Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Chapter 7 of our book Teaching A-Level Modern Languages is about how to help students become effective essay writers on a film they have studied. One of the aspects we emphasise is the need to carefully scaffold the process of essay writing, turning knowledge of themes, character and film techniques into appropriately formed sentences, paragraphs and full essays. To satisfy the grading criteria (AO3 and AO4) essays need to be written in complex, accurate language, and to demonstrate close knowledge and critical analysis of the film. Few students can do this without close guidance and feedback. In the following section of the book we show, for three popular films, how this process can be modelled and practised. Analytical/Complex sentences As students work through the film, they are introduced to lexical and grammatical constructions, creating complex sentences which demonstrate critical analysis. If a colleague is teaching other parts of the course at the same time, it is possibl...

This is a simple activity I enjoyed using with classes, notably from Y8 to Y10. The idea is to display a short text on the screen, work with it (e.g. read it aloud, translate it, do a 'find the French', do some question-answer), then in a series of subsequent slides, gradually remove words and phrases. For each of the following slides the class has to recall the missing words until they are able to recreate some or all of the text purely from memory. The task is almost all in the target language. Words and chunks are repeated many times over and hopefully some will be assimilated for later use. It's not a communicative task at all, but I found that my classes did enjoy the short-term memory challenge and they were seeing, hearing and using chunked language many times over. With a highly proficient class, they will be able to recreate virtually the whole text without any support after about 20 minutes. Below is an example I wrote for my site. It's a simple text in the pe...

For language learners, being able to converse fluently is a major goal and the one by which we often judge a person’s linguistic fluency. Students arrive in A-level classes with varying oral skills, so a clear priority is to help them achieve the best level of proficiency possible given their starting points.   In the A-level exam, spoken fluency is assessed notably in Assessment Objective 3 (AO3) where students must “manipulate the language accurately, in spoken and written forms, using a range of lexis and structure” (Ofqual, 2016).  In our new handbook we have a chapter devoted to developing students' oral skills. This post summarises what is in the chapter, then looks at an example fluency-building activity which we call 'Speedy Summary'. The sections in our chapter are as follows.         How spoken proficiency develops         Accuracy and fluency         Oral drills        ...

Chapter 8 of our new book for A-level teachers, both trainees and existing practitioners, is titled Teaching the literature essay . In this chapter we go into considerable detail about how to develop students' knowledge, powers of critical analysis and essay writing skill, using six popular texts as samples. The texts chosen are No et moi, L’Étranger, Der Vorleser, Der Besuch des alten Dame, La casa de Bernada Alba and  Como agua para chocolate.  The idea is, however, that these serve as examples for any text from the exam board specifications. In the chapter we look at how to plan the teaching, classrooom activities and how to write about character, thematic content and style. We put forward ways to help students write complex critical and anlaytical sentences and paragraphs, leading up to examples of whole essays. The key is to structure and scaffold the process, rather than dive into essay writing from the outset. To answer the question "What can I do in class when t...

Phew! After nearly six months of work, our book for A-level language teachers, both aspiring and practising, is published. Called Teaching A-Level Modern Languages , priced at £25, you can find it on Amazon here:  https://amzn.eu/d/cyya0pY . Teaching languages at A-level is a both a joy and a challenge and we hope to have shared how students (and teachers) can get the most out of the process. So what's the background here? Steve Glover and I are old friends. He is now based in Paris, while my wife and I moved to London in July. Years ago, the other Steve taught French in East Lancashire before moving on to other projects, including establishing an early website for French teachers (The Really Useful French Site), working with Digitalbrain, writing the Attitudes course for A-level and authoring the site dolanguages.com, formerly known by different names depending on the language. Steve also runs webinars on A-level literature and film, specialisng in how to produce effective essays...

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...