Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

I’ve been interested to see how the Pearson Edexcel and AQA awarding bodies (exam boards) will mark the dictation section of the Listening exams. As an aside, it’s both interesting and unfortunate that the dictation is part of the Listening paper, since dictation is not much about listening comprehension at all, but about accurate written transcription of words and phrases. Which leads me to the Pearson Edexcel mark scheme… Because the Ofqual/DfE brief, based on the TSC ‘three pillars’ view of language learning (phonics, vocabulary and grammar), is that GCSE should assess students’ knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences (SSCs). So the mark scheme should assess precisely that - how sounds convert to spelling. Pearson have gone to extremes on this, I would suggest. Now, this creates a problem, particularly for French where the same sounds can be spelled accurately in many ways. Just to take an example the /o/ sound can be spelled variously as o, ot, os, au, aux, eau, eaux, ault, t...

 

When we put together the new edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit , we decided to include a new chapter on the subject of lexicogrammar and Gianfranco's EPI approach. EPI stands for Extensive Processing Instruction . It was my suggestion to include this new chapter since EPI has become a popular methodology, embraced either in full or in part, in many schools, mainly in the UK, but also in Australia and elsewhere. Evidence of its popularity in England comes from the annual Language Trends survey completed by thousands of teachers.  So the question posed by this post is why has the approach become so popular? I'd suggest a handful of key aspects which I shall list below under the headings of theoretical underpinnings, comprehensibility, clarity, self-efficacy, inclusivity and thorough processing. These are all interconnected. I shall not describe the methodology in full, for example the details of the MARS EARS pedagogic cycle. You can find this elsewhere, for example in Th...

Updated on 20th June Our new book is out! Gianfranco and I wrote and published the first edition of our Toolkit book in 2016. We have been delighted that the book has found thousands of readers and been very useful to so many teachers. The success of that book spurred us on to write two others together: Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (2019) and Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know (2021). For some time I had been thinking that it would be worth producing a second edition of the Toolkit book. This is for a few reasons: The first edition research references were all from before 2016, and there have been new books and research papers to cite from. Having read a good deal since 2016, we had more to write about! Gianfranco's EPI approach has gained a lot of traction in schools since 2016, so I felt we needed to reflect this in a second book. Although the Toolkit is not an EPI book (Gianfranco would want this to be clear), the new editio...