons. These are those lessons you can call upon when you have been stymied by a broken photocopier or computer; or maybe when for some reason you suddenly get a lesson you haven't prepared for, for example with a cover class. An example from the post is:
My holiday in....
Tell the class what you did during a holiday in some detail. Students may take notes in the target language or in English. You then give them true/false or not mentioned statements. You will need to keep a careful mental note of what you have said. You can then get students to report back to you, or a partner, what you did. This is a good comprehensible input task. You could talk about other topics: last weekend, my pastimes, when I was young etc. Good for intermediates. They may be interested to hear what you did - you can make it all up, of course.
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