Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

  The image above was shared on Twitter/X the other day and I thought it might be worth sharing some thoughts on the subject of cognitive bias and how it affects language teachers. I'm going to take four examples from the list above. But first, to be clear, what is cognitive bias?  Here is what the site Simply Psychology says: Cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking, affecting how we process information, perceive others, and make decisions. It can lead to irrational thoughts or judgments and is often based on our perceptions, memories, or individual and societal beliefs. Biases are unconscious and automatic processes designed to make decision-making quicker and more efficient. Cognitive biases can be caused by many things, such as heuristics (mental shortcuts), social pressures, and emotions. Broadly speaking, bias is a tendency to lean in favor of or against a person, group, idea, or thing, usually in an unfair way. Biases are natural — they are a product of human na...

I use ChatGPT mainly to produce or rewrite written texts, sometimes asking it to add exercises which I then edit as necessary. I have so far experimented with gap-fill, questions in the target language or English, and multiple-choice questions. Exercises are satisfactory, though lack the subtlety a teacher can bring in terms of tailoring to the specific class and what they already know. But there is no doubt that ChatGPT is a great time-saver. Having watched a Joe Dale screencast on resource creation with ChatGPT, I thought I would see how good it is at designing a lesson plan . Teachers in training should find these examples interesting and a useful source of discussion, notably when considering the PPP approach (Presentation-Practce-Production) and communicative methodology.  I used the free version of ChatGPT, but was invited to try out ChatGPT4 during my conversation. So below is the first prompt I used. Note that ChatGPT understands CEFR levels and ACTFL levels for US teachers...

This is another extract from The Language Teacher Toolkit (Smith and Conti, 2023), and follows on from the previous post about types of grammatical knowledge. If you want to explore more posts about grammar, have a look here , here and here . Here is a thought-provoking post by Gianfranco Conti. And here is a very practical post from James Stubbs, about moving students from implicit to explicit knowledge. Here are out 10 principles 1.      Do not make learning grammar rules the focus of language teaching (Ellis and Shintani, 2013). Grammar teaching can reduce enjoyment (Graham, 2022). In particular, make the grammar content lighter with students with lower language-analytic ability, i.e. being able to derive rules by analysing language. Grammar teaching is more suitable for high - aptitude learners (Suzuki and DeKeyser, 2017). 2.       Combine the use of explicit and implicit learning (Ellis and Shintani, 2013). To maximise implicit learning, ...

This post is primarily an extract from Chapter 6 of The Language Teacher Toolkit (2nd ed., Smith and Conti, 2023). To put it in context, I sometimes wonder to what extent language teachers are aware of the issue of 'types of knowledge' and how fundamental it is to our understanding of pedagogy. The extract beneath examines the issue. The extract is in three parts: the two types of grammar knowledge, the 'interface' issue (this is a biggie) and thirdly, does grammar teaching actually help? To put the issue succinctly: what type of knowledge are we imparting when explaining and practising grammar and this type of knowledge become useful in actual communication? I have not not listed the references in this post. They can be found in the bibliography of our book. 1. Two types of grammatical knowledge Hossain Nassaji (2017) reminds us of a long-standing controversy in the field. Does learning develop primarily through explicit teaching and conscious manipulation of struct...

The second part of our workbook for the new GCSE French specifications, first teaching September 2024, is now out on Amazon . This is the second of two workbooks, each one around 130 pages long, including answers. There are a few pages of sample material from the first part  here It was originally Gianfranco's suggestion that our latest project be linked to the revised GCSE and we quickly came up with the idea of a book in two parts and a structure for each part based on five units, each one of around 20 dense pages. The book is A4 size and slim enough to be easily photocopiable within a purchasing school. There are 130 pages, including answers.  Structure of the units Each unit consists of the following sections: A Foundation Tier vocab building section leading into a number of GCSE-style Reading questions, based on the format of AQA and Pearson specimen papers. A Higher Tier vocab building section leading into a number of Reading questions, again based on examples we have se...

This post references an article in The Connexion, a popular newspaper for British people living in France. In a recent interview on France Info I heard a fellow from Larousse talking about the criteria for inclusion of new words in their 2025 dictionary. The editorial team base the new additions on attested usage - not sure how they carry this out, but it involves a frequency count. This means that they do not publish gender-neutral words such as the pronoun iel ( il and elle combined) since these are so rarely used by the general public. (As a teacher, I would point out language items like these to students - for societal interest - but not really 'teach' them.)  In the same interview, the Larousse man also said that they gently encourage French speakers to avoid anglicisms where possible. Good luck with that! Not sure why they would take this political stance either. Anyway, roughly 150 new words have been added to the illustrated Le Petit Larousse 2025, including Anglicis...