Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

I've set up a new section on the A-level page of my site. It's called Dialogues. Although I have masses of texts and listening material on that page, there have been, hitherto, no dialogues. So I used Chat GPT to create a dialogue in French on the topic of marriage. My prompt was: "Write a dialogue in French between two young French people talking about the pros and cons of getting married. About 500 words." The result is below, along with the tasks I thought would go well with the dialogue. This would work well with a Y13 class or maybe a high-flying Y12 group, later in the year. In terms of the Speaking assessment, this would help students prepare for the sorts of conversation they might have when doing the Stimulus card, though they would need to add a few facts and figures for the relating to a francophone country or community to get the best marks. So far there are two dialogues on the page, the one below and one on immigration. More will follow. Dialogue sur le

Some traditions in language teaching are very hard to shift. Two key ones, as I see it, are teaching with a grammatical syllabus and setting vocabulary to learn. I want to look at the second and suggest five reasons why vocab learning (and tests) are a bad idea. 1. What does knowing a word mean? Paul Nation has for many years reminded us that knowing a word is much more than about knowing what it means or how it translates. A bilingual translation of an isolated word is a starting point (and is of course useful), but there is much more to it than this. As well as meaning, we need to know about FORM and USE of words. Form refers to aspects such as spelling, morphological form (is it a noun, a conjugated verb, an adverb based on an adjective?), what it sounds like (phonology) and how its sound relates to its spelling (phonics). USE refers, for example, to other words which commonly go alongside a word, namely collocations (think of what appears when you start a Google search) and, at a m

This is the fourth and final part of this mini-series of posts based on Charles Dodson's 1967 book. Each post has been based on a chapter but this one, though I will refer to elements of Chapter 4, is mainly a reflection on what we have seen so far. Chapter 4, which is brief, considers the role of the technology being used in the late 1960s, namely the reel-to-reel tape recorder and language laboratory. He does not have an awful lot to say about these, but essentially sees the role of these as replicating what a teacher would do using his method. One value he sees with the language lab is that the students can work at their own pace. He suggests how exercises might be designed to maximise the number of 'listening and speaking contacts', as he likes to call them. He quickly returns to his main arguments, however, notably that second language learning is unlike first, except for infant learners. (At this point the notion that only young learners had access to natural language

This third post of four based on C.J. Dodson's book Language Teaching and the Bilingual Method (1967) is the one that readers may be the most interested in. The previous two posts are here and here . Having summarised the attacks made by Dodson on those two extremes of the spectrum, as he saw it in 1967, Grammar-Translation (his so-called Indirect-Grammatical Method) and Direct Method, we now turn to his response to these orthodoxies of the time. Chapter 3 is enticingly called The Bilingual Method . We got there! There is a reminder on the first page that the big step for educators is to accept that first and second language learning are fundamentally different. (Recall that I am summarising his thesis, not defending it! But at the very least I think we might all just about agree that first and second language learning are not exactly the same - that would be a preposterous claim.) Dodson also reminds us in this preface to the chapter that his ideas are based on experimentation. I

In the previous post , I wrote about Chapter 1 of Charles Dodson's book Language Teaching and the Bilingual Method (1967). Chapter 2, called Foreign-language Learning and Teaching, is where we start to get into the meat of his ideas while preparing us for Chapter 3 when we get to see what his method consists of in more detail. To begin with, Dodson presents us with a somewhat familiar dichotomy betqween what he calls the Indirect-Grammatical Method and the Direct-Oral Method. In between he places what he calls 'eclectic methods'. Indirect-Grammatical method  -------------     Eclectic methods  ---------------     Direct-Oral method This is reminiscent of other dichotomies or dimensions which have been described in the history of language teaching. Think of: formal v informal natural v classroom learning v acquisition grammatical v conversational conscious v unconscious explicit v implicit I have written in detail about the history of these dichotomies here. Dodson says that

This is the first of four posts based on an old book by C.J. Dodson called Language Teaching and the Bilingual Method (Pitman Education Library) . . Each post will be based on one of the four chapters of the book. The first chapter is entitled Experimental Data.  A little background first, though. Dodson, at the time his book was written, 1967, was a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. His work was to inspire later books and articles by Wolfgang Butzkamm (for example here ), another proponent of the bilingual approach. Both Dodson and Butzkamm were breaking with what they saw as orthodoxy. Dodson, in particular, as we shall see, was set against both the Grammar-Translation Method, still widely used in British schools in 1967, and the Direct Method, that approach to language teaching developed around the turn of the twentieth century and still influential today. By 1967 it was uncontroversial to be critical of Grammar-Translation - too focused o

Steve Glover and I have made very good progress with our forthcoming handbook for A-level language teachers. Steve has been focusing mainly on the teaching of film and literature, while I have been producing material on aural and written texts, vocabulary and grammar, and developing oral skills. If all goes well, we could publish in around two to three months. If you don’t know Steve Glover, he writes the superb website dolanguages.com and has a long record of materials writing, including his own A-level French course Attitudes. He is an expert in his field and has provided specialist CPD to A-level teachers on many occasions. He’s also an old friend which makes the collaborative writing process easy and enjoyable. I’m sure he’s done many other things I don’t even know about. It’s fair to say we are both veterans now! My own relevant expertise stems from 32 years of A-level teaching and resource writing, working as an associate for a few years with AQA (focused on A-level) and my gener

 Every so often I run a subscriber survey for my site, using the feedback to inform future resources. One thing that came back from my last survey is that teachers actually don’t notice many of the new additions to the site. This is not that surprising, since we often stick with tried-and-tested materials and don’t actively seek out new types of resources. So, in a blatant effort of marketing, I want to point out some of the new materials I have added in the last couple of years. Firstly, over the summer of 2023, I added a large number of starter activities, usually in the form of PowerPoint slides. These can be found in the Y7/Primary, Y8 and Y9 pages. They often involve the very fashionable retrieval practice principle so would work well for departments who have a policy of starting all lessons with a retrieval starter. In actual fact, these starters can be used as fillers, plenaries, or just as part of a lesson sequence.The full list of these can be found in the Contents pages of t

The summer begins to wind down. We have been moving home to London (yep, it is a bit stressful), entertaining friends at our French house, plus... I have been writing material for the A-level book I am working on with Steve Glover. An idea I came up with (I doubt very muh it is original) is a timeline information gap task. I've shared an example below which I posted on frenchteacher.net. You could apply the same principle to various topics: women's emancipation, the reunification of Germany, the Alagerian War, and so on. These dates and notes can be instantly prodiced by Chat GPT, so there is minimal prep, barring a check of the facts, since Chat GPT is better at language generation than facts. (Though, on the whole, I find it to be pretty good.) Here is the example - key dates in the Second World war from the French perspective. Les dates clés de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale du point de vue de la France Instructions  Students work in pairs. Each partner has a list of 6 imp

Below is a listening resource from the A-level page of frenchteacher.net, one of many based on online video clips. I use various questioning formats, some of which I listed in my last blog post. This is a simple QA format. One advantage of questions in the target language is  that you can focus on specific structures. For example, in Question 2 below students must understand and use 'depuis' with the present tense. Question 12 draws attention to the conditional perfect tense, which not be regularly seen or used by students. The clip is below 2 minutes long, which is good for this level and the video source is accessible enough. I would use this with a confident Y12 or a Y13 class. In terms of A-level themes it matches with cyber-society an education, each of which is part of popular exam board specs. Follow the link to view the video. Harcèlement scolaire – une victime témoigne   1m 54 https://www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/education/harcelement-a-l-ecole/harcelement-scolaire-un