Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This is an example of a worksheet I have just been updating for frenchteacher.net. The topic is "The secrets of a happy marriage." I thought I would share the resource since it's a good example of how you can generate a communicative lesson on an interesting topic, while adding elements of 'focus on form' and 'pushed output'. Pushed output is what researchers describe how we 'push' or 'force' students into noticing and using language forms. Some even use the term forced output. Some feel this is not a tremendously useful thing to do, but I disagree, since I am pretty certain that by forcing students to focus on and practise a pattern helps them internalise it for future use. Research on this is a bit mixed, but if you are curious look up the Output Hypothesis (Merrill Swain). In the examples below (using the subjunctive  (after il faut que) and imperatives (2nd plural)), I believe that students may recall specific chunked expressions for f...

This is a reminder of a worksheet format I like and which deals, to a large degree with the 'Google Translate/ChatGPT problem'. Yes, I guess the devious students could spend some time using unofficial help, but in any case it's a different way to tackle both comprehension and translation in both directions. Below is an example resource from frenchteacher.net. I produced this is around 30 minutes today. The topic is tourism in France, part of the patrimoine theme favoured by some exam boards. I have pasted in the two gapped texts, plus the completed versions. On the printed page, students would see the French on the left of a double spread, the French on the right (A4 format). The level is around CEFR B1, and I'd recommend it for a good Y12 class or Y13. The gaps are chosen to force students to translate with the help of the other text and occasional dictionary use. The same text could then be used for oral exploitation in various ways - question-answer, aural gap-fill ...

A little thought piece.  The value of learning and practising grammar rules in language learning has been debated for centuries, but we still debate it. And we still repeat the same failed methods, don't we? We know for sure that the grammar-translation approach only worked for a minority of motivated pupils in selective schools, and even for them, it was more about developing skills in reading comprehension and translation. We know that descendants of the direct method which still stuck to a grammatical syllabus only worked with a minority of motivated pupils, even though there was a laudable emphasis on teaching grammar orally and aurally. The audiolingual approach of the 1950s through to 60s/70s, focused primarily on drilling through speech and listening, but also grammar at the expense of vocabulary and communication. It was seen to be a failure and is now widely discredited. All of the above approaches assumed that grammar patterns could be explained, practised, then put into ...

 As we write our new edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit, we have to decide what to keep in and what to leave out. I had written a section on the differences between boys and girls. But ultimately we feel that, although the research is interesting, there's not a lot you can do with it in practical terms. So, we'll not include this section in the book. Instead, I'll park it here, in case you are interested in what research has said about gender differences in second language learning. If you are interested in any of the references, I'm sure you'll be able to find them. A couple of fairly well known points about competition and subject usefulness emerge, as you'll see below. ***************************************************************************** Much has been written about the underperformance of boys in L2 learning. Across the world more girls choose to study languages and their achievement tends to be higher. Many assumptions have been made about the c...

The news emerged yesterday that the DfE in England decided not to renew NCELP’s contract and instead have given the job of improving pedagogy and uptake in schools to what is called the NCLE ( National Consortium for Language Education ). NCLE is to be run from University College London (Institute of Education, Faculty of Education and Society). They will oversee a new Language Hubs programme, as well as specifically supporting German and Mandarin teaching. A few thoughts have been running through my head about this development. I am first of all pleased NCELP do not continue to get government money. They intend to continue their work under the name Language-Driven Pedagogy and I wish them luck. My issues with NCELP have been twofold.  Firstly, the principles behind their lessons were questionable. The ‘three pillars’ model of explicit language teaching of phonics, grammar and vocabulary does not align with general principles of second language acquisition, as these are usua...

This is a really simple activity which could be used as a starter, filler or plenary. It's basically a listening task plus vocab retrieval. You could make these up more or less off the cuff, but I've split the examples below into three batches, using present, past and near future tenses in French. It would make sense to design the sentences to fit your current topic, but you could also choose to revise earlier topics.  The idea is that the teacher reads aloud the sentence minus the final word. The class has to add that missing word. This could be done orally, on paper or with a mini-whiteboard. I'd suggest the whiteboard since pupils then need to show you their response (if they have one). To add a sense of urgency and encourage fluent recall, you could put a strict time limit on each response. Say 10 seconds - you could even do a countdown. I like the simplicity an clarity of the activity and the fact that it takes careful listening and interpretation of meaning, plus the ...