Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This is the third of a series of posts where I share short extracts from the second edition of  The Language Teacher Toolkit, which is now published! For this section, from the final chapter called " Planning for communication ", Gianfranco and I drew partly on some blog posts I had written a year or so ago. Like most of the chapters in the book, the chapter contains a mixture of research information and classroom practice. This section is focused more on the latter. We particularly had in mind teachers learning the craft in this section, and how they can develop a repertoire of go-to procedures to manage workload through rapid, but effective planning. **************************************************************************** Building a repertoire For new teachers, planning can be daunting. They may be faced with a wide range of theories and advice about how to teach. In teacher education circles there is a debate around whether you should learn from a variety of methods,...

In the run-up to the publication of the second edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit (Smith and Conti, 2023), I shall post the occasional blog post with short extracts from the text. This little section is about correcting correcting students' spoken errors. In the research literature this is usually referred to as corrective oral feedback. I previously posted something about 'learned attention', drawing on the work of Nick Ellis. This extract picks out some key research in this complex field of oral error correction. Elsewhere in the text we go into some detail about the value of correcting written errors. ****************************************************************************** A commonly asked question concerns the correction of students’ spoken errors. Should we do it? Which errors should we correct? How? When? The research in this area is copious and has, alas, produced mixed findings. Two terms are often used to describe how we correct oral errors: prompts and...

 'Faulty transcript' ('Correct the transcript') is the activity where students have a text in front of them while listening to the same text read aloud, but with a number of differences to find. I recall this format being used back in the day for some A-level exams. The value in the task lies in the following, as I see it: Close listening is required (which encourages deep processing of language and careful discrimination of sounds). Students develop their network of links between words - being aware of synonyms, paraphrases. Accurate spelling is required. Students are engaging with comprehensible input - language they understand, the very basis of language acquisition. Useful and relevant language for exam purposes can be modelled. Once a text has been used for the faulty transcript task, the same text could be used for further work, e.g. note-taking in English or dictogloss (where students listen, take notes in the target language, then produce their own summary - a ...

This is a reminder, or maybe you were unaware (!), that over the last few months I have uploaded lots of starter activities to my site. They are mainly editable in PowerPoint, but some are editable in Word. The activities often involve retrieval of known language, so they certainly fit the lesson starter retrieval practice model many schools are encouraging (or even mandating!). By the way, although they are in French, they are easily adaptable to other languages. These tasks don't have to be used as starters, of course. They could be fillers, plenaries or even, with additional material, form the basis of a whole lesson plan. As always, I write what I think would work with an average class and anyway, because everything is editable, you can simplify or add more challenge as you wish. In each case, you don't have to use all the slides. Indeed, in some cases there are too many examples, so you could just use a few one day, then others another time. All zero prep!! One element I ...

The second language acquisition and cognitive science literature are full of jargon to explain language learning phenomena. This can be off-putting to teachers who do not often read research. Sometimes you may even get the impression that terms are invented to describe pretty obvious things which don't need jargon - I'm tempted to include terms like the retrieval practice effect, comprehensible input and the Noticing Hypothesis! Now, learned attention is a term from the literature which is worth explaining, but which describes a phenomenon many language teachers will have thought of and encountered in the classroom. Below is a section from the second edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit (2nd edition) which is due to be published in the early summer. The section comes from Chapter 6 which is about teaching grammar . (L1 = first language, L2 = additional/new language.) ‘Learned attention’ We acquire grammatical patterns by hearing and seeing them in input, but what we pay a...